“Good job, Michelle,” Jerry Weast said to the pretty young woman sitting beside him, who had just made her presentation at a Washington, D.C., forum.

If that sounded a tad patronizing, remember that Weast, a grandfather who probably has a good 25 years on Michelle Rhee, is the nationally known superintendent of the Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools, the nation’s 16th largest.

And Rhee? Well, at the time of this Center for American Progress forum on turning around low-performing schools, she was just weeks into her first job in public education --- chancellor of the troubled District of Columbia Public Schools.

What an entry level job that is!

The enormity of her task is self-evident. While Weast and another veteran, Jack Dale of the Fairfax County (Va.) schools, spoke of helping individual students, Rhee, the neophyte, talked about the need to turn around an entire system. It reminded me of how veteran teachers often gravitate to the suburbs, leaving their rookie peers to fend for themselves in tougher urban schools.

That said, I think Rhee was a brilliant choice by Mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s bright, energetic, self-effacing (she told the forum that she was there to learn as much as anyone) but also tough and focused. As former head of the New Teacher Project, she knows public education but wasn’t in public education. She carries no baggage with the D.C. schools.

Is it naive of her to put the controversial issue of school consolidation near the top of her agenda? Maybe. But Rhee says it’s essential to close some of D.C.’s underused schools: schools of little more than 100 students that are too small to have the kind of enriching activities -- art, music, high-level science -- she said all students deserve. And she plans a comprehensive public relations campaign to get that message out.

I wish her well.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor