Michelle Rhee
Encyclopedia
Michelle A. Rhee is a public figure involved in the American education system. She was chancellor of the Washington, D.C.
public schools
from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst
, a non-profit, tax-exempt political advocacy organization which works on education reform issues such as ending teacher tenure
.
She began her career by teaching for three years in an inner city
school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project
, which in ten years recruited and trained more than 23,000 new teachers to work in urban schools.
, the second of three children of South Korea
n immigrants Shang Rhee, a physician, and Inza Rhee, a clothing store owner. She was raised in the Toledo, Ohio
area and educated in the public schools, through the sixth grade. Her parents then sent her to South Korea to attend school for one year. Upon her return, they enrolled her in a private school because they felt the public school was lacking.
Growing up, Rhee's father encouraged her to do community service. During her teenage years, she worked with children and spent a summer working on a Native American reservation.
She graduated from the private Maumee Valley Country Day School
in 1988, and went on to Cornell University
where she received a B.A.
in government
in 1992. She later earned a master's degree in public policy
from Harvard University
's John F. Kennedy School of Government
.
special that she saw when she was a senior in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America
, went through their brief training period in how to teach, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. She was assigned to one of the lowest-performing schools, in a neighborhood that reminded her parents of a war zone. She had difficulty controlling her classroom the first year. She has said the stress gave her hives, and that she once put small pieces of masking tape on the children's mouths so they would be quiet on the way to the lunchroom. Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, "I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town", and took more courses in education and received her teachers' certification
. Rhee first year test scores showed a precipitous drop in her class: Average math percentile dropped from 64% to 17%. Average reading percentile dropped from 37% to 21%.
She told The New York Times that the students she taught her second and third years had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile—but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile. Earlier she had said on her resume that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile. In 2010, a retired math teacher unearthed test score data on Rhee's Baltimore school which indicated that her students' scores went up during the 2nd and 3rd years, but that the percentile gains were less than half what Rhee claimed: In Math her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually. In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually. Rhee claimed that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones she claimed on her resume were because her principal at the time had informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.
quickly offered Rhee the job of chancellor; she accepted after being promised mayoral backing for whatever changes she wanted to make. Critics noted that Rhee had no experience running a school system, and had not even been a principal. She had been highly recommended to Fenty, however, by the chancellor of the New York public schools.
Rhee inherited a troubled system; there had been six school chiefs in the previous 10 years, students historically had below-average scores on standardized tests, and according to Rhee, only 8% of eighth graders were at grade level in mathematics. The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the US.
Upon taking office, Rhee immediately began to make a series of radical changes that relied on top-down accountability and results from standardized tests. She said there was no time to waste because children were being robbed of their futures. In her first year on the job, Rhee unapologetically closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals and cut approximately 121 office jobs. Stated reasons for the closings were under-enrollment and excess square footage. Following Rhee's announcement of some of the changes, D.C. Council members asked for more information about how the decisions had been made.
In February 2008, Rhee also announced a plan to add early-childhood programs, gifted and talented programs, art and music classes, and special education services to District schools.
In 2008, she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained. Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment.
In 2010, Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20% pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for "strong student achievement," in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice. Of the dismissed teachers, 76 were dismissed in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act
because they lacked proper teaching certification. 26 other teachers were dismissed because their students had continually received low scores on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System. Teachers were observed by administrators and outside professionals for five 30-minute sessions during the year, and the teachers' performance was rated during those sessions. Teachers who received fewer than 175 out of 400 points were deemed ineffective and were dismissed. Teachers who received between 175 and 249 points were deemed minimally effective and given a one-year warning to improve their performance.
Rhee's actions have earned her applause from school reformers, as well as the scorn of teacher unions and community activists. Her supporters claim that under Rhee's chancellorship, student achievement in the D.C. Public Schools greatly improved. Since 2007, secondary schools have improved their standardized test pass rates by 14% in reading and 17% in math, while elementary school pass rates have improved 6% in reading and 15% in math. System-wide high school graduation rates also improved by 3%, up to 72% in 2009. By 2010, D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reading pass rates had increased by 14 percentage points, and math pass rates had increased by 17 percentage points. Enrollment decreased by one percent, a slower decline than prior years. However, significant achievement gaps remained between students in high-performing and low-performing school districts, and between white and African American students. Education expert Diane Ravitch
questioned the legitimacy of Rhee's results, alleging that "cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum" were the true outcomes of Rhee's tenure in D.C. schools.
Some parents and community leaders said that Rhee's speed left them without input on the changes. The District Council also criticized Rhee for being unresponsive to Council members' requests for information about school operations. From 2008 to 2010, Rhee's approval ratings decreased from 59% to 43%. 28% of African Americans supported Rhee in 2010, down from 50% in 2008.
Rhee fired several administrators and school principals, including Marta Guzman, the principal of the high-performing Oyster-Adams Bilingual Elementary School, which Rhee's own children attended. Some parents alleged that the firing process was neither transparent nor fair. According to the Washington Post, "the departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wondered why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories. The move also heightened ethnic and class tensions within the school's diverse community. Eduardo Barada, co-chairman of the Oyster-Adams Community Council, the school's PTA, said Guzman was toppled by a cadre of dissatisfied and largely affluent Anglo parents with the ear of a woman who was both a fellow parent and the chancellor." Rhee also fired a principal she had hired seven weeks before in Shepherd Elementary—another high-performing school in the upper Northwest neighborhood.
Detractors also complained about Rhee's closing of several D.C. schools without holding public hearings, not reporting complete budget figures at recent D.C. council hearings, excluding parents from involvement (GAO report), hiring former supporters to conduct an evaluation of her performance in a show of conflict of interest, opposing student protests of her security policies, managing using authoritarian principles, and spending considerable time before the national media (Time, PBS, lecture circuit) instead of visiting schools.
Rhee and supporters responded that personnel decisions are based on the judgment of the chancellor and that closures and restructuring are necessary to effect reforms.
Referring to the 266 teachers she laid off, Rhee told a national business magazine: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" At the time, she did not provide evidence of her accusations nor comment when asked why these accused teachers were allowed to be in the district prior to the dismissals. Union leadership asked Rhee to apologize to the 266 teachers for making remarks that were without basis in facts. Rhee refused to apologize, but clarified that only one teacher was dismissed due to sexual abuse allegations.
The Washington D.C. 2010 Mayoral Election
was interpreted by political experts as a referendum on Rhee's unpopular tenure as school chancellor. Following the defeat of incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty in the 2010 Democratic primary election, Rhee called the election results "devastating for the schoolchildren of Washington, D.C." Rhee encouraged education reformers to learn from the election and "be more aggressive and more adamant." Fenty announced on October 13, 2010 that Rhee had resigned, Rhee soon launched a personal website, a Twitter
account, and a Facebook
page.
discovered that at one school in particular, Noyes Elementary, an anomalous number of erasures on student standardized tests were detected by CTB/McGraw-Hill during Rhee's tenure and that Rhee's office was informed of this incident. Erasures consistently changed an incorrect answer to a correct answer. Statisticians contacted by USA Today claimed that "the odds are better for winning the Powerball
grand prize than having that many erasures by chance." The radical testing gains made by the school as well as the anomalous erasures raised suspicions that the answer sheets were tampered with after being collected from students.
The gains in test scores made at Noyes Elementary School earned the school recognition as a Blue Ribbon School. Rhee promoted the school as a model for her education reform movement. The article noted that Noyes was only one of 96 schools in D.C. flagged by third parties for abnormally high wrong-to-right changes in answers since 2008. At Phoebe Hearst Elementary, Winston Education Campus, and Aiton Elementary, 85% or more of classrooms were identified as having high erasure rates in 2008. At four other schools, the percentage of classrooms in that category ranged from 17% to 58%. The total number of schools in D.C. with abnormal rates of wrong-to-right erasures is more than half of all schools. The article claimed that among the 96 schools that were flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out TEAM awards "to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff." Noyes was one of several schools Rhee awarded after having been flagged for abnormally high erasures.
In return for increased test scores in D.C. schools, Rhee gave performance awards and increased compensation to the teachers and administrators. According to the article, "Rhee bestowed more than $1.5 million in bonuses on principals, teachers and support staff on the basis of big jumps in 2007 and 2008 test scores."
The USA Today report commented that experts said such aberrations should trigger investigations. No investigations occurred in D.C. in 2008. In 2009 a limited investigation was conducted on behalf of OSSE that examined whether protocols were adhered to at eight schools, but never examined whether administrators or teachers may have tampered with the test results. Mary Lord, a state board member, was critical of the decision not to investigate the 2008 scores. "If you are going to add all this weight" to testing, "hanging the principals' reputations ... and the teachers' pay on it, you have to make sure it is totally accurate," Lord says. Current acting chancellor, Kaya Henderson, said that all suspicious scores had been investigated. Henderson was Rhee's deputy chancellor.
Rhee defended herself on the Tavis Smiley
Show. She claimed an unnamed "third party" investigated any suspicious scores. Rhee did not explain the high rate of erasures on tests, but called the USA Today article an attack on school reform. She said, "It isn’t surprising that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved .... unless someone cheated." Since then she told Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews that her previous remarks were "stupid" and she is glad her successor, Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson, ordered a new investigation.
is a main objective Rhee and the group. Within weeks of its founding, Rhee and Students First had advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey on abolishing teacher tenure and other issues related to public education reform. In 2010-2011, Rhee served on the transition team of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott.
She has also been a visible figure in the national media, appearing on television shows, radio programs, and the documentary film Waiting for Superman
. In May 2011, Rhee spoke in favor of school choice alongside the Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker
at an event hosted by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice education organization founded and funded by Betsy DeVos
.
In October 2011, Rhee's group StudentsFirst launched an initiative to defend Michigan Republican Paul Scott against a recall effort. Rhee's organization has dedicated nearly $70,000 to defend state representative Scott. Scott's opponent in the upcoming race, Bobbie Walton, said StudentsFirst's involvement in the local election was "evidence of a national push to discredit teachers unions."
Laura Bush
at President
George W. Bush
's 2008 State of the Union
address.
In March 2010, Rhee became engaged to Kevin Johnson
, mayor of Sacramento, California
and former NBA
player. The two married in September 2011 in a small ceremony at Blackberry Farm near Knoxville.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
public schools
District of Columbia Public Schools
District of Columbia Public Schools is the traditional public school system of Washington, D.C. in the United States.- Composition and enrollment :...
from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst
StudentsFirst
- External links :* , Big Rapids Daily Press, May 23, 2011....
, a non-profit, tax-exempt political advocacy organization which works on education reform issues such as ending teacher tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
.
She began her career by teaching for three years in an inner city
Inner city
The inner city is the central area of a major city or metropolis. In the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, the term is often applied to the lower-income residential districts in the city centre and nearby areas...
school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project
The New Teacher Project
The New Teacher Project works to ensure that poor and minority students get equal access to effective teachers. It helps urban school districts and states recruit and train new teachers, staff challenged schools, design evaluation systems, and retain teachers who have demonstrated the ability to...
, which in ten years recruited and trained more than 23,000 new teachers to work in urban schools.
Early life and education
Rhee was born in Ann Arbor, MichiganAnn Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
, the second of three children of South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
n immigrants Shang Rhee, a physician, and Inza Rhee, a clothing store owner. She was raised in the Toledo, Ohio
Toledo, Ohio
Toledo is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Lucas County. Toledo is in northwest Ohio, on the western end of Lake Erie, and borders the State of Michigan...
area and educated in the public schools, through the sixth grade. Her parents then sent her to South Korea to attend school for one year. Upon her return, they enrolled her in a private school because they felt the public school was lacking.
Growing up, Rhee's father encouraged her to do community service. During her teenage years, she worked with children and spent a summer working on a Native American reservation.
She graduated from the private Maumee Valley Country Day School
Maumee Valley Country Day School
Maumee Valley Country Day School is an independent and non-religious private school located in Toledo, Ohio. The school was founded in 1842 as an all-girls finishing school in Western New York and was moved to Toledo in 1884, where it became The Smead School for Girls...
in 1988, and went on to Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
where she received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
in 1992. She later earned a master's degree in public policy
Master of Public Policy
The Master of Public Policy , one of several public policy degrees, is a master's level professional degree that provides training in policy analysis and program evaluation at public policy schools. The MPP program places a focus on the systematic analysis of issues related to public policy and the...
from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
's John F. Kennedy School of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
.
Teaching
Inspired by a PBSPublic Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
special that she saw when she was a senior in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America
Teach For America
Teach For America is an American non-profit organization that aims to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting the nation's most promising future leaders to teach for two or more years in low-income communities throughout the United States...
, went through their brief training period in how to teach, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. She was assigned to one of the lowest-performing schools, in a neighborhood that reminded her parents of a war zone. She had difficulty controlling her classroom the first year. She has said the stress gave her hives, and that she once put small pieces of masking tape on the children's mouths so they would be quiet on the way to the lunchroom. Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, "I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town", and took more courses in education and received her teachers' certification
Certified teacher
A certified teacher is a teacher who has earned credentials from an authoritative source, such as the government, a higher education institution or a private source. These certifications allow teachers to teach in schools which require authorization in general, as well as allowing educators to...
. Rhee first year test scores showed a precipitous drop in her class: Average math percentile dropped from 64% to 17%. Average reading percentile dropped from 37% to 21%.
She told The New York Times that the students she taught her second and third years had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile—but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile. Earlier she had said on her resume that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile. In 2010, a retired math teacher unearthed test score data on Rhee's Baltimore school which indicated that her students' scores went up during the 2nd and 3rd years, but that the percentile gains were less than half what Rhee claimed: In Math her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually. In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually. Rhee claimed that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones she claimed on her resume were because her principal at the time had informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.
New Teacher Project
In 1997, Rhee founded and began serving as the CEO of The New Teacher Project, a non-profit which within ten years of its founding, had trained and supplied urban school districts with 23,000 mid-career professionals wanting to become classroom teachers. The Project has mainly served New York, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia, Beginning in 2000, the Project began redesigning the D.C. school's recruitment and hiring processes.Chancellor of D.C. public schools
In 2007 the D.C. board of education was stripped of its decision-making powers and turned into an advisory body, and the new office of chancellor was created—so that changes in the public school system could be made without waiting for the approval of an often argumentative board. Newly-elected D.C. Mayor Adrian FentyAdrian Fenty
Adrian Malik Fenty was the sixth, and at age 36, the youngest, mayor of the District of Columbia. He served one term—from 2007 to 2011—losing his bid for reelection at the primary level to Democrat Vincent C. Gray...
quickly offered Rhee the job of chancellor; she accepted after being promised mayoral backing for whatever changes she wanted to make. Critics noted that Rhee had no experience running a school system, and had not even been a principal. She had been highly recommended to Fenty, however, by the chancellor of the New York public schools.
Rhee inherited a troubled system; there had been six school chiefs in the previous 10 years, students historically had below-average scores on standardized tests, and according to Rhee, only 8% of eighth graders were at grade level in mathematics. The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the US.
Upon taking office, Rhee immediately began to make a series of radical changes that relied on top-down accountability and results from standardized tests. She said there was no time to waste because children were being robbed of their futures. In her first year on the job, Rhee unapologetically closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals and cut approximately 121 office jobs. Stated reasons for the closings were under-enrollment and excess square footage. Following Rhee's announcement of some of the changes, D.C. Council members asked for more information about how the decisions had been made.
In February 2008, Rhee also announced a plan to add early-childhood programs, gifted and talented programs, art and music classes, and special education services to District schools.
In 2008, she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained. Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment.
In 2010, Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20% pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for "strong student achievement," in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice. Of the dismissed teachers, 76 were dismissed in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act
No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is a United States Act of Congress concerning the education of children in public schools.NCLB was originally proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office...
because they lacked proper teaching certification. 26 other teachers were dismissed because their students had continually received low scores on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System. Teachers were observed by administrators and outside professionals for five 30-minute sessions during the year, and the teachers' performance was rated during those sessions. Teachers who received fewer than 175 out of 400 points were deemed ineffective and were dismissed. Teachers who received between 175 and 249 points were deemed minimally effective and given a one-year warning to improve their performance.
Support and criticism
Michelle Rhee remains a highly controversial figure in the field of education due to her aggressive style of reform and what some believe to be anti-union sentiments. Another common criticism disputes her claim that she dramatically increased students' average scores from the 13th percentile to the 90th, a claim that could not be verified during her confirmation process for D.C. Schools Chancellor as the relevant Baltimore records could not be located.Rhee's actions have earned her applause from school reformers, as well as the scorn of teacher unions and community activists. Her supporters claim that under Rhee's chancellorship, student achievement in the D.C. Public Schools greatly improved. Since 2007, secondary schools have improved their standardized test pass rates by 14% in reading and 17% in math, while elementary school pass rates have improved 6% in reading and 15% in math. System-wide high school graduation rates also improved by 3%, up to 72% in 2009. By 2010, D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reading pass rates had increased by 14 percentage points, and math pass rates had increased by 17 percentage points. Enrollment decreased by one percent, a slower decline than prior years. However, significant achievement gaps remained between students in high-performing and low-performing school districts, and between white and African American students. Education expert Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch
Diane Silvers Ravitch is an historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S...
questioned the legitimacy of Rhee's results, alleging that "cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum" were the true outcomes of Rhee's tenure in D.C. schools.
Some parents and community leaders said that Rhee's speed left them without input on the changes. The District Council also criticized Rhee for being unresponsive to Council members' requests for information about school operations. From 2008 to 2010, Rhee's approval ratings decreased from 59% to 43%. 28% of African Americans supported Rhee in 2010, down from 50% in 2008.
Rhee fired several administrators and school principals, including Marta Guzman, the principal of the high-performing Oyster-Adams Bilingual Elementary School, which Rhee's own children attended. Some parents alleged that the firing process was neither transparent nor fair. According to the Washington Post, "the departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wondered why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories. The move also heightened ethnic and class tensions within the school's diverse community. Eduardo Barada, co-chairman of the Oyster-Adams Community Council, the school's PTA, said Guzman was toppled by a cadre of dissatisfied and largely affluent Anglo parents with the ear of a woman who was both a fellow parent and the chancellor." Rhee also fired a principal she had hired seven weeks before in Shepherd Elementary—another high-performing school in the upper Northwest neighborhood.
Detractors also complained about Rhee's closing of several D.C. schools without holding public hearings, not reporting complete budget figures at recent D.C. council hearings, excluding parents from involvement (GAO report), hiring former supporters to conduct an evaluation of her performance in a show of conflict of interest, opposing student protests of her security policies, managing using authoritarian principles, and spending considerable time before the national media (Time, PBS, lecture circuit) instead of visiting schools.
Rhee and supporters responded that personnel decisions are based on the judgment of the chancellor and that closures and restructuring are necessary to effect reforms.
Referring to the 266 teachers she laid off, Rhee told a national business magazine: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" At the time, she did not provide evidence of her accusations nor comment when asked why these accused teachers were allowed to be in the district prior to the dismissals. Union leadership asked Rhee to apologize to the 266 teachers for making remarks that were without basis in facts. Rhee refused to apologize, but clarified that only one teacher was dismissed due to sexual abuse allegations.
The Washington D.C. 2010 Mayoral Election
Washington, D.C. mayoral election, 2010
The Washington, D.C. mayoral election of 2010 took place on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. The primary elections occurred on September 14, 2010. Vincent Gray won the general election by a wide margin, although many voters wrote in incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty, whom Gray defeated in the...
was interpreted by political experts as a referendum on Rhee's unpopular tenure as school chancellor. Following the defeat of incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty in the 2010 Democratic primary election, Rhee called the election results "devastating for the schoolchildren of Washington, D.C." Rhee encouraged education reformers to learn from the election and "be more aggressive and more adamant." Fenty announced on October 13, 2010 that Rhee had resigned, Rhee soon launched a personal website, a Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
account, and a Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
page.
Testing scandal
Investigations have questioned some of Rhee's accomplishments in increasing test scores in D.C. schools. In 2008 the Office of the State Superintendent of Education discovered that 103 schools in DC were flagged for suspiciously high wrong-to-right answer changes. The number of schools in DC with abnormal rates of wrong-to-right erasures is more than half of all schools and includes eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out TEAM awards "to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff." An investigation by USA TodayUSA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
discovered that at one school in particular, Noyes Elementary, an anomalous number of erasures on student standardized tests were detected by CTB/McGraw-Hill during Rhee's tenure and that Rhee's office was informed of this incident. Erasures consistently changed an incorrect answer to a correct answer. Statisticians contacted by USA Today claimed that "the odds are better for winning the Powerball
Powerball
Powerball is an American lottery game sold in 44 jurisdictions as a shared jackpot game. It is coordinated by the Multi-State Lottery Association , a non-profit organization formed by an agreement with lotteries. Powerball is a game whose advertised jackpot starts at $20 million and can roll into...
grand prize than having that many erasures by chance." The radical testing gains made by the school as well as the anomalous erasures raised suspicions that the answer sheets were tampered with after being collected from students.
The gains in test scores made at Noyes Elementary School earned the school recognition as a Blue Ribbon School. Rhee promoted the school as a model for her education reform movement. The article noted that Noyes was only one of 96 schools in D.C. flagged by third parties for abnormally high wrong-to-right changes in answers since 2008. At Phoebe Hearst Elementary, Winston Education Campus, and Aiton Elementary, 85% or more of classrooms were identified as having high erasure rates in 2008. At four other schools, the percentage of classrooms in that category ranged from 17% to 58%. The total number of schools in D.C. with abnormal rates of wrong-to-right erasures is more than half of all schools. The article claimed that among the 96 schools that were flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out TEAM awards "to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff." Noyes was one of several schools Rhee awarded after having been flagged for abnormally high erasures.
In return for increased test scores in D.C. schools, Rhee gave performance awards and increased compensation to the teachers and administrators. According to the article, "Rhee bestowed more than $1.5 million in bonuses on principals, teachers and support staff on the basis of big jumps in 2007 and 2008 test scores."
The USA Today report commented that experts said such aberrations should trigger investigations. No investigations occurred in D.C. in 2008. In 2009 a limited investigation was conducted on behalf of OSSE that examined whether protocols were adhered to at eight schools, but never examined whether administrators or teachers may have tampered with the test results. Mary Lord, a state board member, was critical of the decision not to investigate the 2008 scores. "If you are going to add all this weight" to testing, "hanging the principals' reputations ... and the teachers' pay on it, you have to make sure it is totally accurate," Lord says. Current acting chancellor, Kaya Henderson, said that all suspicious scores had been investigated. Henderson was Rhee's deputy chancellor.
Rhee defended herself on the Tavis Smiley
Tavis Smiley
Tavis Smiley is a talk show host, author, liberal political commentator, entrepreneur, advocate and philanthropist. Smiley was born in Gulfport, Mississippi and grew up in Kokomo, Indiana. After attending Indiana University, he worked during the late 1980s as an aide to Tom Bradley, the mayor of...
Show. She claimed an unnamed "third party" investigated any suspicious scores. Rhee did not explain the high rate of erasures on tests, but called the USA Today article an attack on school reform. She said, "It isn’t surprising that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved .... unless someone cheated." Since then she told Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews that her previous remarks were "stupid" and she is glad her successor, Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson, ordered a new investigation.
School choice and school vouchers
In 2008, Rhee's office released a statement that said, "While Chancellor Rhee hasn’t taken a formal position on vouchers, she disagrees with the notion that vouchers are the remedy for repairing the city’s school system." In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on January 11, 2011, Rhee endorsed vouchers when she supported, "giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools," adding that "All children deserve the chance to get a great education; no family should be forced to send kids to a school they know is failing." In a February 2011 speech before Georgia's legislature, she indicated she had supported the DC voucher program as a supplement to the charter school alternative. She said that if a parent did not win the lotto to get their child into a charter school, then "who I am to deny them a $7,500 voucher to send their child to a great Catholic school."After D.C. schools
On December 6, 2010, Ms. Rhee went on the Oprah Winfrey show to announce that she had declined all job offers resulting from her high profile work as D.C. Chancellor and would be focusing on a new advocacy organization she had formed called StudentsFirst. She told Winfrey's audience she wanted to have one million members and raise one billion dollars in order to catalyze education reform in the United States. According to The New York Times abolishing teacher tenureTenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
is a main objective Rhee and the group. Within weeks of its founding, Rhee and Students First had advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey on abolishing teacher tenure and other issues related to public education reform. In 2010-2011, Rhee served on the transition team of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott.
She has also been a visible figure in the national media, appearing on television shows, radio programs, and the documentary film Waiting for Superman
Waiting for Superman
Waiting for "Superman" is a 2010 documentary film from director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lesley Chilcott. The film analyzes the failures of American public education by following several students through the educational system, hoping to be selected in a lottery for acceptance into charter...
. In May 2011, Rhee spoke in favor of school choice alongside the Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker
Scott Walker (politician)
Scott Kevin Walker is an American Republican politician who began serving as the 45th Governor of Wisconsin on January 3, 2011, after defeating Democratic candidate Tom Barrett, 52 percent to 47 percent in the November 2010 general election...
at an event hosted by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice education organization founded and funded by Betsy DeVos
Betsy DeVos
Elisabeth "Betsy" DeVos is an American politician and school choice activist from the state of Michigan. She is a former chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party.-Family background and education:...
.
In October 2011, Rhee's group StudentsFirst launched an initiative to defend Michigan Republican Paul Scott against a recall effort. Rhee's organization has dedicated nearly $70,000 to defend state representative Scott. Scott's opponent in the upcoming race, Bobbie Walton, said StudentsFirst's involvement in the local election was "evidence of a national push to discredit teachers unions."
Awards and recognition
Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the National Center for Alternative Certification. She was a special guest of First LadyFirst Lady
First Lady or First Gentlemanis the unofficial title used in some countries for the spouse of an elected head of state.It is not normally used to refer to the spouse or partner of a prime minister; the husband or wife of the British Prime Minister is usually informally referred to as prime...
Laura Bush
Laura Bush
Laura Lane Welch Bush is the wife of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. She was the First Lady of the United States from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009. She has held a love of books and reading since childhood and her life and education have reflected that interest...
at President
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
's 2008 State of the Union
State Of The Union
"State Of The Union" is the debut single from British singer-songwriter David Ford. It had previously been featured as a demo on his official website, before appearing as a track on a CD entitled "Apology Demos EP," only on sale at live shows....
address.
Personal life
While Rhee was teaching, she met Kevin Huffman, who was also a member of Teach for America and later became head of public affairs of the organization. The couple married two years after they met and had two daughters before being divorced in 2007. The children attended the Oyster-Adams public elementary school, considered one of the best in Washington D.C. while Rhee was chancellor.In March 2010, Rhee became engaged to Kevin Johnson
Kevin Johnson
Kevin Maurice Johnson is the current mayor of Sacramento, California. He is Sacramento's first African American mayor. Prior to entering politics, Johnson was a basketball player in the NBA, playing point guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Phoenix Suns...
, mayor of Sacramento, California
Sacramento, California
Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...
and former NBA
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association is the pre-eminent men's professional basketball league in North America. It consists of thirty franchised member clubs, of which twenty-nine are located in the United States and one in Canada...
player. The two married in September 2011 in a small ceremony at Blackberry Farm near Knoxville.
See also
- PrivatizationPrivatizationPrivatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency or public service from the public sector to the private sector or to private non-profit organizations...
- No Child Left Behind ActNo Child Left Behind ActThe No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is a United States Act of Congress concerning the education of children in public schools.NCLB was originally proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office...
- Standardized testStandardized testA standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a...
- Teaching to the testTeaching to the testTeaching to the test is an educational practice where the curriculum is centered primarily around an end assessment or standardized test. The practice is designed to give students a set range of knowledge or skills that will allow them to enhance their performance on tests...
- Wendy KoppWendy KoppWendy Sue Kopp is the CEO and Founder of Teach For America , the national teaching corps and the CEO of Teach For All.-Background:...
External links
- Students First - Official website of Michelle Rhee's nonprofit education reform group
- The New Teacher Project
- Bio on National Council on Teacher Quality
- EAGTV video of speech given by Rhee, (7:53) on May 20, 2011
- "Michelle Rhee: 'You Can Change People's Hope'" National Public Radio, 2007-09-04
- PBS NewsHour Investigative Report, Part 1: D.C. Schools Chief Rhee Faces High Expectations for System Reform
- PBS NewsHour Investigative Report, Part 2: In Battle to Revamp D.C. Schools, Education Leader Faces Resistance
- PBS NewsHour Investigative Report, Part 3: In Washington, D.C., Schools Chief Faces Tough Choices
- C-SPAN Q&A: Brian Lamb interviews Michelle Rhee
- Interview with Michelle Rhee on PMAKid.com