More than anyone else, Michelle Rhee is the face of the corporate reform movement. She is the leading spokesperson for its strategies: evaluating teachers by test scores; awarding merit bonuses; firing teachers and principals who don’t get higher scores; opposing tenure and seniority; attacking collective bargaining; closing public schools; and encouraging privatization by opening charters, both nonprofit and for profit, and by increasing the availability of vouchers.
Adrian Fenty, the newly elected mayor of the District of Columbia, appointed her chancellor of the district’s public schools in June 2007, and she led the D.C. school system until October 2010, resigning after Fenty ran for reelection and lost the Democratic primary. She was a major factor in the mayor’s defeat because her policies of firing teachers and closing schools had alienated many black voters. After she left her position in D.C., she created an organization called StudentsFirst with the intention of raising $1 billion and enlisting one million members. Its purpose was to eliminate tenure and seniority so that “great” teachers could be rewarded with bonuses and bad teachers fired. It was also a staunch advocate for privatization of public schools. As StudentsFirst became active in political campaigns, Rhee worked closely with conservative Republican governors and endorsed candidates who shared her views about teachers, charters, and vouchers.
When she was appointed to run the D.C. public school system, Michelle Rhee had never run a school system or even a school. In the early 1990s, as a member of Teach for America, she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school that was part of a for-profit experiment in privatization, which was terminated by the district after four years.1 After her teaching stint, she ran a program to recruit teachers for urban schools called the New Teacher Project. When Adrian Fenty selected her to lead the D.C. public schools, she was thirty-seven years old. Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public schools, recommended her to Fenty; Klein, too, had come to his position without education credentials.
From the moment she was appointed, Rhee became renowned for her candor and toughness. She minced no words in castigating the culture of complacency, inefficiency, and incompetence that she encountered. The D.C. school system, whose students were overwhelmingly black and poor, had a long history of abysmal test scores. Rhee blamed their low academic performance on lazy and indifferent teachers; she often complained about the “crappy education” that students in the D.C. schools were getting. She pledged to get rid of ineffective teachers and hire only great teachers. She said that teachers and their union were greedy and self-interested; she, unlike the teachers, cared about the children. With Fenty’s support, she pledged to make D.C. the highest-performing urban district in the nation. She said she would close the district’s yawning achievement gaps. And she made clear that she was there to fire people.
Why the public fascination with Rhee? Part of it was due to the perception that she, unlike other education leaders, was willing to act tough in a field where professionals stress that they are caring and nurturing people. Every instance of her abrasive, confrontational style cemented her image as someone who would crush anyone who got in her way. She alone was “for the children.” The media loved her decisiveness, her lack of compassion, her hardness. So did the big foundations and corporations. She was the quintessential corporate reformer.
Her tough talk brought her instant notoriety. During the presidential debates in 2008, both Barack Obama and John McCain praised her, even though she had been on the job for only a year and a few months. Right after the election, she was featured on the cover of Time. The cover said, “How to Fix America’s Schools,” implying that Rhee knew precisely what to do. The cover photograph portrayed an unsmiling Rhee in a classroom, dressed in black, broom in hand, looking defiant and determined. To her admirers, she was the new broom, ready to sweep the schools clean of lazy teachers and incompetent bureaucrats. To her detractors, she was a mean witch with a broom. She was a star of the film Waiting for “Superman,” which opened in D.C. the day after Fenty lost his reelection bid.
Rhee did what she said she would do. She closed schools, fired half the central office staff, fired hundreds of teachers, fired dozens of principals, and established a performance-based teacher evaluation system after a public battle with the Washington Teachers Union and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. By the time Rhee left, she had replaced nearly half the district’s teachers and about a third of its principals, according to her biographer Richard Whitmire.2
By the summer of 2008, she had attracted an “army of believers.” She selected dozens of new principals, who agreed to do whatever was necessary to disrupt the culture and raise scores.3 She met with every principal and got a promise of test score gains. Those whose schools met their target won a bonus; those who failed to meet their target were at risk of losing their jobs. Overnight, she became the national hero of the brassy new reform movement. A profile in The Atlantic captured some of the excitement that reformers felt:
“People are coming from across the country to work for her,” says Andrew Rotherham, the co-director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank. “It’s the thing to do.” Rhee had Stanford and Harvard business-school students on her intern staff this summer, and she has received blank checks from reform-minded philanthropists at the Gates and Broad foundations to fund experimental programs. Businesses have flooded her with offers to help—providing supplies, mentoring, or just giving cash.4
With her brusque and unapologetic style, Rhee gleefully burned bridges. She alienated veteran educators and parents who opposed school closings. She mocked the idea of collaboration. She said in the fall of 2008 (and often repeated, in one form or another): “I think if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”5 She felt that if she listened to people who disagreed with her, it would slow her down, and she had no intention of slowing down. She gloried in being an intimidating and glowering superstar who fired people and closed schools, because she was doing it “for the kids.”
Rhee believed that the key to raising test scores was to find and reward great teachers and great principals and to find and fire bad ones. She believed in test scores as the ultimate measure of schooling, and she scorned those who didn’t share her devotion to standardized testing. She felt certain that she could close the achievement gaps between black and white students if she could get the teachers and principals she wanted. Rhee believed that three great teachers in a row would close the achievement gap, and she often recited that claim. She felt sure that she could staff the entire school system with great teachers. To reach her goals, she needed to change the evaluation system and the salary structure. She expended much of her time negotiating a deal with the Washington Teachers Union to install her teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT, in 2009. She raised $80 million from several foundations to fund the new salary scale, one that offered significantly higher salaries to teachers willing to give up their tenure. (Many of the teachers who were eligible for big bonuses turned them down, preferring to keep their tenure.)6
Rhee enjoyed stepping on toes and kicking people out, but there was a price to be paid for her hard-charging style. She became a major issue in the mayoral election of 2010, and her boss, Adrian Fenty, lost to the city council president, Vincent Gray. Gray won the black vote by a large margin, while Fenty won the white vote by a large margin. Gray was elected, and Rhee resigned. But Gray had no appetite for changing what Rhee started; he did not want to alienate the powerful people in the business and philanthropic communities who supported Rhee. To guarantee continuity, he appointed her deputy, Kaya Henderson, also a TFA alumna, to replace Rhee.
What did Michelle Rhee accomplish? A review of her tenure a year later concluded that she had improved purchasing, textbook delivery, and food services. Most parents thought that the school system was improving. And the issue of school reform had been elevated as a major topic for public concern.7
Rhee’s relentless pressure to raise the passing rates on tests brought some early gains, but it produced a major cheating scandal as well. In the spring of 2011, four months after Rhee left the district, USA Today published a report about widespread cheating at more than half the district’s schools. The investigation focused on the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, where the passing rates in reading had shot up from 44 percent in 2007 to 84 percent in 2009. The gains were so large that they should have set off alarm bells, but they did not. Instead, the school was recognized in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Education as a National Blue Ribbon School. Michelle Rhee congratulated the principal and “touted the school … as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.”8
USA Today reported that the erasure rates on the standardized tests at Noyes were unusually high: “On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA Today.”
Rhee honored Wayne Ryan of Noyes as a model principal. The district featured him and the school in recruitment ads and asked, “Are you the next Wayne Ryan?” Rhee promoted Ryan to the position of instructional superintendent, where he supervised other principals. Noyes’s great success proved to Rhee that her methods worked. She distributed more than $1.5 million in bonuses to teachers, principals, and support staff in schools that saw big test score gains; in three of those schools, USA Today found that “85 percent or more of classrooms were identified as having high erasure rates in 2008.” District officials knew of the high erasure rates before the exposé but did not conduct an investigation. Three months after the story was published, Wayne Ryan abruptly resigned.9
The cheating scandal was referred to the office of the D.C. inspector general for investigation. That office concluded that there may have been cheating at one school but nowhere else. It saw “insufficient basis” to investigate any other schools. The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education concurred. Chancellor Kaya Henderson said, “I am pleased that the investigation is complete and that the vast majority of our schools were cleared of any wrongdoing.” The Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, who had supported Rhee, was outraged by the cursory investigation and wrote that it looked like a cover-up to him. Meanwhile, the reading proficiency rates at Noyes, which were celebrated when they reached 84 percent in 2009, fell to 32 percent in 2012, and the math proficiency rates were equally low. Similar high-pressure tactics in Atlanta produced another major cheating scandal, which was thoroughly investigated and led to indictments of the superintendent and thirty-four other educators. But no one was held accountable for the mysterious rise and fall of test scores in Washington, D.C.10
Other things happened during Rhee’s tenure that bolstered her image among the corporate reform crowd while giving ammunition to her critics. Because she enjoyed the adulation of the media, she gave free access to many national reporters. When John Merrow visited, accompanied by a PBS camera crew, Rhee said to him, “I’m going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?” That was too good to pass up, and the camera crew shot over the principal’s shoulder as Rhee said, “I’m terminating your principalship—now.” As she spoke, Rhee’s face was impassive; she showed no emotion, no regret, no compassion. The film clip was included in Waiting for “Superman” to demonstrate her legendary take-no-prisoners style. Her biographer said that her actions were “thoughtless and reckless,” but Rhee said that there was an “upside” to the media attention because it “helped attract foundations willing to commit millions to teacher pay-for-performance bonuses.”11
Shortly after Rhee left office, critics questioned her account of her years as a TFA teacher in Baltimore. She had described herself to the media as a teacher who was awful in her first year but who then achieved astonishing results in the next two years. Her own success, she said, proved to her that a teacher with high expectations can overcome all obstacles. Her résumé said, “Taught in Harlem Park Community School, one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in Baltimore City, effecting significant measurable gains in student achievement. Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90% of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”12
Critics doubted that oft-told claim, but the records could not be found to verify or challenge it. Some of Rhee’s critics kept digging and found a report written in 1995 by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The report said that the combined scores of all the classes in the grade where Rhee taught had increased significantly, but the gain was not large enough to substantiate the spectacular claim on Rhee’s résumé. The blogger G. F. Brandenburg, a retired mathematics teacher, was first to break the news. The Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews concluded that Brandenburg “has proved that Rhee’s results weren’t nearly as good as she said they were.”13 Rhee’s office promptly issued a statement saying that “the attacks” were “unfounded” and that the report covered all the students in the third grade, but not necessarily Michelle’s. It concluded, “This episode is further proof of what we’re up against.”14
A few days later, Brandenburg published a comment by the principal investigator for the 1995 report, who told him that even though the scores were not broken out by classroom, Brandenburg’s conclusion was correct. With only four third-grade classrooms in the school, if one class had average scores in the range of 90 percent, it would have lifted the average of the entire grade.15
Another part of Rhee’s legacy was the IMPACT system she devised to evaluate teachers. Fifty percent of the evaluation was based on the value-added test score gains of students. This is a model aligned with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, which encouraged states to judge teachers by changes in their students’ test scores (D.C. won one of the Race to the Top awards). Rhee’s system was supposed to identify the “best” and the “worst” teachers, since the best will supposedly produce big test score gains while the worst will not. In 2011, based on both test scores and observations, the district fired 206 teachers.
But were those fired the city’s worst teachers? According to The Washington Post, one of the fired teachers received a commendation in May 2011 from her supervisor, who said, “It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined.” Two months later, this fifth-grade teacher was fired: Her students’ scores didn’t go up as much as the statistical model predicted based on their previous year’s scores. The classroom observation counted for 35 percent and other factors for 15 percent, but the value-added scores doomed her. The teacher suspected her students came from a school that had cheated and inflated their previous year’s grades. She appealed her firing but was turned down by the district. No excuses! The school principal gave her a glowing recommendation “without reservation” when she applied to teach in nearby Fairfax County, Virginia. He said she was “enthusiastic, creative, visionary, flexible, motivating and encouraging.”16 She was hired.
The District of Columbia, like other high-poverty districts, had long had a high level of teacher turnover. This teacher churn continued during Rhee’s tenure. Hundreds were fired within a few years, while others resigned or left to teach elsewhere. One in every five teachers in the district left in a single year, 2010–11. The New Teacher Project, the advocacy group founded by Rhee, claimed that this was not so significant because the “best” teachers were retained, but somehow the “best” teachers (the report called them “the irreplaceables”) were highly concentrated in the district’s low-poverty schools. Few were teaching in high-poverty schools. At this rate, the district would lose nearly half its teachers in only two years. One longtime analyst of the D.C. system, the civil rights lawyer Mary Levy, calculated the five-year teacher turnover rate at 75 percent. The principal turnover rate was no less disturbing. In the spring of 2008, Rhee replaced one-third of the district’s principals with her choices. By 2012, 60 percent of the forty-six new principals were gone. A few had moved into senior administrative jobs or to other schools, but most had left the D.C. school system.17
After Rhee left the D.C. chancellorship, she created StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote charters and vouchers. She quickly attracted millions of dollars from wealthy supporters of school choice and opponents of teachers’ unions. She poured large sums of money into political campaigns for candidates and issues that advanced her agenda. Although nominally a Democrat, she backed the political agenda of the nation’s most conservative Republican governors, like Rick Scott in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels in Indiana, and Chris Christie in New Jersey. Most of her organization’s political contributions in state races went to Republican candidates. In Tennessee, she spent nearly $1 million to enable the Republicans to achieve a supermajority in the legislature.18
What did Michelle Rhee accomplish during her three and a half years in charge of the D.C. public schools? Did she accomplish her goal of making it the highest-performing urban district in the nation? Did she make substantial progress? Under the heading “Driving Unprecedented Growth in the D.C. Public Schools,” the Web site of StudentsFirst says about her time in D.C., “Under her leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years.”19
Boasting about her accomplishments brought her additional media attention and made her the toast of the reform movement, but it also invited additional scrutiny. Alan Ginsburg, who worked as a policy research director for many years at the U.S. Department of Education under both political parties, analyzed Rhee’s record. He reviewed the district’s NAEP scores in reading and math from 2000 to 2009 and concluded: “Rhee did not initiate the DC schools’ test-score turnaround when she took office in 2007. DC’s NAEP scores had already steadily improved under her two predecessors, Superintendents Paul Vance and Clifford Janey. Moreover, the rates of DC score gains under Rhee were no better than the rates achieved under Vance and Janey.”20 Ginsburg did not refer to the D.C. state tests that Rhee cited on her StudentsFirst Web site, because the D.C. tests “were redesigned between 2005 and 2006 and performance levels for 2006 and afterwards are not comparable with those from prior years.”
Ginsburg found that the largest gains on NAEP occurred during the Vance administration. He cautioned that U.S. education has a long history of looking for “silver bullet” solutions that fail when tried on a large scale. He found no evidence to support Rhee’s policy of teacher removal and urged policy makers to evaluate this approach carefully before adopting it nationally. Other nations, he pointed out, have developed more positive and successful ways to improve teaching, and he urged attention to them.
We can now add to Alan Ginsburg’s analysis because we have NAEP scores for 2011.
From 2009 to 2011, the D.C. public schools saw no statistically discernible increases in fourth-grade mathematics scores, but there was a discernible increase in eighth-grade mathematics scores.
In fourth-grade mathematics, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, black students, and Hispanic students were flat.
In eighth-grade mathematics, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and Hispanic students were flat, but there was a statistically significant increase in the scores of black students.
From 2009 to 2011, the D.C. public schools saw no significant change in fourth-grade reading scores and no significant increase in eighth-grade reading scores.
In fourth-grade reading, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and Hispanic students were flat. The scores of black students declined by a statistically real margin.
In eighth-grade reading, there was no change in the scores. The scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and black students were flat. The scores of Hispanic students declined significantly.21
Looking at NAEP scores, we know for certain that Rhee did not turn it into the highest-performing urban district in the United States. Its students still have low scores on the no-stakes federal assessment. It remains in the bottom group of urban districts along with Atlanta, Baltimore City, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Fresno, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia (Atlanta is in the bottom tier in mathematics but not in reading).
Did Rhee reduce the achievement gap between black and white students? No, the achievement gap between black and white students was unchanged from 2007, when she started, to 2011, after she departed.22 Washington, D.C., continues to have the largest black-white gap of any urban district tested by NAEP, because of the extremes of affluence (mostly white) and poverty (mostly black) in the district. The Hispanic-white gap in D.C. in both reading and math is almost as large as the black-white gap, and here, too, D.C. has the biggest gaps among the nation’s urban districts.
Rhee continued to be dogged by persistent suspicions that she had failed to investigate widespread cheating, especially after a confidential memo was leaked to PBS correspondent John Merrow. Merrow considered the memo to be confirmation that Rhee knew about a pattern of cheating but ignored it. Merrow, who filmed Rhee a dozen times when she was chancellor, summarized her tenure: little or no gains on test scores, high turnover of teachers and principals, lowest graduation rate of any big city, largest achievement gap of any big city, a truancy crisis, big increase in spending, a bloated central office staff, and declining enrollments.23
At this point, it is impossible to discern a lasting legacy from the Rhee era in the D.C. schools, which continued under the control of her deputy Kaya Henderson. The schools have experienced high levels of instability because of the frequent turnover of teachers and principals. More public schools will close, and more charter schools will open. Nearly half the students in the district are enrolled in charter schools, more than in any other city except New Orleans. The district’s public schools have not been transformed academically. The students in D.C. are still poor and are still low performing on the federal tests. The reform program of privatization, teacher bonuses, and teacher firings was not successful. Rhee did not prove that poverty doesn’t matter. She made promises she could not keep. The problems she inherited remain unchanged.