Radical
Fighting to Put
Students First
by Michelle Rhee
Harper
In a town full of divisive personalities, Michelle Rhee, who ran Washington, DC’s public schools from 2007 to 2010, polarized opinion more than any other public figure I can remember, with the exception of a handful of officials. (Here’s looking at you, Marion Barry.) I
Either you admire her do-whatever-it-takes attempts to overhaul a system that had become a national embarrassment, or you loathe her as a power-mad, union-busting, school-closing dictator who trampled over teachers, parents and public servants.
Her supporters and detractors could probably agree on one word to describe her: formidable.
There’s no whiff of regret in “Radical.” By her reckoning, Rhee came in to do a difficult and politically dangerous job, and she did it the way she thought it needed to be done. Once she couldn’t do it effectively anymore, she moved on to bring her message of “radical improvement” to the national stage.
“No more mediocrity,” she writes in what could be a career slogan. “It’s killing us.”
Even the fiercest Rhee-haters among my friends and neighbors agreed with her that DCPS needed help. Some schools, especially in the richer parts of town, enjoyed good test scores and high graduation rates. Elsewhere, students trailed far behind their peers nationally in math and reading. Many kids didn’t stay in school at all.
“The dropout rate was above 50%,” Rhee writes. “The achievement gap was a canyon.” Teachers weren’t sure they’d have the textbooks and other materials they needed. School buildings suffered from a lack of maintenance and repairs. The system was a mess — “a whole different level of bad,” Rhee calls it.
Rhee rode into town in 2007, hired by another lightning rod, then-mayor Adrian Fenty, to clean things up. What she did and how she did it take up about half the book. For all the dust she kicked up, the story as she tells it is not a rodeo of drama. Radical change apparently involves a lot of meetings and negotiations, punctuated by surprise visits to schools, pep talks with confidantes and reminders that kids should come first.
In public, Rhee has never lacked for confidence. Those put off by her ego might be surprised by the uncertainties she felt in her early career as a teacher. The word “struggle” turns up a lot. She nearly flamed out during her first year as a Teach for America fellow at an inner-city Baltimore school in 1993. “Day in and day out, I struggled with my students,” she writes. “They simply wouldn’t listen. I would routinely spend the day alternating between screaming at the children, bribing them, and giving them the silent treatment for their misdeeds. None of it worked.”
She stuck it out. From more experienced teachers she learned how to manage a classroom and keep students engaged. “It was then that the light went on for me,” she says. If her students didn’t achieve, it wasn’t “about their potential or their ability or anything else. It had to do with what I was doing as a teacher, what we were doing as a school, and the expectations that we set for them.”
After teaching for three years, Rhee founded a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which worked with school systems to recruit more and better teachers.
When Fenty offered her the chancellor gig, friends warned her about DC’s racial and social politics, its administrative swamps.
Rhee’s first act, after getting the schools open on time, was to take on the DCPS bureaucracy. The new chancellor gave the central-office staff a straighten-up-and-fly-right speech. “Some clapped. I froze hiring,” she reports. “In March 2008, I handed out 98 pink slips.”
Rhee closed 23 under-subscribed schools in her first year. She fired principals and teachers identified as underperforming or worse. She took on the tenure-and-seniority system protected by the Washington Teachers’ Union and the American Federation of Teachers. In 2010, after what sound like painful negotiations, the union approved a new contract that eliminated tenure in exchange for merit pay. That achieved one of Rhee’s long-held goals: to do away with what she calls “the dance of the lemons” — the shuffling of union-protected, subpar teachers among classrooms and schools.
As the founder and chief executive of StudentsFirst, an advocacy group that gets involved in political campaigns, she continues to seek and get national attention for education reform.
“We’ve gone soft as a nation,” she warns readers in the book’s final section, “A Radical’s Vision.” “We are not doing our kids any favors by teaching them to celebrate mediocrity, to revel in the average, and to delight in merely participating.”
Rhee started something that is still playing out. Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s deputy, succeeded her as chancellor. Henderson has a quieter style than Rhee did. But the new chancellor seems just as willing as the old one to close schools and hold accountable a system that for too long let too many Washington students and their parents down.
From The Washington Post