School Chief heading to Inauguration Without Kids

By MENSAH M. DEANPhiladelphia Daily News
deanm@phillynews.com
While students in the Philadelphia School District will hear inauguration-focused lessons when they arrive in class Tuesday, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman will be in Washington for President-elect Ba-rack Obama's big day.
The next several days, in fact, will be a whirlwind for Ackerman, who joined the district last year and has seen her star steadily rise as a national education figure.
On Monday Ackerman will join Washington schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, New York City Chancellor Joel Klein and Paul Vallas, superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans, for a pre-inaugural panel discussion at Howard University.
Director Spike Lee is organizing the discussion and will film it as part of a documentary he is making about the inaugural.
On Tuesday, Ackerman will be a guest of state lawmakers for the swearing-in, she said, and will attend the Pennsylvania Ball that evening.
Today Ackerman is scheduled to tape an interview for "Good Morning America" that will air Sunday morning. The topic: What she would like Obama to put in his education agenda.
Ackerman said as late as Tuesday that she did not plan to attend the inauguration, but she changed her mind.
"I told my staff that I was not going, then I talked to the people who made it possible for me to go and I thought, 'What an ingrate,' " she said yesterday. "There are people who would love to go and here I have an invitation."
Ackerman, 62, said she is paying her own expenses and is feeling a little awkward about leaving the district's students behind even though they are going to watch it in school on television.
"There was a lot of guilt and feeling bad and wishing I could take everyone with me, but I can't. I don't know, I'm being a little bit selfish here," she confided to reporters.
On more substantive matters, Ackerman said she was looking forward to working with Arne Duncan, the future U.S. education secretary.
"I've known him for as long as he has been superintendent," she said of the former Chicago schools leader. "He's a reformer, open, [and] I think he understands the difficulty urban schools in particular face in raising achievement for diverse populations."
Ackerman said she was hopeful that Obama and Duncan would expand preschool and afterschool programs and create a plan to forgive college loans. *