So, you might ask, if she was that good, why was it such an urgent matter to get rid of her just before the start of a new school year?
We might have asked that of Chairman Archie or the other four members of the SRC if they had appeared in public. Instead, they washed their hands of the matter by issuing a news release.
So, it fell to the mayor to play Pontius Pilate in a news briefing that raised more questions than he was willing or able to answer. "I'm tremendously reluctant to get into a lot of post-tenure analysis," he said.
There wasn't a lot of analysis during her tenure, either. The SRC risked mass whiplash from looking the other way. They lauded the fact that test scores and graduation rates improved on her watch just as they had for five years before she got here.
But they seemed to get blindsided by a budget shortfall of nearly $700 million.
They credited her for working to improve parental involvement. But they shrugged when groups of parents complained that she overruled their decisions about which organizations should be running the reform programs at their reconstituted schools.
In the most egregious example, she not only overruled the School Advisory Council at West Philadelphia High School, she implied that they had sold their children out to choose an educational management organization that had paid parents a pittance a year earlier to knock on their neighbors' doors and invite parents to school council meetings.
And they got played in a backroom maneuver after approving a vote by the Martin Luther King High School's parent-led SAC to turn over the reform of King to Mosaica Turnaround Partners.
