D.C. has some of the worst public schools in the nation. Education Week gives D.C.'s K-12 education an F for student achievement and college prep, and ranks it last in the nation for overall effectiveness. The 2007 NAEP showed that only 8% of D.C.'s eighth graders are proficient in math; only 12% are proficient in reading. Only 43% of D.C. high school students graduate within five years. And that's not for lack of spending--D.C. spend $17,000 per pupil (Boston is the only other urban district that spends more).

That's one of the more damning ironies of our country--that our capital is the scene of some of our most devastating failures of access and opportunity. But at the moment, it also seems to be the scene of one of the more inspiring clean-up operations.

Check out what Fast Company's Jeff Chu has to say about Michelle Rhee, the newly appointed chancellor of D.C. public schools.

Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C., is one of the worst schools in one of the worst school districts in America.

"The mentality of excellence? We wish we could have that," said principal Harriett Kargbo, as we toured the school one morning in May. "But this," she said, pointing at the metal detector guarding the entrance, "is the reality."

This, too: Dozens of kids wandering the halls during second period. Corridors littered with fliers, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags. One second-floor foyer reeking of marijuana. ("I smell pot smoke," I said. "Really? I don't," Kargbo replied.) In the five-year history of No Child Left Behind, the school has never met the law's benchmarks; in 2007, just 24% of its sophomores tested "proficient" in reading and only 20% made the grade in math.

As we walked from one teaching area to another -- Dunbar is one of D.C.'s last open-plan schools, with dividers and old filing cabinets separating the "class-rooms" -- it became clear why the students weren't learning. Of the dozen classes we visited, only in one history session were all of the students doing something approximating work. "Why isn't anyone teaching?" I asked Kargbo as I watched one student do a meticulous inventory of the contents of her wallet. "It's the end of the period," she said. Half an hour later, second period ended.

That afternoon, Kargbo was fired.

The woman who orchestrated the "contract nonrenewals" of Harriett Kargbo and 30 other principals that day was Michelle Rhee, the 38-year-old chancellor of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS). When she was appointed by Mayor Adrian Fenty just over a year ago, Rhee had never led a school, let alone a school system with 10,000 employees and a budget of nearly $1 billion. Since then, she has shuttered 23 schools, canned 15% of the central-office staff, fired 250 teachers who failed to get NCLB-required certification, and bought out more than 200 others. As the new school year gets under way, she is pushing a revolutionary contract that may simultaneously kill the entrenched seniority hiring system and make Washington's teachers the highest paid in America.

A staunch Democrat, Rhee's nevertheless a fan of NCLB--despite what she acknowledges are its problems--because it has introduced a desperately needed measure of accountability into a system that has for too long been answerable only to its own interests (which are not, it goes without saying, identical to those of the kids it is charged with educating). Rhee is professedly worried about what will happen to education if Obama becomes president. "He has taken on this 'NCLB is evil, sucking the life out of teachers' angle. I have a laundry list of things I'd change," she says, but the law nonetheless "brings accountability to a system that sorely needs it."

Read the whole thing, and send her your good wishes for success that improves D.C.'s schools--and that can be replicated across the nation.