Mingling: Michelle Rhee visits with students in Washington, D.C., where the chancellor is trying to turn the embattled school system into the "highest-performing" district in the country. (Alex Tehrani)
Is Michelle Rhee the new face of education reform?
The chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools puts teacher performance at the center of a controversial bid to remake one of the nation’s most troubled urban school districts.
By Sean J. Miller | Correspondent / January 27, 2009 edition
Washington
On a recent afternoon, Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, came out of a meeting to find an e-mail on her BlackBerry describing a problem at Anacostia High School. Two students had gotten into a fight while being dismissed from the cafeteria. A short time later, another student, who was smoking in a stairwell, started a small fire with his cigarette. It set off the fire alarm.
While the school evacuated to the football field, a third student ran down the hall jabbing his penknife into three kids, randomly.
“You know high school kids: When something happens it sort of causes a [chain reaction],” Ms. Rhee tells me, sounding casual, as we sit in her office. With the fire out and students milling around the 50-yard line, Rodney McBride, the Anacostia principal, calls Rhee to ask whether he should send the students home early.
Get them back in class, is her resolute response. Don’t waste the rest of the day.
The incident illustrates Rhee’s no-nonsense approach to turning around one of the nation’s most troubled urban school districts.
Since she was appointed chancellor in June 2007, the young Korean-American has brought sweeping changes and a stern hand to the Washington public school system. She has fired hundreds of teachers, principals, and administrators, as well as shuttered 23 underattended schools.
At the core of her strategy is a conceptually simple but politically complex maxim: improve learning in the classroom by improving the people who hold the chalk. To do that, she advocates recruiting and retaining good teachers by paying them higher salaries – but cleaning out those who don’t perform.
Her tough approach and willingness to take on “untouchable” issues in education have earned her a reputation as a nonideological crusader who might be carving out a new model for school reform. But critics, including many teachers, see her tactics as heavy handed and capricious. Is she education’s new White Knight or just a Michelle the Knife?
•••
What Michelle Rhee isn’t anymore is anonymous. In the nation’s ultimate media town, she’s become something of a celebrity. On this day, she chats in a TV studio with local talk-show host Bruce DePuyt. A meteorologist at the station strolls in and laments that he didn’t bring in his copy of Time magazine that features her on the cover. He wanted her to autograph it.
“She can sign mine for you and then we can swap,” says Mr. DePuyt. Rhee smiles politely. It is the third time she has been on his show. “She’s one of my all-star guests,” DePuyt says. Rhee rolls her eyes.
The young chancellor doesn’t like to talk about her new klieg-light status or how it affects her job. “I really frankly don’t care all that much about the media,” she says. Rhee is similarly dismissive of Washington’s political rituals, saying at one point: “I’m not a politician, but I am an administrator who has to deal with politics.”
Lately, in fact, she has been embroiled in some politicking with the local teachers union over a new contract. At the heart of the dispute is the most radical element of her reform plans – performance-based salaries for teachers.
Rhee would like to see people in the classroom paid a lot more – six figure salaries in the case of some veteran teachers. It’s a prospect many teachers relish. But in exchange for the highest salaries, she would like teachers to surrender their coveted tenure protection so they can be fired if they don’t bring up test scores – something most don’t like.
As Rhee sees it, money will motivate teachers to do better and those who don’t will be (and deserve to be) let go. She believes there’s nothing wrong with the kids. “It’s the adults,” says Rhee. [Editor’s note: The original text said Rhee sees teachers, administrators, and in some cases parents as the main problem. But she never identified parents as part of the problem.]
Yet quantifying teacher performance, especially in a poor district like Washington D.C., can be problematic. Some teachers inherit a class of underachieving students. Moreover, the district has difficulties recording the most basic statistics accurately. When Rhee took charge, for instance, she didn’t have an accurate count of how many children with special needs attended her schools.
She says teachers will be evaluated through a number of lenses – student performance,
classroom observations, general professionalism.
Yet not all the teachers she’s fired so far have inspired plaudits from members of the Washington Teachers’ Union and some local parents. Some fault her for acting too hastily, others for jettisoning good instructors.
“Teachers are feeling the pressure to show progress, and if they don’t show progress, they’re afraid they’re going to lose their jobs,” says Angela Morton, principal of Smothers Elementary School.
Questions persist, too, on whether Rhee can recruit enough qualified teachers to fill the vacancies that would be created by any massive turnover. “You can fire people who aren’t doing a good job, but if you then don’t have good people to put in their place, it can backfire,” says Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan who serves on an advisory board with Rhee. “I think it’s frankly more than just finding good teachers and paying them enough. You can pay people as much as you like, and they still couldn’t teach a kid to read.”
Still, many people in education circles praise Rhee for bold moves and for tackling entrenched interest groups. “I think Michelle’s strategy is the only coherent strategy to try to reform these [urban] systems,” says Rick Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “These are not well-run systems.”
•••
Rhee seems an unlikely candidate to reform public education. Before moving to Washington, she was running an education nonprofit from her home in Colorado. Rhee had never run a school district – or even attended public school much.
While growing up in suburban Toledo, Ohio, she attended the private Maumee Valley Country Day School. From there, she went to Cornell University. When she graduated, she entered Teach For America (TFA), which is like the Peace Corps for young teachers.
“I was actually surprised when I heard she was going to do Teach For America,” says Erik Rhee, her older brother. Growing up in a community of hyper-achieving Korean-Americans in Toledo, Erik says “the basic expectation was doctor, lawyer, something like that. It was generally understood that you were just going to be successful.”
After joining TFA, Rhee spent three years teaching elementary school in Baltimore. It turned out to be formative for her. “I was incredibly frustrated by what I saw happening,” she says. “I knew that I wanted to do something that would have a broader impact on public education, and I knew that teacher quality was the biggest lever to that.”
In 1997, Rhee founded her own nonprofit, The New Teacher Project, which trains people to go into urban classrooms. A decade later, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, who became the governing authority over the Washington school district in June 2007, offered Rhee the opportunity of a lifetime – the chance to lead a well-funded but underperforming school system.
The statistics were stark. Washington’s eighth-grade students ranked lowest in the nation in math – only 8 percent scoring “proficient” or better in 2007. When it came to reading, the district was ranked last out of 52 jurisdictions. Still, Washington spends some $13,000 per student, among the highest rates in the country, though large amounts go to special-needs kids.
Whatever the ultimate outcome, Rhee’s education reform experiment won’t fail for lack of effort. She regularly works from 6:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., up to seven days a week. Somewhere in there Rhee spends time with her two young daughters.
After the Anacostia incident, Rhee attended a community forum where she discussed the district’s five-year plan for several hours. The next morning she was closeted with the City Council for seven hours.
Her brother knows the regimen well. He frequently gets e-mails from her after midnight. “You need to go to bed,” he will write back. Her usual response: “Yeah, soon.”
2. Jeff Cokenour | 01.27.09
If Ms. Rhee succeeds in improving the educational outcomes of students under her charge, then her methods should be duplicated where they can be, however, laying the educational burden solely on the backs of teachers isn’t going to solve the crisis in education. The problem is multifaceted and as she said in this article involves “bad administrators” and “bad parents” as well. America must come to understand that the ability to reproduce does not make one a parent any more than the ability to drink makes one a fish. Students who come from homes where no parental supervision is present will largely perform poorly regardless of the teacher. I beg, plead and cajole both my students and their parents to see the benefit of academic rigour, yet many times my pleas fall on deaf ears. One might also question the example that Ms. Rhee’s is providing to her own children if she is working from 6 to 1 a.m. - Who is teaching them?
Education is not the dissemination of information as the educational establishment thinks - it is a relationship between a teacher, a pupil and that pupil’s society. The Greeks understood that education cannot be divorced from life - it is a part of it. Locking scared, hungry, neglected and abandoned children in a room for 8 hours a day with a stranger is not a recipe for success. What about compulsory education for parents of troubled children?
3. Harry kuheim | 01.27.09
It’s quite easy to come in a classroom as a big shot in a suit and spout platitudes and quite another to spend 7 hours a day in a classroom with hostile kids who hate school armed only with a piece of chalk.The disintegration of black families where kids get no upbringing and are deserted by low life gang menber fathers is the problem not teachers.
4. Ian | 01.27.09
I agree wholeheartedly with those who have indicated that we should proceed cautiously yet optimistically with these sorts of reforms. Though Rhee is clearly ambitious and dedicated, she is wrong in saying that there is “nothing” wrong with kids. There are American families who don’t see value in education and many children in such families stonewall the process. Education is complex, and solving the problems in public education will be a complex process involving many changes, more than one person - no matter how dedicated - can intitate. Rather than ignore this complexity, we should embrace it. What works for one group of students may not work for another. I believe that any successful remedy must feature choice on the part of the student and his family and an atmosphere of trust on the faculty. That is a hard atmosphere to create when you are afraid of being fired, and yet there are dangers associated with unaccountable tenured teachers as well.
5. Paragon55 | 01.27.09
Rhee says. “There’s nothing wrong with the kids.”
This is the concept that will cause her to fail. I am a high school teacher, and I agree that a lot can be achieved by improving the quality of teachers, parents and administrators. But to ignore the FACT that students are untimately responsible for their own learning is a fatal flaw in her program.
When students are not called to be responsible, they grow up socially malformed and underdeveloped. The public education system should guarantee ACCESS to a good high school education, not a good education per se, because the students must do their part. Any student who refuses to participate responsibly in the learning process should be let go (maybe with a 3-strikes-you’re-out rule), and the government should stop throwing money at an unsolvable problem.
If we want kids to grow up to be responsible and productive adults, we should expect that of them as early as high school. Anyone who says “There’s nothing wrong with the kids” is awfully naive.
6. cdpardee | 01.27.09
Please update your article showing the actual advances of the student population. If that looks good, then somehow we need to put her in charge of the U S school system. Give her a million dollars minimum and financial backup as well as all the help ( selected by her )that she needs and set her loose. It is obvious the USA has lost its get up and go, the basic problem becomes parents. I have been watching her for a year now.
7. soulshadow55 | 01.27.09
“Growing up in a community of hyper-achieving Korean-Americans in Toledo, Erik says “the basic expectation was doctor, lawyer, something like that. It was generally understood that you were just going to be successful.”
In my mind that quote says it all. In Ms. Rhee’s community, she was EXPECTED to suceed. Which in turn, created in her mind the will, desire and determination to work hard and get good grades. She was able to equate good grades and education in the long run with success in life.
My African-American parents (yes, both mother and father) drummed it into my head night after night that education was a way out of poverty. My parents both had a 4 and 6th grade education. They grew up in semi-rural Virgina at a time when Virginia did not educate black children past elementary school. In order to go to high school your parents would have to know someone or have relatives in Washington, D.C. They would ship you off to Washington to stay with them so that you could attend high school. So my parents were strong on education because they lived lives that were directly affected by their lack of education. After graduating high school my parents had nothing but encouragement for me - there was no college fund. So I paid my way though college. It took me years but a college degree was, in my mind, a way out of having to live like my parents. It is so profoundly true that an educations is something that can’t be taken away from you.
I don’t understand how parents can curse or strike their children’s teachers on the word of a child. Nor allow their child to play video games or run the streets without knowing whether homework is done. How they can purchase $200 Nikes but not a home computer?
Yes, some of the problems with D.C. schools may start with the teachers. But as a 1973 graduate of D.C. public schools I’m sure most of the problem is parents who don’t discipline their children; parents who don’t give a damn whether their children get an education or not; and parents who only care so long as they don’t have to lift a finger. I’m certain that if the majority of students went to school with an attitude for learning, and were instilled with the value of an education teachers would most certainly meet them more than half way.
8. annie | 01.27.09
Student performances are based on teachers. Attitudes of the students rooted from home. Attitudes are very important for students and bad attitudes will affect school performance. Schools, parents, teachers, and students work together can improve school performance. How about each year, schools need to hold parent meeting to educate parents about the school and the expection of the students. Require parents to volunteer at school maybe once or twice a year. Taking time off is difficult to some parents (a day or two is possible for the entire year). Educate parents how to communicate and motive kids. For the children without parents, they can work with social workers. These kids can visit the workers several times a week or link them up with kind hearted and welcoming families for several evenings a week. Good attitudes need to instill in students will reflect on the school’s performance.
9. Linda/Retired Teacher | 01.27.09
The biggest problem in schooling in the United States is the fact that bright people like Michelle Rhee usually do not choose teaching as a career. When they do, they often stay for two or three years and then go on to greener pastures. The teachers in DC are there because they accepted the jobs. Urban districts traditionally have had to hire anyone who applied for the position of teacher, regardless of qualifications. As the old saying goes, all you needed to teach in the city was “a warm body and a degree.”
Right now, because of the economy, there is a surplus of teachers so Ms.Rhee might be able to fire the “bad” teachers and hire the “good” ones. However, treating these teachers with such flagrant disrespect will undoubtedly backfire badly. In a few years, when the baby boomers retire and DC becomes desperate again, the district will surely have to settle for a warm body WITHOUT a degree.
10. Knowledge is Power | 01.27.09
“and the government should stop throwing money at an unsolvable problem.”
Well the real problem is not the student that doesn’t graduate high school as an 18 year old. The problem emerges in the years after that when that student has an increased likelihood of committing crimes, being unemployed, and making little contribution to society. It is not enough to say “kids that don’t care don’t count.”
I teach too and am equally frustrated by some of the students I see that seem to have little, if any, interest in their own education. They clearly don’t see a connection between their academic success and their future. That message has to be communicated by schools, parents, and society at large.
One of the most disturbing trends in recent history is the death of intellectualism. Our society values the immediate payoff rather than long term value. Anyone have any ideas on how to reverse that trend?
11. Mary, Washington, DC | 01.27.09
You quote Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, as saying, “I think Michelle’s strategy is the only coherent strategy to try to reform these [urban] systems.” Pray tell, what is her coherent strategy? It certainly wasn’t set forth in this article, and as a resident of DC, I can tell you that her only obvious strategy is to alienate people, pitting principals against teachers, and young teachers against old teachers, firing competent, in some cases, beloved principals because they don’t “fit” (more likely that they stood up to her) and priding herself on being anti-social because it helps her handle irate parents. http://www.newsweek.com/id/154901/page/1. Have you ever seen a successful management strategy that was based on tearing people apart instead of bringing them together?
After firing all the old “bad” teachers, Rhee sees a future of bright, young, energetic, idealistic “good” teachers with the right “mindset,” meaning they are willing to work long hours and take responsibility for students learning despite their limitations outside of school. In fact, implying that students have such limitations will prevent you from getting hired. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011001772.html. This isn’t a strategy, this is despotism and mind control.
I notice most of the readers’ comments here are negative and many mention the role of the family. If you are teachers – forget getting a job in DC. You don’t fit with the Chancellor’s beliefs, and that’s all that counts in DC – for now.
12. Mary, Washington, DC | 01.27.09
The second link in my post above is incorrect. Here is the correct link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113001929.html
13. Op | 01.28.09
When you grow up in an Asian family, you have hell to pay if you get anything less than an A in any subject. As soulshadow said, if you expect your kids to succeed, they have a better chance of doing so. Asian parents all know this and won’t put up with any bs about “too much pressure” or “it’s too hard”. Kids do well because they have no other choice. If you go to Japan, kids there go to school on Saturdays and they also go to school after school (called “juku”), where they get extra instruction. Learning and education are actually valued! Here, it’s more important to have the $200 Nikes. Come on America! Are you just kidding about the change or are you actually going to change?
14. Kasey | 01.28.09
@JEFF COKENOUR,
You wrote “One might also question the example that Ms. Rhee’s is providing to her own children if she is working from 6 to 1 a.m. - Who is teaching them?”
This is part of the problem. Ms. Rhee likely doesn’t have to inveset much time and effort in her children’s learning because their teachers are effective. This is the reason she places the sole burden for educating children on the teachers.
What she fails to realize, however, is that her children’s teachers are able to be so effective because of the mindset and value for education she instilled AT HOME.
I am what’s considered a highly qualified educator, but even for 6 figures I wouldn’t work in DC. The school system has too many problems, and sadly, I don’t think Ms. Rhee is part of the solution.
I’ve been watching her, Fenty, and the school system very, very closely since his election, and I’ve always scoffed at the idea of her replacing all of those “poor, ineffective” teachers with “highly qualified, effective” ones, as though they’re clamoring for a coveted spot in DC.
15. Herb Yood | 01.28.09
One hopes that Michelle Lee is better at evaluating schools than most of the big-time education reformers. In Massachusetts, blowhards brought in education reform without a real evaluation of schools or teachers. It was quite true that some schools were poorly run, and it is also true that some teachers were not good teachers. However, most schools were run adequately or well, and most teachers took their work seriously and performed it competently and, in some cases, brilliantly. The whole enterprise was painted as failing by people who had to be prodded into allowing students to retest to obtain diplomas. No allowances were given to students who had learning disabilities; no allowances were given to students or schools whose enrollments included many recent immigrants from non-English speaking countries.
All teachers and schools were painted with the same dismal brush. Teachers, principals and administrators’ suggestions and insights were routinely ignored, and the only way the programme was able to survive was to loosen the standards for passing the state tests.
It was pitiful.
Michelle Lee, at least, recognises the importance of teachers. May she do well, if she is able to support teachers in doing what they do best: teaching. May she not do well if she is like so many others and has no idea what a good teacher really is beyond a test score on a test that may be less than a perfect mirror of student achievement.
16. JesseAlred | 04.14.09
I am a veteran teacher in Houston seeking a dialogue with Teach for America teachers nationally regarding policy positions taken by former Teach for American staffers who have become leaders in school district administrations and on school boards. I first became aware of a pattern when an ex-TFA staffer, now a school board member for Houston ISD, recommended improving student performance by firing teachers whose students did poorly on standardized tests. Then the same board member led opposition to allowing us to select, by majority vote, a single union to represent us.
Having won school board elections in several cities, and securing the Washington D.C Superintendent’s job for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp’s friends are pursuing an approach to school reform based on a false premise: that teachers, not student habits, nor lack of parent commitment or social inequality, is the main cause of sub-par academic performance. The TFA reform agenda appeals to big corporations who see our public institutions as inefficient leeches. This keeps big money flowing into TFA coffers.
The corporate-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide initially sponsored Wendy Kopp’s efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize its responsibility at the time it embraced Ms. Kopp. TFA recently started Teach for India. Are Teach for India enrollees aware of the TFA/Union Carbide connection?
When TFA encountered a financial crisis, Ms. Kopp nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project sought to replace public schools with for-profit corporate schools funded by our tax money. Ms. Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP’s national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.
In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was pivotal cover for Bush, since as Governor he had no genuine educational achievements, and he needed the education issue to campaign as a moderate and reach out to the female vote. KIPP charter schools provide a quality education, but they start with families committed to education. They claim to be improving public schools by offering competition in the education market-place, but they take the best and leave the rest.
D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s school reform recipe includes three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of hype. On the cover of Time, she sternly gripped a broom, which she presumably was using to sweep away the trash, which presumably represented my urban teacher colleagues. The image insulted people who take the toughest jobs in education.
TFA teachers do great work, but when TFA’s leadership argue that schools, and not inequality and bad habits, are the cause of the achievement gap, they are not only wrong, they feed the forces that prevent the social change we need to grow and sustain our middle class.. Our society has failed schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It’s not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. It’s not the other way around.
Ms. Kopp claims TFA carries the civil rights torch for today, but Martin Luther King was the voice of unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where do we go from here?, argued for some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity would never be enough in a survival of the fittest society to allow most of the under-privileged to enter the middle class.
Your hard work as a TFA teacher gives TFA executives credibility. It’s not the other way around. Your hard work every day in the classrooms gives them the platform to espouse their peculiar one-sided prescriptions for school improvement. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here with TFA teachers. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
17. Teacher | 06.17.09
National media portraits a different image of Michelle Rhee. In Washington, especially in the school system, she is perceived as cold, cruel, political, and just worried about her next national post. Even those who joined her in her transition have left. She has gone through a new wave of central office management twice because of her lack of leadership. DCPS reform is only a reform in the eyes of the media.
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1. Loren Steele | 01.27.09
Ms. Rhee’s work ethic is truly inspiring. That seems to be the conclusion of the multitudes of articles written about her. Beyond that, we know that her solution is to test and fire. It certainly makes sense that good teachers make good schools, but I’m highly skeptical that bad schools are bad because they have bad teachers. It’s probably more likely that bad schools get what they pay for. Teachers need a safe(nonviolent)environment in which to work. They need a clean, toxin-free classroom. They need time and space to meet with colleagues. They need adequate classroom resources along with support and maintenance of technology. They need to know that they can build a trusting relationship with their supervisors, and once built, can depend on the support of their supervisors in case of crisis or misunderstanding. I believe it is much more cost-effective to train and support teachers than to try to find and buy “high quality” teachers from some as yet unseen source.