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For more than a year, the debate, press coverage, and buzz in Washington, D.C., have swirled over whether someone so different—and so relatively inexperienced—can deliver sweeping change. And presidential hopeful Barack Obama hasn’t been the only one receiving that kind of unrelenting scrutiny.
Michelle Rhee became chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) in June 2007, just after the city’s newly elected mayor, Adrian Fenty, had taken control of the troubled district. She fast became a lightning rod with her launching of a massive reform of a system that burned through six of her predecessors in 10 years. She has come under fire in part for firing principals without warning and closing schools without seeking much community input.
“I didn’t think that off the bat I’d be embraced by the community. Why would I be?” Rhee said in a phone interview recently. “I was the diametric opposite of what people both wanted and expected. Joel Klein [New York City public schools’ chancellor] always jokes that I was the most unpopular choice that the mayor could have made.”
Rhee, a 37-year-old Korean-American whose parents immigrated from South Korea, arrived after a decade at the helm of the New Teacher Project, a New York-based organization that has recruited teachers—many of them professionals willing to change careers—for 200 mostly urban school systems across the country. While she notes that managing 120 employees may not add up to running a school system with almost 50,000 students and more than 4,000 teachers, she says she came to her new $275,000-a-year position prepared.
“I ran a small nonprofit organization, but we had contracts with New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago. It wasn’t like I didn’t know how a large district bureaucracy worked or what you had to go through to move the things that you needed to move.”
Although she was taking over a school system in which 86 percent of fourth-graders lacked proficiency in reading and 92 percent of eighth-graders were deficient in math, Rhee had already filled tall orders. “I took on things that others said was impossible,” she notes. “They said that there was no way of talking people who were making six-figure salaries into taking a 90 percent pay cut to teach in inner city schools. And we showed in city after city—year in and year out—that there absolutely was a group of mid-career professionals who were compelled to change careers and come into education.”
Rhee and the young team she brought over with her also had worked with DCPS since 2000. “We knew a lot of the people here,” says Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who worked with Rhee for 10 years at the New Teacher Project. “We knew something of the politics, and we knew very clearly what the key challenges were here. So we were able to get started more quickly.”
Still, Rhee admits, she never aspired to head a school system, until Fenty convinced her. “I saw the conviction that he had and thought that this is a one-time opportunity to show it’s absolutely possible to have a high performing urban school district,” she says. “After years of poking and prodding from the outside, I was willing to put my money where my mouth is.”
Rhee’s D.C. setting is a world away from her suburban upbringing outside Toledo, Ohio, where she attended private school from grades 7 to 12. “I grew up in an upper middle class household,” Rhee says. “My father was a physician, and he very much raised us with the belief that everything you have in your life has nothing to do with the fact that you were special and everything to do with the fact that you were lucky enough to be born into this family. Because of that, I grew up with this sense of social justice and kids not getting what they need just by virtue of where they were born.”
After getting a bachelor’s degree in government at Cornell University, Rhee joined Teach for America and spent the next three years teaching second- and third-graders at an inner-city Baltimore elementary school before moving on to the New Teacher Project.
Jumping Right In
This past June, the D.C. Mayor’s Office released a list of almost 50 first-year accomplishments by Rhee’s administration, including a national campaign to recruit principals. Applications increased by 350 percent from the previous year to a total of 700, which has provided the district “an excellent pool of potential school leaders to choose from,” according to a press release. Other changes ranged from creating a tracking system to deliver an unprecedented 97 percent of required textbooks by the start of the 2007-2008 school year to the deployment of 6,300 computers for teachers and administrators, the kind of steps one might expect from a school system trying to right itself.
