Talk about a buried lead. In a new Education Next profile of District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the conclusion that, “Rhee’s most important achievement might be in the management fixes most people can’t see,” is hidden deep under a horrendous PhotoShop job of Rhee dressed as Joan of Arc and he-said she-said claims about whether Rhee’s leadership style is inclusive enough. Rhee herself buries her own accomplishments with stories like this:

Six weeks into the job, Rhee called her staff together with the message that “We are not here to do the bureaucracy better,” Nyankori says. Rhee told them that “that’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster. We are here to derail those trains.”

Fine. I get it. Raising student achievement and dramatically reshaping the education sphere is where we want to go, but surely there must be some room for doing the little things right along the way. Mundane tasks like managing a staff, prodding a reluctant bureaucracy, meeting deadlines, etc. matter. They’re not sexy accomplishments and they take time, but they’re vitally important to transforming a lagging institution.

What’s sad is that beyond all Rhee’s other accomplishments–the high profile, the rising test scores, the insatiable appetite for answering emails–the article dug up quite a few examples showing she’s actually done a really good job at these little things:

It’s not news that Washington’s schools are among the most woeful in the country, but even a cynic has to gasp. The mismanagement is legendary: consider the 5 million personnel records Rhee says she found piled on a storeroom floor when she took office. Marc Borbely, a former teacher, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004 to find out how many work orders were outstanding at the central maintenance office. The answer: 25,000.

Teachers complained of out-of-control students: The city’s Ballou High School was closed for a 35-day cleanup after students stole chemistry-lab thermometers and scattered the mercury around hallways. In most school districts, mercury thermometers had been replaced years earlier.

And:

Rhee’s other successes aren’t exactly the stuff of headlines. Erich Martel, who has taught social studies in the D.C. schools for 40 years, says teachers are doing more lesson prep and trying to make their classes more interesting. “There are teachers who need someone looking over their shoulder and they’re getting it,” he says.

And:

Long-neglected school buildings are being renovated or rebuilt, which could make them more competitive with some better-housed charters. Spending on professional development has quadrupled. There are art and music classes in every school, the district says.

And:

High-school transcripts, which the schools used to hold on to and sometimes alter to boost graduation rates, are being centralized and scrubbed (the audit found that one-third of students weren’t taking the classes they need to graduate). [The district's special education head] says he has lured back 155 of the district’s 2,400 special-ed youngsters who are in private schools, at a yearly cost of $141 million, with more programs and better case management, and has set a target return date for each of the others. Quarterly diagnostic tests have been aligned with year-end assessments: Unbelievably, the two were designed by different consultants, and didn’t predict or reflect the outcome of the other.

When trains run on time, people are more likely to take them. When schools function properly–when teachers get their paychecks on time, when principals get routine maintenance taken care of, when students have clean classrooms–the business of schools works better and more learning takes place. DC public schools were a disaster when Rhee took over, and it showed in all kinds of ways, more than just test scores. Raising student achievement might be the end goal, but there are plenty of interim benchmarks on which Rhee and her staff could already demonstrate improvement. That’s not something to be ashamed of.