On July 11, Brian Betts, principal of the District’s Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, was at Dulles International Airport about to leave for a vacation in Spain. He was feeling good. His first year running a school whose students struggle with poverty and neighborhood strife had gone well, he thought. Quarterly test results were encouraging. Attendance was up. Parents were happy. Some of his staff had gone so far as to enroll their children at Shaw.
His cellphone rang. “Principal Betts? This is Chancellor Rhee.”
“Hi, chancellor,” he said.
“I wanted you to know that I am looking at the DC-CAS scores,” the D.C. schools chancellor said, “and you’re not going to be happy.”
“Okay,” Betts said. Uh-oh, he thought.