tavis: i was on a plane flying to washington and happened to be on the same flight as former mayor adrian fanti -- fenty. it reminded me that when he first asked you to take on this assignment you told him then that you were going to be a political liability. did you think you were going to be the kind of liability politically that you turned out to be? >> yes. that is exactly what i told him that. i said, "you do not want me for this job. for the kinds of things that we would have to do to turn this district around, it will cause a tremendous political opposition and headaches." he said that as long as we knew that what we were doing was going to increase the quality of schooling kids were getting, he had no problem taking the heat on all those things. i did know that the changes that we made when absolutely cause a lot of room for. there is no way that you can take a dysfunctional system like the one we had in washington, d.c. -- when we inherited the school district, 8% of eighth graders were on grade level in mathematics. you do not take a system that is that broken and radically change it