Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History, Volume XV

Thursday, September 4, 2008
This is Michelle Rhee. She's the 37 year old Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public School system, and a force to be reckoned with.

From her Wikipedia article: "Rhee taught in Baltimore, Maryland as a recruit of Teach For America for three years before founding The New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization which works with needy school districts to recruit and train new teachers. She founded the program in 1997, and it has since expanded to forty programs in twenty states, recruiting more than 10,000 teachers."

But it's what she's done since then that makes her exceptional. In June of 2007, the Mayor of Washington, DC made her the new Chancellor of DC public schools. She came in with guns blazing and some radical ideas about how a school district should be run.

Washington DC spends more money per student than almost every other major school district but have some of the worst test scores in the country. Her mandate? To fix it. By any means necessary.

Her ideas are unorthodox:

* Fire more than 100 administrative workers

* Close down 23 schools

* Threatening to fire principals of schools who are not performing

* Renegotiating the contract with the teachers union to reflect a "pay for performance" structure, including firing those teachers that don't make the quality cut

* Providing a pay scale for quality teachers that allows 6 figure incomes for those that perform

Her motto? "If the rules don't make sense for kids, I'm not going to follow them. I don't care how much trouble we get in."

An education advocate who believes that the needs of the learners are the top priority? An education administrator who believes teachers and supervisors should be accountable in terms of how effective they are in performing their duties? A government official who's prepared to put her money where her mouth is in terms of providing top pay for top performers? Shocking.

Needless to say, the teacher's union is not happy with her, her ideas, or her style. They've been a powerful union for many, many years, and this woman is upsetting their apple cart.

What a shame.

You go, Chancellor Rhee. Keep behaving badly and pushing the envelope. Because, as you say, the education system is there for the kids, not the adults.


H/T to Newsweek for source material.

2 comments:

Anne C. said...

Wow. Cool!

vince said...

Needless to say, the teacher's union is not happy with her, her ideas, or her style.

Gee, what a surprise.

We need more Michelle Rhee's in this country.