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Changing the Rules

New D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is betting on a serious overhaul of the system. Can her tough-love approach turn around Washington’s troubled schools?

By Michelle R. Davis
Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

Every summer, leaders in the District of Columbia Public Schools scramble to fill empty principal slots before the school year begins. This summer was no exception, with nearly 15 percent of the district’s schools posting vacancies. But when the system’s new chancellor, Michelle Rhee (Baltimore ’92), arrived in the nation’s capital in June, she quickly realized the candidate pool didn’t meet her standards. One week on the job, 37-year-old Rhee put a freeze on hiring new school leaders. Instead, she opted to hire interim principals and mount an intensive national recruitment campaign that would culminate in the hiring of permanent school leaders in January and February. “I’m going to put an incredibly heavy emphasis on principals this year,” Rhee says. “I’m going to be spending a lot of my personal time this year interviewing candidates and making sure we get the best.”

Rhee has wasted no time taking action since new D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the schools in June and nominated her for the newly created position of chancellor. Since then, Rhee has been working nearly seven days a week; getting up at dawn; meeting with politicians, parents, and education activists; touring schools; and e-mailing until the wee hours of the morning.

But it will take much more to straighten out the troubled D.C. system of 146 schools and 50,000 students. Critics of the district have long condemned the low student achievement, decrepit buildings, and what they see as nonsensical procedures and irresponsible spending consumed in bureaucracy.

“Everything is a mess,” says Victor Reinoso, Washington’s deputy mayor for education. “There’s student achievement, the state of the facilities, staff retention—all of those issues. The support functions are in disarray, the IT system. Essentially anything you can imagine that is critical to making a system of this size function is dysfunctional.”

“The longer you work [in D.C.], the clearer some of the additional broken things come into view that you didn’t even know about,” says John Deasy, the superintendent of nearby Prince George’s public schools in Maryland, who knows Rhee through her work in his district. “There’s a real need for very strong leadership top to bottom and someone who knows how to make systems work and improve instruction simultaneously.”

Rhee, whose unconventional background includes only three years working directly in a school district but a decade working with multiple districts through The New Teacher Project, says her experiences have taught her that it’s often the adults holding students back. Despite an overwhelming list of needed improvements, Rhee has initially limited herself to a few areas of focus, namely improving district systems and structures, raising the level of parent and community engagement, and, first and foremost, increasing student achievement.

With a low-key but steely confidence, Rhee maintains that significant progress is possible. “I have spent my entire career in situations where people [told me], ‘It’s not going to be possible.’ I know what needs to be done here—it’s just not going to be easy,” she says. “Those are two different things.”

Setting A New Standard
On a typical evening in late July, Rhee sat in her office, with its distant view of the Washington Monument, and deftly juggled a disgruntled city council member, a regional superintendent’s resignation, a looming dinner meeting, a reporter’s queries, and a constantly vibrating BlackBerry. Those who have worked with her say the principal-hiring freeze is just one example of the decisiveness that has been a hallmark of her career.

That career has consisted mainly of building The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit seeking to change the way new teachers are brought into the profession. Under a decade of Rhee’s leadership, the organization grew from a handful of employees and one or two alternative-certification-program contracts with districts to a staff of 120 that has recruited more than 23,000 teachers for more than 200 school systems and effected critical district- and state-level policy changes.

In recent years, The New Teacher Project has expanded its scope in ways that many say show the mark of determined, courageous leadership. In 2005, it was set to release a report that skewered union teacher-transfer practices that made hiring and keeping good teachers difficult for hard-to-staff schools. Some at the organization wanted to squash the report, worrying it could amount to organizational suicide if angry teachers’ unions blocked the group from working in their districts. But Rhee stood firm.

“Michelle felt it was our moral responsibility to get that information out, even if it cut into business,” says Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust and chair of The New Teacher Project’s board. “Michelle wanted to do it because it was the right thing to do.”

Instead of losing business, The New Teacher Project gained credibility and continued to grow.

Rhee is setting a similarly intrepid vision in Washington, where she has already staked her reputation on high expectations for what D.C. students can and will achieve. The first Teach For America alumna to lead a major urban school system, she has built an energetic team to put her vision into action. That group includes several of her fellow alumni, like Kaya Henderson (N.Y.C. ’92), now Rhee’s deputy chancellor, and advisors Billy Kearney (Metro D.C. ’94), Richard Nyankori (Baltimore ’93), John Davis (Baltimore ’92), and Anthony deGuzman (N.Y.C. ’94).

There is little doubt that the district has a long way to go. Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported that only 38 percent of the city’s fourth graders met math proficiency levels, compared with 67 percent of low-income fourth graders nationwide. Student achievement was the lowest of 11 major school districts examined, including New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, and last year only 22 percent of the district’s public schools (including charters) met federal performance targets for adequate yearly progress.

One major barrier is D.C.’s entrenched central-office bureaucracy, widely known for its ineffectiveness and talent for subverting reform. It is a system where paychecks don’t go out on time, air-conditioning systems have stayed broken for years, basic supplies don’t reach students, and schools struggle to open each year with teachers in their classrooms. All at a cost of $13,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In one of her boldest moves yet, Rhee announced in late August her intention to begin a serious restructuring of the central administration that could entail downsizing its staff by several hundred employees. Rhee intends to present new legislation to the D.C. Council seeking the authority to suspend personnel laws so that she can terminate under-performing employees without having to reassign them to other positions within the system.

At press time, the Washington Post reported that the mayor planned to ask the D.C. Council to invest $17 million in Rhee’s plan, including $7 million for severance packages and $10 million for back pay owed to employees. The response of the council and unions could mean either a significant step forward or a disappointing setback in Rhee’s ability to remake the system into one that is efficient and responsive to the needs of the parents, students, and schools.

In her first weeks as chancellor, Rhee surveyed principals and found that most made between one and three trips to the central office every few weeks. “They told us they actually came down to the central office...to drop off paperwork because they are afraid if they send it, it will get lost. They feel they have to walk down personally,” she says. “That’s crazy, that’s ridiculous, and that’s a waste of time, because that means they’re not in the schools. Logistically, it’s sucking time away from principals engaging the students.”

It was not the chancellor’s first encounter with D.C.’s bureaucratic dysfunction. In fact, Rhee herself was so frustrated with the District’s operations earlier this year that she nearly pulled The New Teacher Project out of the city after five years of recruiting all of the District’s new teachers. Too many recruits left, often because their first paychecks arrived late or because district officials couldn’t tell them where or what they’d be teaching before the start of school.

“We’re not talking about, in a lot of cases, things that have not ever been done before,” Rhee says. “We can’t get people paid on time, but the bottom line is that there are companies and organizations that are far bigger than we are that manage to get their people paid every payroll. It’s not rocket science. These are basic practices.”

As part of the restructuring, Rhee intends to hire payroll experts to make recommendations or take over themselves, and she feels confident these systems can be improved. “I’m not trying to re-create the wheel or do something outside my area of experience. Let’s have the experts come in,” she says.

Rhee did receive an introduction to just how difficult routine operations can be when, in August, just weeks before school started, at least half of the District’s schools didn’t have their required textbooks. Some were delivered to the wrong schools, others were never ordered, and thousands languished in a disorganized warehouse. Ultimately, schools opened with the majority of books needed, but Rhee says she’s considering scrapping the centralized warehouse system and having schools order books directly.

Initial small successes have earned Rhee accolades from many principals. Things like getting toilets and air- conditioning fixed with single calls, after principals had spent months trying to do the same. Daniel Gohl, the former principal of McKinley Technology High School, who now leads the district’s new Office of Secondary School Transformation, has firsthand experience with Rhee’s willingness to intervene and cut through red tape.

When a renovated McKinley opened in 2004, a television studio was to be the new program’s crowning jewel, marrying traditional classes with high-tech career experience. But the studio, nearly finished, never opened. Someone high up the district’s chain of command had decided the studio’s design should be altered—which required more money. So work halted, and the studio lay trapped in the kind of limbo for which the D.C. school system is often criticized.

Gohl says he e-mailed incessantly and pressed his superiors without success. After he pled his case to Rhee, she immediately directed that the studio be completed, and it was ready to open when the school year began.

“When nobody’s willing to make a decision, people can hold things up,” Gohl says. Opening the television studio for student use “will make a huge difference. It will re-establish hope and send a signal of adult attentiveness.”

Winning Over the Skeptics
Also central to Rhee’s vision of creating an environment supportive to students are her efforts to draw parents and the community back to a system that has repeatedly disappointed them over the years. One telling sign of the depth of dissatisfaction with D.C. schools is that almost a quarter of the city’s students have fled to charter schools—despite the fact that many are themselves troubled and low-performing.

“[The community] has lost confidence in the system, and rightfully so. The system has not been responsive to them,” Rhee says. “I’m trying to make significant changes in this district, and having a very strong voice from the community is incredibly important.”

Rhee has plans to improve the district’s website to include more parent-friendly material about everything from bus schedules to enrollment, and she’s mulling over how to better inform parents about student achievement data. She’s also attending community meetings across the district and sitting in parents’ living rooms, always asking for input on what needs changing.

One steamy summer afternoon, Rhee showed up at a neighborhood block party in the Northwest section of the city, ate barbecue, cheered on kids in the Moon Bounce, and danced the Electric Slide. On front porches, she chatted with parents about what they wanted from their school system. She spent much of her time talking to students, asking them about favorite teachers, classes, and what they liked—or didn’t like—about their schools. Rhee was scheduled to attend the party for 30 minutes. She stayed for nearly three hours.

It is this kind of personal outreach that helped Rhee overcome some initial skepticism about her appointment. Mayor Fenty nominated her without any public deliberation on the first day he took control of D.C. schools from the school board, prompting some in the community to denounce the move as a silencing of their voice. The fact that Rhee is Korean-American in an overwhelmingly African-American school district that hasn’t had a superintendent of another race in 40 years also raised eyebrows, particularly as broader controversies stirred about the racial makeup of Fenty’s team. Finally, some cited concern with her limited time working in a school district and inexperience managing as large an organization as the D.C. public schools.

Yet despite the controversial nature of the appointment and the fact that two members had voted against Fenty’s bid to take over the schools, the D.C. Council unanimously endorsed Rhee’s nomination. All over the city, there are stories of union leaders, politicians, and community activists who were set to object to Rhee’s nomination but changed their tune after meeting her.

“When I first found out she didn’t have a superintendent’s background, I was concerned,” says activist Cherita Whiting, chairwoman of the District’s Ward 4 Education Council. Then she met with Rhee one-on-one. Whiting says her meetings with past superintendents have always included “handlers,” ready with facts or to correct misstatements.

“It was no-holds-barred,” Whiting says. “She was going to answer any questions I asked or give any statement she wanted. That tells me that you really want to tell the truth, that you don’t have any hidden agendas.”

Those familiar with Rhee’s work for The New Teacher Project say she also knows more about large urban school districts than many at the top of the education profession. “She has seen a substantial number of urban districts in this country and how they operate,” says Christopher T. Cross, an educational consultant and a member of The New Teacher Project’s board of directors. “She brings a wealth of knowledge that is every bit as valuable as someone who
has punched the ticket on their way up the ladder of a particular district.”

Margot Berkey, executive director of Parents United for the D.C. Public Schools, says she is optimistic about Rhee’s ability to make changes, but cautions that creating a successful organization differs from righting a large school system that has gone off course. “It’s one thing to be highly successful organizing and running a start-up, and another to be a fixer.”

Deasy, the Prince George’s superintendent, suggests that once Rhee has won support, she needs to carefully manage expectations from politicians and parents. In a school system with so many problems, he adds, Rhee must choose a few things and fix them as promised to prove that she is forging ahead: “She’s got to lay out for the public what’s wrong and then say, ‘We’re going to do triage, the vital things first, and then move on from there.’ ”

Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City schools and a friend of Rhee’s, has no doubt that she has the grit to get it done. “This is not for the politically faint of heart,” Klein says. “On very human terms, she has a deep inner sense of confidence. . . . I’ve met lots of people in this job, but very few have the power and intensity that she does.”

According to Klein, Rhee has faced down stagnant bureaucracies before. In 2000, Klein brought in Rhee and The New Teacher Project to work with his district’s ineffectual human resources department, much to the dismay of HR staff members. But the end result was a successful partnership.

“It’s very hard to make it work when you have that type of organizational resistance,” Klein says. “But Michelle and her team navigated those waters and recruited phenomenal teachers for us and built trust and relationships that me ordering people to work together could have never accomplished.”

Getting Priorities Straight
Through all of her long days and focused efforts, Rhee’s bottom line remains student achievement. By creating a working system and engaging the community, the new chancellor aims to lay the groundwork for more fundamental shifts in school and student performance.

To this end, Rhee announced she would take no external meetings during the first three weeks of the school year. The first week she planned to spend touring schools, every day, all day. The second and third weeks she said she would meet individually with every principal in the district. “We’ll be sitting down and looking at all the schools’ test scores and related data,” she says. “We’re going to set clear expectations for what we want to see moving forward, and we’ll be doing that on a quarterly basis.”

Rhee is building on the standards and assessment system and overall strategic plan implemented by her predecessor, Clifford Janey, who held the district’s top post for three years. But she’s also emphasizing short-term benchmarks of student progress, getting teachers results quickly, and providing intensive professional development on how to use the data to drive instruction. Reading will be a particular focus, with elementary reading instruction and professional development as a key priority.

For the upper grades Rhee plans to emphasize the creation of a “college-going culture,” says Abigail Smith (E. North Carolina ’92), special assistant to deputy mayor for education Reinoso. Part of that effort will be increasing the number of certified Advanced Placement courses available to students and providing broad access to the PSAT and SAT. Individual graduation plans are also on the to-do list. The plans would enable educators to work with students who may need extra time or remedial work to graduate, to map out exactly what classes and courses of study are needed to get there. “We want to focus on high school, where often the notion is that we’ve missed the boat by then,” Smith says. “We want to say, ‘It’s not too late.’”

More than anything, Rhee expects the adults in the system to commit to student success. “This is not going to be the place for everybody,” she says. “In terms of attitude and willingness to do everything it takes to get children to succeed, [those are] non-negotiable.”

Making It Stick
Despite early small successes, Rhee faces the reality that six superintendents in a decade—many of whom also came in to celebration—have failed to fix the district’s problems. The task is daunting, but Rhee seems unintimidated.

From this perspective, a nontraditional résumé was a plus in the mayor’s mind, Rhee says. Fenty wanted to “bring someone into the system who, on the one hand, has shown that she can have systemic impact on these ‘intractable’ issues in education, but at the same time isn’t going to come with a narrow set of expectations about what is possible.”

And though many view the D.C. district as a sprawling system, it ranks 48th on a list of the country’s 100 largest school systems. Rhee says she’s used to navigating much larger districts, such as New York City’s 1.1 million-student system, through her work with The New Teacher Project.

“This is fixable,” Rhee says. “I’m confident I’m going to be successful because I have a lot of clarity around the things that need to happen.”

Part of her conviction is rooted in her experience in Teach For America and the belief that low-income students have the power to achieve. “My entire professional career, what I have done inthe past 12 years, has all been guided by my experience in the classroom,”
she says.

WE ASKED YOU

What do you believe is the biggest factor in attracting and retaining top-quality teachers in low-income urban districts? 146 alumni responded:

34% Better support and resources from school and district leadership

29% Higher pay

26% Recognition for strong performance and increased opportunities for career progression

6% Smaller class sizes

5% More autonomy in the classroom

In 1992, after graduating from Cornell University, she found herself at Harlem Park Elementary School in Baltimore being overrun by her students, who came to class lagging in achievement and with a host of family and social issues. The first year was so challenging that she returned to her suburban Toledo, Ohio, home with a stress-related rash and seriously considered quitting.

Instead, Rhee spent the entire summer cutting out letters, planning lessons, and cramming for the coming school year. That fall, she teamed up with another teacher and the two taught a class of more than 60 students for two additional years.

Rhee assigned two hours of homework a night, visited her students’ homes, called their parents, and held before-school and weekend tutoring sessions. “We spent every minute engaged in instruction. When we lined up for the bathroom, we were doing multiplication facts,” she says. “We tried to squeeze every minute of instructional time out of the day.”

It paid off. On average, her students’ standardized test scores jumped from the 13th percentile to the 90th, she says.

“Nothing changed in that classroom except how the adults were teaching,” Rhee says. “I know it can be done.”

Rhee also knows, however, that her chancellorship is a grand and uncertain experiment under a national microscope. If she succeeds, the students of Washington, D.C., will know a new reality grounded in achievement and opportunity. It could also reaffirm the core mission of Teach For America and the alumni movement’s power in ways skeptics never expected to see. And the personal stakes are high, too: She’s moving her two daughters, 5 and 8, to Washington, where they’ll attend public school.

“It is a risk,” Rhee says. “But the bottom line is that what happens here with my administration will make people see—this is the way it can work.”

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