To whom much is given, much is expected. And Washington DC’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been given quite a bit: control of one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, a broad mandate for sweeping reform, and the unequivocal support of her boss, Washington mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s also been given an inexhaustible work ethic, a hardcore “no excuses” management style, and an apparent immunity to criticism or the opinion of others.
Now, much is expected. Everything, in fact.
She is, in the apt description of The Atlantic, “the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide.” Her rise in the last 18 months from relative obscurity to the cover of Time Magazine earned her the top spot in our poll to determine the most influential person in education in 2008. It wasn’t a close contest.
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post was one of many of our panel of observers to put Rhee at the top of his list of the year’s most influential people in education, citing her status as “the most visible educator of the year, pushing the discussion toward rewarding teachers and ending tenure.” The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation likewise placed Rhee atop their ballots. Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools.net, cited Rhee’s “radical new way of thinking about the teaching profession, including tenure and compensation.”
“Love her or hate her, she is redefining the very definition of an urban superintendent,” said Patrick Riccards, author of the blog Eduflack. ”She has changed the way teachers, families, the community, and businesses think about DC Public Schools. For the first time in a long time, people have hope for schools in the District.”
Rhee’s paradigm shattering proposal for DC teachers–way higher pay in exchange for giving up seniority and tenure-has pushed her to the forefront of the national dialogue about teacher quality and compensation. In the process she has become, perhaps inevitably, the most polarizing figure in education. Her brand of education reform strikes a nerve-and a chord. She has clearly tapped into the energy and idealism of younger teachers who are often mystified by union politics and fiercely committed to closing the achievement gap. Rhee’s proposal is not intimidating, but welcome to many of the “Rhee-volutionaries” she’s attracting to the nation’s capitol. Perform or perish? Bring it on. ”If I worked my butt off, did everything I could, and got fired by an administration like Rhee’s who deemed my teaching ineffective, I would tip my hat, sigh of relief, and find a new career or job,” a first-year Teach for America corps member commented on this blog in response to the Time Magazine cover story about Rhee. A Newsweek profile, one of dozens of national news stories about the Chancellor in 2008, noted “Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets.”
KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on.
A fight over the teachers’ contract looms in 2009. The Washington Teachers’ Union has brought in the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten to address the stalled negotiations. The stakes and the rhetoric are high. “I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats,” union vice-president Nathan Saunders told Newsweek. “I believe this contract is going to pass. And I believe it is going to have a huge impact,” said Rhee. “Even if it didn’t, it would not stop me.”
That’s precisely the kind of don’t-mess-with-me rhetorical flourish that divides Rhee fans from her detractors. “Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly,” notes columnist Julia Steiny. ”Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.”
In the final analysis, Michelle Rhee is, as The Atlantic correctly concluded, carrying the very viability of education reform on her shoulders:
Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform-not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community. The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all.”
Note: Thanks to our panel of education observers and pundits for their time and help in making the Education Person of the Year series possible: Sol Stern, Jay Mathews, Bill Jackson, Andy Rotherham, Diane Ravitch, Mike Petrilli, Jay Greene Michael Shaughnessy, Nancy Flanagan, Patrick Riccards, Corey Bunje Bower and Dan Brown.
I can’t disagree. Rhee was person of the year just as George Bush in 2001 and Ronald Reagan was when he adopted the same tactics to attack unions, use Voodoo Economics to accelerate the deindustrialization of American, and replace our middle class society with a deep division between rich and poor. Rhee and true believers (like the TFAer you cite) may be not realize that they came of age at a time where their prosperity and educational opportunities were paid for by the poor. Reagan was the intellectual father of the concept that reality is just “the old paradigm,” and Rhee is the greatest exponent of that philosophy. Rhee’s followers are so a-historical that I bet they’ve never asked what Orwell would say about their appropriating the word “reform,” dropping the quotes and labeling their opponents as “status quo.”
So, I’ll nominate Jack Jennings as Educator of the Year for 2009. The so-called “reformers” did not win any friends by crybabying so much when Obama did not repudiate Linda Darling Hammond. Rhee’s theatrics will not intimidate Raum Emmanuel. Americans have tired of the non-stop scorch and burn politics.
Jennings knows how to make compromises. Jenning’s CEP has done a thorough job of documenting the flaws of NCLB-type accountability. Jennings is the un-Rhee.
In American politics, we should revere the principle of “the loyal opposition,” where “my opponent is my opponent, not my enemy.” I can not think of another person is educational politics which whom I disagree so vehemently that I would not want to follow that principle. But when you are attacked by the Grand Inquisitor, you have to fight back. Its her complete belief in her own righteous ness that makes Rhee so dandgerous. Regardless of what Rhee is like as a person, we must defeat the mentality that she represents.
John,
I have a great idea. Let us allow the teachers to determine for themselves whether they think they can rise to Chancellor Rhee’s challenges. The other choice is to allow the teachers to hide their incompetence behind the power of the union. The automotive industry did that; look where they stand now. Perform or perish is the rule of every other industry save for those “protected” by union contracts. Who “protects” the end consumer – students – from incompetent teachers?
Well, gee. I was on point with three out of five CKB winners, and threw away one of my picks, so I’m feeling pretty much in the loop. I would gently disagree with John on Michelle Rhee’s danger quotient. Even people with whom you violently disagree can teach you some things, if only about the narrowness of a personal perspective.
Michelle Rhee genuinely believes that paying a set of “elite” teachers $100,000+ in exchange for their job security will leverage student achievement gains that will mean something real to those students, down the road. I’m not so sure–and I support performance pay for teachers. I believe that Rhee is pursuing “teacher quality” when she should be pursuing and rewarding quality teaching. I also think she should re-read the chapter on why teachers cheat in “Freakonomics.” Still– she is both brilliant and compelling and I sincerely hope she can turn her starpower into positive gains in the D.C. schools.
In one sense, the higher pay/security tradeoff Rhee proposed is just another gimmick–a bigger splash than scripted lessons, administrator walk-throughs, rules and learning objectives posted on the wall, etc. etc. But still a trendy “strategy.” As Diana Senechal notes in an early comment, none of strategies du jour will work without a strong, rich curriculum. That and some effective teaching will get you somewhere.
John T, I think you may have snagged 2008 Most Frequent EdBlog commenters Of The Year…
Robert, good write-up. But it’s New Years, you have to make predictions: will the Rhee DC teacher contract ultimately get voted on this year, and if so, will it pass?
Either that or predict who will win AL East.
The AL East is easier. It won’t be the Rays, the baseball equivalent of a 100 year flood, and it won’t be the Yankees because the gods punish hubris, and Yankee fans are acting as if they’ve already won it and the season is a mere tune-up for October (I’m a Mets fan, naturally). So you’ll be seeing the Sox in the post season.
I’m fascinated by the DC contract. I suspect that there will be a contract vote, and it will pass, but it may not end up looking quite like people expect. That’s just a wild guess, though because there’s no way of knowing what the the true agenda and endgame is. People tend not to tip their hand in public statements. For example, what’s the most important thing to Rhee? Is it really tenure? Why should tenure be an issue for someone who believes the best teachers come from place like TFA and only stay a few years. Perhaps she’s willing to “give away” something that’s really not that important? But think how valuable it would be to have the ability to put every teacher on probation for a year and clean house. Then she could use those extraordinary salaries to create the only buyer’s market for teachers in urban America. Again, this is raw conjecture on my part. I’m merely assuming we really don’t know as much as we think.
Here’s what I really want to know: What will constitutes failure and or cause for dismissal? The high salaries are welcome and reflect, I think, the true talent and effort that’s required to be successful in an environment like DC. But what constitutes not cutting it?
My gut feeling is that John T. is reading Rhee correctly, but since I don’t follow the D.C. schools closely I’ll try to withhold judgment a bit longer.
But I think her management style and the reputation she’s building for herself with the Time magazine cover and the “I don’t give a crap” comments undermine the reforms she’s advocating for. High salaries in return for at-will (or close to at-will) employment will only be appealing to a significant fraction of teachers if management is perceived to be fair. And it will only improve education if principals really do evaluate teachers on their effectiveness, not on their loyalty or their adherence to pet educational philosophies.
As others have pointed out, education is a “people business,” and an effective reformer has to be able to work successfully in that environment. I haven’t seen that side of Rhee yet.
My guess is that if she gets the contract reforms she wants, a high turnover of poorly paid teachers will be replaced by a high turnover of highly paid teachers, with a slow attrition of both “dead wood” and effective, experienced teachers. The quality of education may marginally improve.
But for real long term improvements, Rhee will need to follow the contract reforms will a sustained effort to hire fair and effective principals who can motivate their staff rather than terrorize them. We’ll see.
Education and economics go hand-in-hand. While I truly believe that all children can and will learn given the necessary resources, inequality will always be the downfall of quality education in urban and rural school districts because they lack the monetary and environmental support to sustain them. Education reformers need to begin to work with other sectors to educate the whole child through community schools and community building while simultaneously working within to improve individual schools and systems.
P.S. Having suffered through the 2000 World Series, I’m not sure I agree that the gods punish hubris. Roger Clemens seems to me to be a counter-example.
It seems obvious that teachers need time for their own projects, that many a good teacher has a life of the mind. Under Rhee’s system, such a life barely exists, if at all. Teachers work long days, and then what? They are probably too tired to do much else. They might spend time with friends or family, but for the most part they will need to rest and recharge for the next day.
What ever happened to the teacher who spent time reading literature, history, and science, or studying a language? Who played chess in tournaments and solved logic problems for fun? Who played an instrument–seriously and well–or wrote good poetry and prose? Who invented gadgets and assembled electrical circuits? Who tracked down an idea or word to its origins and wrote an article about it? Who performed in a play and spent hours perfecting the role?
I don’t mean hobbies that one can pick up and drop or do lackadaisically. I mean serious pursuits, equal in importance to the teaching, though they may not bring remuneration. I mean the work that takes time and intense commitment, as fun as it may also be.
Given a choice between (a) a lower salary and more time to myself, and (b) a higher salary and less time to myself, I would choose the former. Moreover, I believe the former could benefit my students. Students need teachers who do interesting things. Even if the teacher doesn’t talk about it, students can sense it. Yes, there are teachers who live mainly for their teaching, and that is commendable. But many others need intellectual time and freedom. If the schools push such teachers out, we will be in bad shape.
Diana Senechal
P.S. Thanks for the series, Robert, and happy new year to all!
Robert,
I agree with your selection of Michelle Rhee as education Person of the year. I must first admit I am a fan of her approach of placing the needs of children above those of adults. Isn’t that what all schools should emphasize? I mean, really! I was mildly disappointed you failed to mention that component of her philosophy as reason for your selection.
Paul Hoss
Hi Paul. In case you joined late, the Person of the Year selections were not intended to be a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, or a validation. We asked about a dozen close observers of the ed scene to list who they thought were the five most influential people, then assigned a value to each person’s list — five for place, four for second, etc., then aggregated the results. So it’s not a”selection” but an attempt to enumerate a consensus.
I have to be honest with you and say I find Rhee’s “children above adults” line to be a bit argumentative and ultimately counterproductive. It seems a way of stifling honest discussion of ways and means. If you claim, as she does “I’m for the interests of children above adults” then you are either overtly or by inference dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as NOT putting the interests of children first. It’s sort of like claiming the divine right of kings, isn’t it? If you disagree with the crown, your dispute is with God himself.
I’m all for a sense of urgency and mission. But in the long run I think we best serve children by proceeding from the assumption that all stakeholders want what’s best for them. That’s our common ground. I act in the best interest of children. I disagree with lots of people in education. But it doesn’t follow that I think they therefore aren’t motivated by the best interest of children.
Nancy, I don’t disagree with your correction. And I hope Robert is right about the endgame and not tipping her hand. If Rhee wants to bargain in good faith, then a deal shouldn’t be hard. But if all of her tirades are just negotiating in the press, I’d be shocked.
But the Rhee model is differnt because it is such a threat to the rest of the country. Her backers could put up the money for $100,000 for that one small district, one time, but once the union is broken you’d have nothing but the old fashioned bait and switch, and with plenty of corporate interests wanting to replicate it. But Mike G., you know what my arguement is. So, I just want to loop back the Klein nomination. He may or may not have made improvements, but the cost was $7 billion? I need to look it up, but as I recall our state could have raise per student spending for poor students by 3000% with the new money he was provided. Klein ran a district during an economic boom that was unimaginable in much/most of America. He ran a school when violence and crime was at an all-time low. It remains to be seen whether his “reforms” are even sustainable in NYC. But Klein/Rhee and the other true believers say that the rest of the country should follow their examples even though we don’t have a fraction of the resources.
But Nancy’s and Robert’s point is well taken and if we see Rhee as an example of data-driven accountability-drive reformers, then we can at least learn this much from them. They came to education recently and they came with fresh eyes. They redefined education from the “feed the chickens” model where teachers are just supposed to teach and its on the students to learn. They redefined the issue from equality to equity. (Before, I was taught to never talk about equity because we in Oklahoma had quietly gotten a few hundred dollars of additional funding for urban schools and if that was widely known we could lose it.)
Redefining a problem is a worthy first step, but it is not solving the problem.
Robert, I thoroughly agree with your very thoughtful comment on the danger of common rhetorical strategies for claiming the moral high ground. It’s too easy–and generally very misleading–to turn discussions about school reform into morality plays.
Diana, your comment reminded me of program offered years ago by the Council for Basic Education. CBE offered teachers small NEH-funded grants to support intensive independent study on topics of their choosing. The program died for lack of funding. It was challenging to sustain support for any initiative that did not guarantee short-term gains in student achievement–and longer-term effects were, of course, very difficult to measure.
Robert,
“”When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
Does this sound familiar at all? And he was one of the “good” guys.
Paul, it doesn’t sound familiar to me. Who said it? When? I know history didn’t begin with my career but I can’t imagine someone saying that today. But I really wanted to comment on the stupid statement that one year of Klein’s new spending could increase Okla spending by 3000% not 300%. Actually, I was just checking on whether people were reading carefully.
It was Al Shanker. I remember the remark from Richard Kahlenberg’s bio of Shanker. I don’t recall the context.
I am always amused by the expectation that unions should do anything other than represent the interests of their members–that’s why unions were created. I usually need an adult beverage and a sympathetic audience before I tell my own shafted-by-my-union story (it’s pretty mind-boggling)–but I still believe that teacher unions serve a useful purpose.
People whose #1 public education improvement strategy is “take down the teacher unions” are operating under a kind of reverse silver-bullet fantasy. In right-to-work states where the teacher unions are weakest–say, Mississippi–have all the problems that people try to blame on the unions been solved? Have they figured out how to swiftly get rid of ineffective or immoral teachers? Have their achievement scores steadily risen? Do they have the right teacher in the right classroom? Are they using their available resources to best effect? Exactly.
And–Shanker truly was one of the good guys. He ran afoul of his own union most frequently when he was aiming at teacher professionalism (which necessitates accountability and asks teachers to be entrepreneurial, collaborative, innovative and self-motivated).
BTW, I love what Diana had to say about teachers as curious scholars and community intellectual resources. I also think Rachel is right–it’s likely that Rhee will get her incentive through and a purging of low performers will be followed by the exit of the most accomplished and creative teachers who will what hate what they have to do to make more money.
Well said, Nancy. I do worry about the assumptions incentivists make about teaching and learning. For example, I will always have a certain ambivalence about the mindset that holds the secret to unlocking teacher talent is incentive pay. It tacitly assumes that we’re capable of doing more and better work, if only you make it worth our while–a pretty bleak view of teachers, frankly. I’m all for increasing salaries to attract talent, and especially for taking on tougher assignments–but to assume merit pay will make a difference strikes me as a bit off. At the risk of sounding haughty, the type of teacher who will redouble his or her effort to make a few thousand extra bucks is probably not your ideal teacher to begin with.
Excellent points, Nancy and Robert. Nancy, I will have to quote you sometime on the “reverse silver-bullet fantasy.”
Supposedly the Shanker quote appeared in the Meridian Star (Mississippi) on August 13, 1985. I can’t find any context for it beyond that.
I can’t find the quote in Kahlenberg’s bio, but there’s a similar quote on p. 125, at the start of chapter 7 (he was speaking at Oberlin during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis): “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.”
A few thoughts here. First, a quote can easily be misinterpreted out of context. Second, there’s a big difference between not representing children and not caring about their education. He fought on many fronts to improve the schools. Third, it seems he was quite complex; I imagine most people would disagree with at least something he said or did over his career. Fourth, he was right. The union is there to represent the teachers. I see nothing wrong with that.
Take all that into account, and yes, it’s a controversial statement, but by no means does it show that Shanker or the union opposed the interests of the children, not even when he said the words.
Also, Claus, that is very interesting about the CBE/NEH grants. Too bad the funding ran out.
I think China should also introduce such “Education Person of The Year” awards system to encourage educators and educational institute think and act more critically about education situation and system in China.
As soon as I pushed “Post” I worried “what if it was a famous leader … the only unionist brazen enough to say something like that would be …” But I make plenty of goofs in real life so why not admit them in the blogosphere? I figured that the quote dated back to the time when Woody Allen would write about “Al Shanker got the Bomb and …”
This reminds me of the generational divide in this debate. The NYC Teachers Strike, to me, is the black and white footage on TV as desegregation down here was getting violent. (when I a grad student in the NYC area in the 70s, it was still too raw and you could not discuss it in polite society) And the message to me was that we should never cultivate racial divisions for political advantage.
As Neil Howe just reminded us in the Washington Post, the generation that came of public school age during the 70s did not have the same joyous experience in schools and colleges as Baby Boomers did. Remember when baby boomers were told the purpose of school was so we could have meaningful lives after technology reduced the workweek down to just a few hours a week?
Educators ought to be able to have conversations across generations. I must say frankly that many of the ideas of “reformers” sound like desecration of the liberal arts principles that are holy to me. I don’t know if they understand why. (The distinctions made by my teachers between the non-communist left and the anti-communist left were still so important to them, but just intellectual history to me.)
I don’t have to take the bait and over-react, but I must say honestly that what I hear and feel from Rhee and many others is that they are calling us racists. Maybe the younger teachers don’t fully understand why a baby boomer would hear them that way. But I believe they are playing the race card for political advantage. (and I do believe that Rhee believes the worst of her opponents)
Similarly, as I’ve written I think they are being coopted by the unchecked corporate, market forces that gave them such opportunities but without realizing the harm they did to most Americans. But if they don’t know the history of the 70s, its because we haven’t taught them.
Worst, why did the kids born in the early 60s have such divided and uneven and often cheapened experiences? I believe its because the baby boomers have taken a “do what I say not what I do approach.” We had been taught the values of delayed gratification in our two-parent families. But when the Energy Crisis hit, we didn’t tighten our belts, reinvent the car, and invest in education for the 21st century. We went with the quick fix of easy credit.
So now, as the financial engineering that produced the economic bust is discredited, we are facing an educational bubble in jacked up test scores produced by the same tools that gave us the recession. On Wall Street, people who didn’t even remember the 1987 bust, programmed computers without considering the possiblity of a downturn. “Reformers” are pushing theories that are so new that they don’t even factor in the downside of their educational approaches.
Lastly, there is no reason to fight someone who you aren’t afraid of, so I should be more clear of why I’m afraid of Rhee. I read and hear of teachers saying, “I do my job. I trust my principal” so the two-tiered contract would be good for me. But what about other teachers who do their jobs but have abusive principles? It can’t just be about “me.”
If the younger generation doesn’t understand why so many the baby boomers are afraid of Rhee, then we need more conversation – not guilt-tripping.
I don’t mind making typos or other mistakes, but I don’t want to be guilt-tripping a new generation of reformers when they may not even understand why I feel like they’ve been guilt-tripping us.
It’s as much of a mistake to believe that the interests of children and teachers are always in opposition, as to believe that they are always aligned.
And why is there so often an assumption that administrators have the best interests of children at heart, while teachers don’t?
In our district I see too many issues turn into shoving matches between employee groups, but no one group consistently puts children first.
And in the end, it’s up to the voters to make sure that the school board and the superintendent keep the focus on kids — when that accountability becomes ineffective, its really hard to stop the organization focusing on the needs of adults rather than students.
John,
Some excellent points.
Seemingly there will be action on Rhee’s Red/Green proposal sometime in the (very) near future. Precisely when the plan goes to a vote remains to be seen. News at eleven.
There’s a good piece by Colbert I. King in this morning’s WaPo if anyone hasn’t read it yet regarding Rhee’s celebrity. He does not sound like a fan of the Chancellor’s.