Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  “Are you people insane?” I asked Victor and his chief of staff, Eric Lerum. “Who calls for a meeting at eleven p.m.? And who takes a meeting at eleven p.m.?”

  “Oh, trust me,” Eric said, “the chairman will be in the office. And he’ll take the meeting.”

  The mayor and I walked up to Gray’s office. It was four minutes after eleven o’clock.

  When Fenty had proposed his takeover of the schools in January and guided the legislation through the city council, he had agreed to collaborate with the legislators in searching for and choosing the first chancellor. That’s not exactly what transpired.

  “I would like to introduce you to Michelle Rhee, our new chancellor,” Fenty said.

  Though I could tell he was shocked, Gray tried not to show it. I’m sure his mind was racing, and he was paying scant attention to my introduction of myself and my experiences. After a few minutes of small talk he stood to shake my hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Rhee. I look forward to working with you.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, AS we huddled in the mayor’s office shortly before the announcement, the staff guided George Parker and Nathan Saunders into the room. Parker was president of the Washington Teachers’ Union; Saunders was the VP. I had had some experience with George through my work at The New Teacher Project. I knew him to be a fair and reasonable guy.

  “Hey, Kaya!” he exclaimed and kissed Kaya Henderson on the cheek as he entered into the room.

  “So you know Kaya, that’s great!” the mayor said. “And that must mean you know our new chancellor, Kaya’s boss, Michelle Rhee.”

  “Uh, yeah, Michelle, nice to see you,” George sputtered.

  “As you know,” the mayor continued, “the Public Education Reform Act requires that you have the opportunity to meet the chancellor candidate. So here she is.”

  George, like Vincent Gray, was stunned.

  “I think we’re ready to go down to the press conference now, Mr. President,” the mayor said. Then he asked, “Are you comfortable?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Parker said, and we headed downstairs to stop at the council breakfast, before the press conference.

  The Washington Post had blasted the news of my nomination on the front page that Tuesday morning. When we got downstairs, the council members had already read the paper, and the press was buzzing outside of city hall.

  The mayor introduced me to the council members one by one. I shook hands and tried to make small talk. More thin lips and stunned expressions.

  “We would love you to join us for the press conference,” Fenty said. At 9:15 a.m., we all filed out and stood in front of the Wilson Building, the sun splashing across the steps, a bank of cameras staring at us.

  As the mayor stepped up to the podium, a reporter spoke first.

  “Mayor Fenty! Mayor Fenty!” she screamed. “Why do you insist on showing favoritism to the Washington Post? There are many media outlets in this city! It is unconscionable that you would repeatedly show favoritism to the Washington Post alone!”

  He ignored her.

  “Within the past hour,” Fenty said, without skipping a beat, “I have signed a mayoral order appointing Michelle Rhee acting chancellor.”

  No one could even hear what he was saying because this woman was screaming over him. Yet he continued as if nothing was happening. Is that what I’m supposed to do, too? Just pretend I don’t hear this lady screeching in my ear?

  I stepped to the microphone. I smiled. Silence.

  “Good morning,” I said. Some clapped, tepidly. I looked up. My family and friends were the only ones putting their hands together.

  “Thank you, Mayor Fenty. I see this as a tremendous opportunity. . . .”

  We smiled. We shook a few hands. It seemed like a dream.

  THERE WOULD BE NO opportunity to mend fences or smooth ruffled feathers.

  After a brief stop at District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) headquarters, we hopped in a van for the first foray in a summer-long tour of the District of Columbia, from border to border. Aboard the van were Tim Daly and Ariela Rozman, my successors at TNTP. They were helping to staff me for the first few days because they knew me best.

  Our first stop was Benning Elementary School, on D.C.’s east side. We headed away from downtown and the National Mall on Pennsylvania Avenue, drove up Capitol Hill past the House office buildings, the U.S. Capitol to our left, and crossed the Anacostia River to Ward 7, home to D.C.’s black working and middle class. I started to see firsthand how much my new home—the city behind the monuments—was starkly divided by race, class, and power.

  The Founding Fathers created the District of Columbia in 1790, fulfilling plans spelled out in the Constitution. They envisioned a federal enclave that would house the government, but they wanted to separate it from the state politics of Maryland and Virginia. It was placed under federal control in 1801, with Congress and the president to run the city. They didn’t anticipate the population that would come to live in the city around the government. Waves of residents have since flocked to the District of Columbia, especially during the two world wars. Many African Americans migrated up from North Carolina and formed a solid middle class, nurtured by jobs in the federal government. Under segregation, schools such as Dunbar High were among the finest in the nation.

  For more than 150 years, except for a brief period after the Civil War, the District of Columbia suffered without an elected local government. It failed to develop a homegrown political class. White supremacists in Congress ran the city as if it were a plantation. They disregarded the health, welfare, and education of the black underclass, which grew and eventually settled in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek and across the Anacostia River.

  When President Dwight Eisenhower desegregated the D.C. schools in 1954, many whites moved to the suburbs. By 1960, D.C. had become the first majority African American city in the nation.

  President Lyndon Johnson started the move toward limited self-government in 1965, which paved the way for local leaders and civil rights activists to run for local office. Marion Barry was among them. Barry’s first step into elective politics was a run for school board president in 1971. D.C. schools were already among the worst in the nation. Barry vowed to improve the schools and campaigned across town in a Camaro with the poster “United To Save the Children.” He won, but rather than improve the schools, he used the post as a stepping-stone.

  Home Rule—with an elected mayor, city council, and school board—took effect in 1974, under President Richard Nixon. Barry was elected mayor first in 1978, and then three times after that.

  As head of the school board and in his four terms as mayor, Barry paid scant attention to the schools. When pressured to reform education, he said that schools were under the control of the school board, which was statutorily accurate. For the next twenty-five years, school buildings fell into disrepair, the Washington Teachers’ Union controlled the classrooms, nepotism ruled the central administration—and generations of African American students were not taught to read or write, add or subtract. The dropout rate was above 50 percent.

  But in white neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park, some schools were among the best in the nation. Elementary schools prepared students to excel. Each year top graduates of Wilson High, an integrated school in Tenleytown, went to Harvard, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The achievement gap was a canyon.

  WHEN WE PULLED UP to Benning Elementary, I saw the results of that quarter century of neglect. The one-story, tan-brick building looked more like a jail than a school. A low concrete wall surrounded it. It had no grass or playground.

  I might well have been the first superintendent to set foot in Benning, and the administrators had set up a table with cheese and crackers. I was more interested in checking the classrooms than chatting. Benning was hot and dark inside, the lights turned off to keep it cool since the air-conditioning wasn’t working. The school seemed empty, because it was operating at half capacity. Benning was
designed for the open classroom model, and the few students I saw seemed distracted.

  Principal Darwin Bobbitt walked us past the library. I stopped.

  “There are no books in here,” I said. “This is supposed to be the library. What’s going on?”

  “We didn’t have enough books,” he said, “so we took down the shelves. Why pretend to have a library?”

  THERE WAS NO PRETENDING that D.C. schoolchildren weren’t in dire straits.

  Low-income black children in the fourth grade scored the worst in the country on federal reading tests. Eighty-eight percent of eighth graders scored below proficiency in English. In the nationwide report card—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—children that I would be responsible for were scoring far worse than their counterparts in other cities. Their performance was the worst in the country.

  Most people blamed poverty for the low academic achievement levels of the children in D.C. They were wrong. The federal report card showed that poor African American students in New York City were two grade levels ahead of the poor black kids in Washington, D.C. On average, fourth- and eighth-grade students in the District of Columbia were about a year behind students in similar straits nationwide, in cities such as Houston and Boston. There is no doubt that poverty and home environment have an impact on students and schools, but clearly there was something terribly wrong with the D.C. schools.

  I was not the first leader to promise reform, and I was not the first outsider. The district had churned through six superintendents in the ten years before Fenty asked me to step in with the new title of chancellor. I saw a cautionary tale in retired general Julius Becton, who had taken over in 1996 and promised change. “Failure is not an option,” he said. The general never got control of the central administration or the schools. His administration failed to open schools on schedule. The bureaucracy couldn’t come up with an accurate count of students. He said trying to run D.C.’s public schools was harder than fighting in a war. He resigned after sixteen months.

  I was convinced that the culture of the school system and the quality of instruction in the schools had combined to frustrate superintendents and fail students. The national studies proved my case: it was not just the poverty or drugs or broken families or violence that made it hard to teach kids.

  To paraphrase Clinton adviser James Carville: It was the schools, stupid. And the mind-set.

  Tim pointed out a sign he’d found in Slowe Elementary, one of the stops on the tour of schools that first day: “Teachers cannot make up for what parents and students will not do.”

  Wonder why I was enraged?

  THE EVENING OF MY first day on the job, after visiting Benning Elementary, we pulled the van up to Angela Copeland’s house on W Street, in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood, around the corner from Union Temple Baptist Church. Copeland’s row house was painted pastel blue with white pillars. The plants on the porch gave it an inviting feeling, but I didn’t feel too welcomed when I first got out of the van. Conversations stopped. People stared.

  I could tell what they were thinking. “What’s this Asian lady doing here?”

  As an outsider in so many ways, I was determined to show up in neighborhoods and homes across D.C. and make myself accessible to all. The visit to Copeland’s house was the first of four meetings in living rooms that first week. At every home—and at every encounter at every school thereafter—I would give out my cell phone number and invite people to call.

  “Are you sure you want to give your number to everyone?” Eric Lerum kept asking. He was the mayoral aide Fenty had assigned to me for my first month on the job.

  “Absolutely sure,” I responded. “Parents, teachers, students—they all have to know that they can reach me, get a response and reaction, that we can try and answer questions and fix problems.”

  But no cell phone contact could fix the problems I knew I would encounter inside Angela Copeland’s home. There were about fifteen parents waiting for me in her front room. Copeland introduced me. I smiled. No one smiled back. No one was rude, just skeptical.

  I sat down on an ottoman in the middle of the room, looked around, and set my eyes on a woman whose lips were pursed and eyes most doubtful.

  “Now, I know what you all are wondering,” I said. “What does a Korean lady from Toledo, Ohio, know about running schools, and why did Adrian Fenty pick her? Am I right?”

  I stopped. I smiled. I could tell I had disarmed them. They weren’t expecting me to talk about the elephant in the room.

  “Have you ever had a schools superintendent ask to meet with you in your homes?”

  “No” came the chorus.

  “Well, I’m here. My job is to ensure that every kid in this city is in a great school so that all of them are getting an excellent education. What do I need to do to accomplish that?”

  Hire teachers who will challenge our kids. Bring art and music back in the schools. Repair the buildings, enrich the after-school programs, enforce discipline.

  When I left two hours later, I might not have converted the group, but I had established a connection, offered up my cell phone number, and promised to return. I also got my first sense of the sameness and separation that I would encounter among parents from different parts of the city.

  On my second night on the job, after meeting with council members and telling a cadre of top principals that I was committed to supporting them, I met with parents at a home all the way across town, in the Palisades neighborhood of Northwest D.C. The Koczela home was a lovely house set back on beautifully landscaped grounds. There was a Volvo wagon in the driveway and a BMW parked across the street. I could have been on another planet.

  Here there was standing room only in the living room. There must have been at least fifty people. They seemed relieved to meet me and adored Kaya Henderson. I didn’t feel the need to break the ice, but when I asked for questions, they sounded very much like the ones I had heard the night before across town in Anacostia: better teachers, more art classes, courses in Latin and French, and more than once: “Please rebuild the schools and fields.”

  My promise to these parents was simple: “I am about preventing the district school bureaucracy from impeding your plans to improve your schools. I know it has been a drag in the past.”

  Most of these parents left happy, but I was left with a quandary. Here in this wealthy, white neighborhood, I was accepted and welcomed. Yet these parents and their kids and their schools didn’t need much from me. I wasn’t planning to devote as much time and energy to them. Most of the schools west of Rock Creek Park were in fine shape compared with the ones east of the Anacostia. My challenge and my passion was around raising achievement for the children of the folks I had met the night before. I was intent on improving their schools, their teachers, their outcomes. Yet those parents were so skeptical of me.

  How could I bridge that gap?

  THE BEST PLACE TO start was from the pulpit.

  “Church,” Kevin Johnson told me. “You gotta go to a black church.”

  Kevin Johnson—or KJ, as his fans called him—had become a friend and confidant. We’d met at an education conference a few years back, and he’d convinced me to sit on the board of his nonprofit organization in Sacramento, St. HOPE Public Schools. I trusted him immediately. A former NBA star, KJ was an anomaly. He returned to the community he grew up in to start charter schools. He wasn’t about the razzle-dazzle of being a former pro athlete. He worked harder than anyone else in his organization. I got used to getting emails from him at two o’clock in the morning. In fact, he was so different from what people expected from KJ the phenom, that I refused to refer to him as that, preferring KMJ (using his middle initial) instead. As a board member at St. HOPE, I was usually the one giving him advice. This time the tables had turned.

  “You may know schools,” he explained, “but I know black people. We know when someone is phony. You genuinely care about black kids getting a great education. My people will sense this immedi
ately, and that will help you. But in order for them to understand that about you, you need to get out. You need to go to church.”

  At 8 a.m. Sunday a few weeks later, I went to Bible Way on New Jersey Avenue, N.W., for the morning service. Bible Way, started in 1957 by the Reverend Smallwood Williams, is one of Washington’s bedrock black churches. The morning prayers have been broadcast on WOL-AM every Sunday for the past fifty years.

  I tried to attend a black church service as often as possible. I bought KMJ’s advice that it was critical to build support in the community. If I was going to be closing schools and firing teachers I’d be finished unless I got the community to trust me, to back me.

  The pews were full. Rev. Cornelius Showell introduced me. I was the only one in the church who was not African American. He surprised me by asking me to address the congregation and speak to the radio audience. I walked up the stairs and mounted the pulpit.

  “The schools in our city have been failing our children for far too long,” I said. “The only people who have paid the price for these failing schools have been the kids.”

  Some clapped.

  “I am committed to changing the way we educate our children,” I continued. “There is no reason why children in Anacostia can’t have the same education and the same opportunities as children in Georgetown.”

  The congregation rose and cheered.

  “It will require tremendous change,” I said. “I’m going to need the entire community to help me. It can’t happen only within the four walls of the school building. I need to work hand in hand with you.

  “I ask for your prayers.”

  SOME OF MY PRAYERS were answered when a few of the best minds and hearts in education reform responded to my pleas to start an education revolution in Washington, D.C.

  There were also some hidden gems within the district schools—people who relished a real opportunity to turn it around, like instructional superintendent Bill Wilhoyte, operations manager Dave Anderson, chief business officer Abdusalam Omer, administrative assistant Joyce McNeil, and finance guru Noah Wepman. I also sweet-talked some TFA alums with whom I’d worked throughout the years—John Davis, Billy Kearney, and Chad Ferguson, and my coworkers from Baltimore, Michele Jacobs and Deonne Medley—into joining me.