A visit with education’s fearless reformer
“Power is the ability to move the seemingly immovable.” That’s what Washington, D.C. public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee said when I stopped by her office yesterday as I headed home from the Fortune 500 Forum. Ever since we launched the Fortune Most Powerful Women list a decade ago, I’ve asked scores – perhaps hundreds – of leaders, male and female, how they define power. It’s fascinating to hear the responses. Rhee’s definition reflects her incredibly difficult task: overhauling what many consider to be the worst major public-school district in America.
Rhee happens to be on the cover of this week’s Time: There she stands sternly in a classroom with a broom in hand. The cover line: “How to Fix America’s Schools.” I’ve been eager to meet Rhee for a while, since a lot of people who have smart ideas about education – Melinda Gates, Allen & Co. banker Nancy Peretsman, Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings – have told me that she’s one of the smartest, bravest education reformers to come along in years. She’s wildly controversial, which makes her all the more interesting.
A 37-year-old Teach for America alum who ran a non-profit called the New Teacher Project in New York City, Rhee had never run a school or a district before D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed her to his top education post last year. Since then, she has closed schools, fired hundreds of underperforming teachers and principals, and fought to replace tenure with pay for performance.
Rhee has hit walls and earned the ire of unions, but that doesn’t discourage her. “You always have to lead from the front,” she told me yesterday when I asked her what is the best advice she’s gotten along the way. Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, gave her that advice last year, and he told her: “Don’t feel the need to bring everyone along with you. If you do that, you’re not going to get anywhere.”
Though a staunch Democrat, she’s worried about Obama’s yet-to-be-revealed choice for Secretary of Education. “The Democrats have fallen down in such a significant way,” she says, “and have not pushed the things that could help the least fortunate.” Who would be her pick for the top education post? She mentioned two people I’d never heard of: Kati Haycock, president of the D.C.-based Education Trust, and Michael Barber, a McKinsey consultant in London who has advised education policymakers including Klein. As for Klein, he’d be a terrific, if controversial, choice, she said. “If the criteria is, how well do you get along with the unions, then we’ve lost already.”
P.S. For more new ideas about education reform, read “Bill & Melinda Gates Go Back to School” in the current issue of Fortune . Click here to see Melinda Gates on video, talking at our recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit about the lessons she learned about trying to fix Amerca’s schools. Also, former IBM (IBM) chief Lou Gerstner shared his ideas in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Dave, I hope you’re wrong. Every once in a great while someone with the right idea and enough strength of character changes the world.
After six years of mayoral control and the Bloomberg/Klein administration’s misinformation to the public, there is sufficient data to prove that their reforms and mayoral control have proved ineffectual and have produced no significant improvement in student achievement.
The Bloomberg/Klein administration claims of a 12 percent increase in Reading and a 19 percent increase in Math scores on the New York State Assessments are inflated. These results include the scores obtained in 2002-2003 well before the implementation of Klein’s reforms. Without the 6 percent increase in Reading and the 15 percent in Math in 2002 – 2003, the figures read a dismal 6.4 percent rise in Reading and only 4.2 percent in Mathematics.
The only independent check on student achievement in New York City shows a completely different picture from that claimed by Klein. The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress administered by the US Department of Education, considered the gold standard in testing, show that student achievement in New York City has stagnated since 2003 with virtually no improvements for Black, Hispanic and low income students. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/dst2007/2008455.pdf
There is a lot to adminre about Michelle Rhee, but in the end she must ultimately fail and I would guess that even she knows that, which makes me wonder why she took the job (I understand it was with reluctance).
History is filled with stories of superhuman reformers like Jamie Escalante (”Stand and Deliver”) who made a difference and a lot of news for a little while. The problem is that these people don’t change the system, and the drones who profit from the system know that all they have to do is wait until these lone sparks die out.
The public schools are utterly and irredeemably corrupt. Their mission has been so twisted by the teachers’ unions and other interests that they no longer really even resemble places of learning. The public has gotten used to this, and being none-too-bright (perhaps as a result of being “educated” in the public schools) it keeps buying the lie that all we need to do is spend more money, much to the delight of the people within the system.
Michelle Rhee’s time will pass. When she goes, everything will quietly revert to normal, and the people who profit from the miserable status quo will continue profiting.
On the day that Washington DC decides to totally dismantle its public schools and replace them with a private, market-based competitive system, I will believe that things will eventually change for the unfortunate victims, namely the shortchanged kids of Washington DC.
Journalism teacher and newspaper adviser at Palo Alto High School
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Jay and Dave – the heroine you speak of is not Michelle Rhee. She is perceived as a despot in DC – for good reason. And true, despots have “changed the world” but not for the better.
Instead of reading just the national press, I suggest you follow recent stories on Rhee in the Washington Post and other local papers. You’ll get a much different picture. Even the Time piece is not very flattering. She comes off as arrogant and disdainful and lacking in basic social skills. I fear sincere people like you are imposing on Rhee your dreams for a miracle cure for DC and education in general.
I was hopeful at first, too. So were a lot of people in DC. She seemed so smart and sure of herself. Unfortunately solving such a big problem takes more than self-confidence and hero-worship, and counting on miracles.