[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpYqVenaBX4]
In case you are wondering why you do not know who this woman is, you are not alone. Hardly anybody outside of Washington D.C. knows who Michelle Rhee is. In short, the answer is: She was appointed in the summer of 2007 as the new Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public School system in our nation’s capital consisting of 144 schools. When D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty made this announcement, it stunned the city, Michelle Rhee had no experience at running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranked last among eleven urban school districts. Just prior to her appointment, she had been running a nonprofit organization called the ‘New Teacher Project’ which helps schools recruit good teachers. Research for several decades has identified ineffective teaching as the biggest problem with U.S. public schools. Picking Ms. Rhee was a bold move, she hailed from Ohio and is Korean American in a majority African-American city with high drop out rates among its students. For example, Anacostia High School has a 24 percent graduation rate and only 21 percent of its students read at grade level. She was on the face of it, the worst possible pick for this job.
But she went to work with an unusual high volume of energy and a huge bag of ideas how to turn things around in the D.C. school district. In the slightly more than one and a half year since she took over, she has made more changes than most reform-minded school leaders make in five years. So far, she has shut down 21 schools – a total of 15 percent of city schools – and has fired more than 100 workers from the districts bloated 900 person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed over 270 teachers and last spring, she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood. She has vowed to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is trying to achieve this through a relentless focus on finding – and rewarding – strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in classrooms. Rhee is convinced that the answer to the United States’ education catastrophe is talent in the form of outstanding teachers and principals. Needless to say, Ms. Rhee and the teachers union are ideological opposites and she is fully aware of it. Her ferocity has alienated many people and not just the Union leaders and membership. Even members of the Washington D.C. city council find her difficult to deal with. While she is aware of this sort of criticism, she stays the course she has charted to achieve her objectives.
We here at Common Sense University find this not only courageous on her part but are encouraged that it is taking place in the first place and we therefore salute Michelle Rhee. For all of you currently pursuing careers in education, we urge you to read up and find out more about this goal-oriented woman who is set on a course to reverse long-standing woes in America’s education sector. We can hardly afford to fall further behind other industrial nations when it comes to high educational standards and results and we firmly believe that it will take many more Michelle Rhee’s to get there from where we are now.