Michelle Rhee’s five year plan for Washington, DC

The planning document makes broad promises about the school system’s future under Rhee. “The experience of DCPS stakeholders will be dramatically different in five years,” it says. The paper divides that period into three phases. The first 18-month segment, currently underway, calls for action to “aggressively transition out poor performers at all staff levels.”

The shakeup began in March with the dismissal of 98 central office employees and continued this spring with the firing of more than 40 principals and assistant principals. Personnel change continues as an objective in the salary plan Rhee has proposed to the Washington Teachers’ Union, in which instructors opting for big raises and bonuses must agree to go on probation for a year.

The second 18-month period, from 2009 to mid-2010, stresses the use of test data to guide classroom instruction. A major theme of third though fifth years is to overhaul special education and completion of a data system intended to give parents real-time information about how their children are faring.