Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah, what do you mean?” I replied.

  “It’s just that most of the people whom we’ve asked to testify at the panel have turned us down. They’re all terrified of the UFT.”

  Indeed, elected officials and education experts alike knew that supporting Klein and the schools against Randi Weingarten and her union was tantamount to excommunication from the UFT’s good graces—and campaign cash.

  “I’m good.”

  IT WASN’T THAT I was being brave. It’s that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

  Several weeks later I was asked to report to the offices of Proskauer Rose, a top Manhattan law firm. I was directed to the room where the arbitration was taking place. It was set up with four sets of tables forming a square. The head table was the arbitration panel. The UFT and New York public school teams were set up facing each other, perpendicular to the panel. The fourth table, facing the panel, was set up for the witnesses.

  I slid into a seat behind the school system’s table. One of Klein’s staffers tapped him on the shoulder, whispered into his ear, and motioned toward me. Joel turned around, smiled his broad smile, and leaned forward. I leaned forward to meet him.

  “Welcome to the madhouse. Thanks for coming, kiddo,” he said, and then turned back around.

  I listened for a while and then was called to give my testimony. My part was pretty simple. Since we had gathered data directly from New York City schools, I was not hypothesizing about what might be happening. I was presenting facts.

  I talked through “last in, first out” policies, by which promising new teachers could be let go if a veteran teacher wanted his or her job. I described the time-consuming thicket of rules a principal had to follow to fire an incompetent teacher. I walked the panel through the forced-placement rules, which required principals to hire teachers who had failed at other schools—“the dance of the lemons,” in the words of some principals. I ran through other provisions of the union contract that were detrimental to creating successful schools.

  With each example, I presented data to show the negative impact on students.

  At the conclusion, I shared our recommendations. I laid out five changes that should be made to the union contract to make it better for kids.

  Then came the questions. The panel asked me a few. The school’s lawyers also asked me a couple. Last was the UFT’s turn.

  “Ms. Rhee,” one union lawyer asked, “isn’t it true that you run an organization that has a multimillion-dollar contract with the NYCDOE? And that your organization would stand to benefit by helping the DOE?”

  “Yes, we do have a contract with the DOE, but my testimony is not about helping the DOE, it’s about the facts.”

  Randi Weingarten shot me a level stare. If looks could kill, I would have been dead.

  I stood up, grabbed my things, and exited the room. Joel came out after me.

  “You were dazzling, kid. Really good. You’re ballsy.”

  The panel ruled for Klein and the New York public schools. It struck down forced placement and replaced it with mutual consent, which meant a principal had to agree to accept a teacher from another school. The arbitrators accepted four of my five recommendations.

  Compared with Randi Weingarten, I considered myself a peon at the time. I had no idea that I had created an enemy.

  4

  The Road to D.C.

  Toward the end of my first meeting in Washington, D.C., about running the public school system, I was trying to figure out how to break it to the city administrator that I didn’t want the job. A trim fellow with a shaved head walked in.

  “Hi, I’m Adrian Fenty,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Fine, sir, it’s an honor to meet you.”

  The new mayor of the nation’s capital seemed young and energetic but not particularly impressive. He was wearing a white shirt, blue tie, blazer, and rumpled khakis. He looked like a mayoral aide, rather than the chief executive of a city with a $10 billion budget.

  “As you know, I’m taking over the schools and I’m looking for a chancellor to lead the district. I don’t want one of the usual suspects. I’m looking for someone with a different profile.”

  He looked around a lot and seemed distracted. He had two BlackBerrys going at once.

  “We went up to New York, and I was incredibly impressed by Joel Klein,” he continued. “I told him I needed someone like him, and he recommended you.” Klein, Fenty said, had described me as someone who knows education and how school districts work, but that I came with a fresh perspective from outside the system.

  “That’s exactly what I’m looking for,” he said. Then he typed an email on his BlackBerry.

  “I appreciate the chancellor’s kind words,” I responded, “and while I do know education and understand how some aspects of school systems work, I have a specific expertise in teacher quality and HR. I don’t have a broad base of experience in running a school district.”

  During our first meeting, Adrian Fenty failed to impress me. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to run a school district for him.

  TWO YEARS AFTER MY initial run-in with Randi Weingarten in New York, I was getting restless.

  TNTP was doing well. By 2007, we had built a staff of about 150 people and had an annual budget of more than $20 million. And I had long ago paid off the original $833,000 loan from Don Fisher at the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. I should have been thrilled and content. I had a great job where I was doing meaningful work and was my own boss. But I kept getting the nagging feeling that it was time to go. I just didn’t know where.

  I had read somewhere that well-organized leaders always plan for their succession, and that they do it well in advance of their departure. My departure was not imminent, or so I thought. I couldn’t imagine another job where I’d feel like I was having nearly as much direct impact as I was having—and not have to answer to a boss. That was an important piece to the puzzle. I am not great at taking orders, and in most jobs, you have a boss. So what could I possibly do next?

  Without an answer to that question, I started planning. My number two, Ariela Rozman, was an incredibly competent woman. We complemented one another perfectly. I would go out and do all of the external work, like closing contracts and making presentations. Ari was a taskmaster. She made the trains run on time, and there was no one better at it.

  I’d originally brought her in to be the vice president of marketing. It wasn’t a great fit for her, but I immediately saw her gift. She became the chief operating officer, which was the perfect role for her. As I considered her, I thought she had about 80 percent of what it would take to be a great CEO. But what about the other 20 percent? We needed someone to be the face of the organization to represent us to the outside world. I thought about the rest of the management team. All of them were incredibly talented and driven. There was Victoria Van Cleef, my vice president of marketing; Robin Siegel, my chief financial officer; and Jessica Levin, my chief knowledge officer. But none of them was exactly right. I considered people outside the organization, but I didn’t love the idea of bringing in a stranger.

  Then my thoughts turned to Tim Daly. We had hired Tim when he was twenty-three. I still remember interviewing him to this day. He knocked my socks off, and I watched him ascend from selection coordinator to selection manager to program director with our New York City public school system contracts. He was incredibly impressive, and I thought he had that presence that one would need to wow the clients.

  However, he couldn’t hold a candle to Ari on the management and operations front. Also, I would probably have a mutiny on my hands if I promoted a kid four levels down as the new CEO. I wasn’t sure what to do. I scheduled a one-on-one dinner with Ari to talk about her future.

  “I’m succession planning,” I said.

  “What? Where are you going? You can’t leave!” she screamed.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I responded. “At least not yet. I
just feel that it’s time to move on, but it’s a little terrifying because I don’t know where to go. Anyways, this is a few years off.”

  IN MAY 2007 I went down to New Orleans for the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, education reform’s version of the World Economic Forum, held every year in Davos, Switzerland. The buzz was all about Washington, D.C. The nation’s capital had just elected a new, young mayor—Adrian Fenty. Word was that he wanted to take over the schools, and he wanted to push through bold reforms. I was invited to a late-night brainstorming session with about two dozen reformers to discuss what the new mayor might do.

  The session was a total snoozer. The usual suspects said the usual things. Nothing new or innovative emerged. I remember leaving thinking, “Jeez, these people have no clue what they’re going to do.”

  The next day Victor Reinoso, D.C.’s deputy mayor for education, who had led the previous night’s session, found me.

  “Hey, I need to talk to you!” he said.

  “Sure, what do you need?” I asked.

  “A superintendent. We need a rock star. You’ve worked with all of the best people across the country. I need you to tell me who’s good and who’s not. Can we discuss it over dinner tonight?”

  “No problem,” I said. “See you then.”

  We went to Jacques Imo’s, a favorite New Orleans haunt, and over alligator cheesecake, I gave him four names.

  “If anyone can turn that crazy system around,” I said, “these are your best bets. I just don’t know that you can talk any of them into doing it!”

  I left feeling good. I’d sung for my supper and gave them the only people who might have a shot at turning around the D.C. schools.

  I knew what I was talking about, too. TNTP had been working with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for years. We had profiled it in our studies. The school system was one of the worst bureaucracies we’d run across. In fact, we were about to pull out of our contract. Given that we worked with all of the most dysfunctional school districts in the country, you knew that meant DCPS was a whole different level of bad.

  IN THE WEEKS LEADING up to the summit, I’d had some tense conversations and communications with Clifford Janey, the superintendent in D.C. He was a good guy, and we actually liked him. He seemed focused on kids, and he was thoughtful.

  But Cliff Janey was not a quick decision maker. He moved slowly, and it was causing us problems. We’d recruit all of these great teacher candidates and have them ready to hire. Then at the last minute he would make a decision to hire math coaches for all the schools, or to close a few schools, and that would throw all of the staffing functions into turmoil. He would make the decisions so late in the game that it would push hiring new teachers back until right before school, making our jobs impossible.

  “It just isn’t a good use of their money,” explained Kaya Henderson, our vice president, who oversaw the D.C. contract. “We charge them money to source these candidates, and we find the best. But they can’t hire them in a timely manner, so they all leave. What’s the point? If all we cared about was making money, we could have a contract here forever without having to produce any results.”

  “But that’s not us,” I said.

  “My point exactly,” Kaya said.

  So we decided it was best to terminate the TNTP contract. We wanted to give Janey a heads-up so, I called him. He didn’t want us to leave. I explained our rationale, and we had some conversations and left messages back and forth. I was still pretty sure that we were going to quit working with his school system.

  In D.C., I had gotten to know Jim Shelton, program director for education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Jim had grown up and lived in D.C. and was incredibly frustrated with how the public schools were operating.

  “Don’t leave,” he pleaded. “You have to hang in there.” He also told me that mayoral control under Fenty could be a game-changer. “Don’t end the contract now. Just wait a little while,” he said. “As soon as the mayor makes the transition and hires a chancellor, it’ll be a different ball game for you guys. I promise.”

  I was skeptical. I’d seen my fair share of superintendents come and go. Each transition brought the promise of a new way of operating, but it rarely panned out.

  THE NEXT MORNING VICTOR REINOSO sought me out again.

  “Hey, can I grab you for a minute?” he asked.

  He led me into a side room off the conference’s main corridor.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?” I asked him back, confused.

  “You becoming the chancellor in D.C.!” he said excitedly.

  “Abso-freakin-lutely not. No way!” I answered.

  “Why not? Last night you said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the right person.”

  “Right, the operative term being right person. I am the wrong person.”

  “Aw, come on, you wouldn’t even think about it?” he pleaded.

  I was thinking, for starters, about how hard it would be to uproot my family from our base in Denver, where Kevin Huffman and I had settled down after being somewhat nomadic.

  “Nope,” I told Victor. “I have two kids in Denver.”

  Kevin and I had married in the mid-1990s and moved to D.C., then to Toledo to be near my parents. In 2004 we moved to Denver, again to be close to my parents, who had moved there once Shang retired. They were helping us raise our two daughters: Starr, who had been born in D.C. in 1998, and Olivia, who came along in 2002 when we were living in Toledo.

  Kevin had gotten his law degree and was working for Teach For America. Working out of Denver, I was on the road much of the time, which took a toll on our marriage but not on our focus on the girls.

  “Really?” Victor said facetiously. “Because we have a lot of schools in D.C. that they could attend.”

  “Seriously, Victor, give it up. Being an urban superintendent is the worst job in the world. Your hands are tied so you can’t actually do anything, but you get blamed for everything. Not gonna happen.”

  “Would you just come out and meet Mayor Fenty?”

  “I’ll meet with the mayor but not about the job. I’ll meet with him to tell him how critical it is that he not hire a bozo and tell him what needs to happen in the district with HR.”

  “Okay, fine,” Victor said. “I’ll take just that.”

  A COUPLE DAYS BEFORE the D.C. visit, I was in New York with my entire family to attend the Teach For America annual gala dinner. The board had decided to establish an award in honor of Peter Jennings, the legendary ABC News anchor, for TFA alums who had demonstrated leadership and accomplished significant education reform after leaving the corps. The selection committee had chosen me as the first recipient.

  My parents were thrilled. Shang and Inza flew to New York with Starr, Olivia, and Kevin Huffman. Though we had grown apart and would later divorce, Kevin and I were still friends and confidants.

  Meanwhile, Shang and Inza were about to understand what their crazy daughter had been up to. My folks would have asked the same questions that came from the retired businessman who called my idea nuts before I even started TNTP. They never really knew why I was flying all over the country to talk to school administrators. But being in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom with a thousand people watching their daughter receive an award by Peter Jennings’s widow—that they could understand. Even my girls, who were too young to grasp school reform, were impressed.

  I was scheduled to sit at the head table next to Joel Klein. When he saw me approach, he came over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Some of the others were advocating for other candidates,” he whispered. He had been on the selection committee. “I told them they all paled in comparison to you. No one has your kind of guts. Congratulations.”

  I went onstage, gave a short acceptance speech, and returned to my family’s table. Shang and Inza were beaming. The girls were digging into chocolate-covered strawberries. All was right with the world.

&nb
sp; THE NEXT MORNING MY phone rang. It was Victor. He was frantic.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

  “A few weeks back, we had taken the city council up to visit New York, speak with Mayor Bloomberg, and see what mayoral control of the schools looked like. Fenty fell in love with Klein and said, ‘I need the next Joel Klein.’ ”

  “Good for him!” I said. “You absolutely do!”

  “Well, this is where it gets tricky. Joel Klein called the mayor this morning,” Reinoso said. “He told him he should hire you!”

  “What?” I asked.

  Klein and I hadn’t even talked about D.C. the night before. “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is the mayor woke me up at five a.m. this morning saying, ‘Who’s Michelle Rhee? Joel Klein says I should hire Michelle Rhee. If she’s that good, why isn’t she on any of these lists you gave me, and why haven’t I met her yet?’ ” Victor paused. “And . . .”

  “And what?” I demanded.

  “And I told him not to worry because you were already slated to come in and meet with him next week,” Victor blurted out.

  “Victor!” I was pissed. “I told you that my meeting with him was not to interview for the job. I’m not interested in being chancellor.”

  “Well—it is now!” Victor replied and hung up.

  THOUGH I WAS A bit nervous that the mayor would be mad that I was not interested in the job, and that I might be wasting his time, I figured he’d take one look at me and dismiss the idea anyway.

  I showed up in D.C. in the middle of May, went to my conference, and called Victor to get the details on the meeting with Mayor Fenty. There was tremendous speculation about whom the mayor was going to choose as the city’s first chancellor. Reporters were watching his every move. Fenty’s aides arranged for me to come in to City Hall late at night, and not to sign in. They directed me to enter through a side door, under the cover of darkness.

  Who were they kidding? Was I the only one who realized that I could sign in and out of that building fifty times and no one would ever conceive of the idea that I might be a candidate for the position?