Portrait of an inbox: fixing America's worst school system, one e-mail at a time.

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Education system in the United States

Monday, March 10, 6:45 a.m.: The first e-mail of the week arrives on Margie Yeager's Palm Treo, from an elementary school principal in the District of Columbia who needs volunteers to restock his library shelves. Yeager reads the e-mail in bed a few minutes after waking. Eventually she gets up, walks into her kitchen, and grabs a Diet Coke from the fridge. It's the first of many, because when your job is to fix the worst public school district in America, you need all the caffeine you can get.

After showering and getting dressed, Yeager drives her beat-up '99 Volvo sedan down Connecticut Avenue to the central office of the D.C. Public Schools, near Union Station. She continues to answer email in the car ("usually" at stoplights, she maintains) before arriving at 825 North Capitol Street. She takes an elevator to the top floor and walks to her cubicle, just up the hall from the office of the district's new chancellor, Michelle Rhee.

A small, quiet, and unassuming twenty-eight-year old former elementary school teacher, Yeager could pass for eighteen. You wouldn't peg her as the holder of a Harvard graduate degree in public policy, or a key actor in Rhee's ambitious plan to reform a school system that combines some of the highest per-student spending levels and worst test scores in the country. Yeager directs Rhee's "critical response team"--five talented young professionals who man a sort of constituent services war room, fielding a daily flood of hundreds of letters, phone calls, and emails from teachers, parents, and the public. Rhee has directed that every request must receive an initial response within twenty-four hours. This is already a small revolution for public education in the nation's capital.

Things are quiet in the central office today--or, as they say in the movies, a little too quiet. The reason is that there are ninety-eight fewer people here than there were on Friday afternoon, when Rhee decimated the bloated administrative bureaucracy (which operated with an approximate ratio of one bureaucrat for every fifty-four students) by firing lo percent of the central office staff. Now, everyone is nervous about what the reaction will be.

Rumors about possible firings had swirled for weeks, after Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty pushed the city council to reclassify hundreds of nonunion school district civil servants as "at will" employees who could be let go at any time. After the first termination letters were delivered midday Friday, the media descended, and footage of distraught...