Buried beneath all the destruction from Hurricane Maria — classrooms ravaged beyond repair, a month or more of school closures, power outages and food shortages, pervasive student trauma — Julia Keleher sees an open window.

Of the things I need to worry about — the buildings, the poisoning from rats being around, the flooding, moving kids, transportation, sliding roads — the thing that worries me the most is that somehow I’m not going to deliver on this learning opportunity, this transformational opportunity for us to start to think fundamentally differently about what it is to be in school, and how one goes about getting an education.

Puerto Rico’s public education system had floundered for years, and previous reform efforts had fallen flat, the fast-talking, upbeat education secretary said. But when Keleher took control of the system earlier this year, she promised to reshape an education department that she said was strained by bureaucratic inefficiencies, a tangled web that suffocated success.

Keleher — a former U.S. Department of Education official who has worked since 2007 to transform Puerto Rico’s schools — announced a plan to decentralize the island’s unitary education system. Dysfunction at the top, she said, had trickled all the way down to individual classrooms and to the pupils who filled them.

Read the full article on Purto Rico's public schools by Mark Keierleber at The 74