Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  But it wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot. We needed to bring in an entire senior staff. Kaya and I went to work building a team.

  The first target was Richard Nyankori. Richard had worked for me at TNTP. He had been widely known as my favorite in the TNTP ranks. Unbelievably talented and one of the most innovative thinkers I knew, Richard was the ultimate utility player. He could do anything and talk to anyone about anything. Fortunately, he lived in D.C. He agreed to join us. I immediately put him on the toughest assignment in the district: fix special education.

  Next was Jason Kamras. Jason was a TFA corps member who had taught in DCPS for ten years and was named the National Teacher of the Year, the first ever to come from the District of Columbia. I had been trying to get him to join TNTP after he finished what I like to call his “Miss America tour” around the country as Teacher of the Year. It didn’t take much convincing. He was sick at heart with what he’d seen as a DCPS teacher, and he was convinced that the teachers deserved so much more.

  I knew that one of my biggest problems was going to be data. How could we get a handle on the basic information about how students were performing? I also knew the solution: Erin McGoldrick, a bright young woman who, by her own admission, was enamored of data. Years earlier I had convinced her to join the board of St. HOPE. I was incredibly impressed with her skills in measuring student achievement. Taking this job would require her to move across the country from Los Angeles to Washington. “This is a dream come true!” she said and packed her bags.

  I put out the word with every education reformer in the country that we were looking for talent. I got an email from Andy Rotherham, a well-known policy wonk and friend. He told me that a TFA alum he knew had heard about me getting the job and was desperate to come work for me. He assured me that I wouldn’t regret the decision for a minute. He was right. Margery Yeager proved to be an invaluable asset throughout my tenure, running the Critical Response Team. Their job, to field the calls from all of the unhappy constituents of DCPS, was one of the toughest in the city. She and her team did it masterfully.

  In my early days, my office was a mess. At TNTP I never had an assistant because I couldn’t stand other people being in charge of my schedule. It became clear very quickly, though, that that would have to change. Liz Peterson, my TFA roommate from Baltimore, and Amma Aboagye, an intern I hired from Cornell University, were about to leave. I was in trouble. Richard set up an interview with his best friend, Shawn Branch. We met on the stoop outside of my house. It was not love at first sight. We both had strong wills and spoke our minds; I could foresee conflicts. But I was desperate, so I hired him. It was the best decision I’d made. He and Angela Williams-Skelton ran my crazy schedule and made the office run like clockwork. I started to refer to Shawn as “my boss.”

  I moved Mafara Hobson and Abby Smith over from the mayor’s office, Mafara to be press secretary and Abby to run the DCPS “transformation office,” which would engineer school consolidation. I hired Peggy O’Brien, a longtime District of Columbia resident and educator, to run our community affairs.

  Last but certainly not least, I needed a general counsel. After being told “no!” by my legal team at every turn for several months, I was fed up. So many of the challenges we were facing in the school district were legal ones, and I needed first-class legal talent. Frustrated, I went to speak at a Legal Aid breakfast, and at the end yelled, “If anyone can find me a decent general counsel can you please send him or her my way?” From that came Jim Sandman, the managing partner at Arnold & Porter, one of D.C.’s top law firms, who agreed to take a huge pay cut to come and work for the district because he believed in the work we were doing. He was a godsend.

  MY FIRST CHALLENGE AS chancellor of public schools in the nation’s capital was to have a smooth opening of schools after summer vacation. Our goal was pretty simple: we wanted to welcome students back with clean schools, teachers in every classroom, class schedules, and ample supplies. Was I setting the bar too high? Given the district’s spotty record for starting class on schedule, it was hardly a given. In years past, schools would greet excited and nervous students with chaos. Classroom assignments were garbled. Hundreds of high schoolers spent weeks without schedules or lockers. Children sat in a classroom for hours without a teacher. Textbooks? Maybe—maybe not.

  The first sign that my inaugural opening day might not go smoothly came when I attended my first meeting in the central office to discuss the progress we were making on the opening of schools. When I walked in the door every staff person stopped chatting and stared.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Chancellor Rhee!” exclaimed the high-level staffer running the meeting.

  The participants clapped enthusiastically. They were running for their lives. The district had seen six superintendents in ten years. With each new leader came a shuffling in the central office. Everyone was on his or her best behavior.

  All eyes were on me.

  “No, no,” I said. “Please don’t mind me. Carry on with your meeting. I simply want to observe.”

  That wasn’t what they expected me to say. People didn’t know what to do. After some shuffling about, they continued. The room was packed. There were representatives from every department, and each had prepared a presentation about what his team was doing to get ready for school opening. The PowerPoints were pretty. But I wasn’t sold. Far from it. Every department was putting on a dog-and-pony show with graphs and charts, but no one was asking any basic questions: for example, whether there were enough teachers at every school. No one was talking about problems or challenges. According to the presentations, you’d have thought we were in the highest-functioning school district in the nation.

  Most important, there was no evidence or data that what was being presented was an accurate reflection of reality in the schools.

  After the meeting I called Jenny Abramson into my office. The mayor’s office had hired Jenny, who had agreed to take a leave from her job at the Washington Post, to oversee the transition.

  “That is the last time we’ll be having a school opening meeting like that!” I said.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It was everyone sitting around congratulating one another on their beautiful slide presentations, but it gave us absolutely no indication as to whether or not we’re ready to open schools.”

  I asked her to get her team out into the schools with a checklist: Books, supplies, schedules, lockers, teachers, furniture, clean buildings. It wasn’t rocket science, just the basics.

  “We need to figure out where the hot spots are so we can fix them immediately,” I said.

  “Got it,” she said, and with that she flew out of the office. Jenny was efficient. I knew she’d get the information.

  Then I yelled to Liz Peterson, my best friend from the Harlem Park days and beyond. She had come on her summer break as a teacher to help my transition. “Try Lisa Ruda again, please,” I begged.

  Liz popped her head in my office. “I left her three messages yesterday.”

  “Call again. Keep calling until she answers. Stalk her.”

  “Okaaay,” Liz said skeptically.

  A WEEK LATER JENNY ABRAMSON came back from her tour of schools. She had the data. It was ugly. The schools were in disarray. Most had been locked up on the last day of school and not touched since. Air conditioners were broken all over the district. Each school needed a deep cleaning. There were broken lockers and cracked floor tiles everywhere. Furthermore, no one seemed to know what the process was for making sure that every child knew what to expect.

  When I was a kid, we’d excitedly run over to the school a few weeks before it started to see our class assignments. They’d be posted on the doors so you knew who your homeroom teacher would be. We would beg our parents to take us school shopping with the supply list clutched in our hands.

  Here in D.C., there were no class assignments. No supply lists. No books.

  On August 4, two weeks before the start of sch
ool, Mayor Fenty joined me in a search for missing books. First stop was the DCPS central warehouse, a three-story brick building in an industrial district along railroad tracks on the city’s far eastern corner.

  We found the missing books—not just for opening day 2007 but for prior years, too. We walked across floors piled high with boxes upon boxes of unopened books. By the time I reached the second floor, I was ready to throw up. Some rooms were stacked with new desks and chairs. Those missing notebooks that teachers had to pay for with their own money? Pencils, glue, rulers, binders? All there, but never sent to students.

  The press showed up.

  “I toured all three floors of this warehouse,” I said. “What I found was shocking.”

  What I didn’t find were the shipments of new science and social studies textbooks we had ordered. “A lot of them did get out to the schools,” I said, “but not every classroom is complete—again.”

  Fenty, dressed in a dark suit and tie on a sweltering day, was cool and calm. “We knew we had a huge uphill climb in turning around our school district. Every day we find something worse than we had imagined.”

  I despaired that I, too, would not open the schools in perfect shape.

  I HAD ASKED JENNY to put together a presentation showing how bad things were and how much work we had to do in order to be ready to open the schools. At the next scheduled school-opening meeting, I was in the room at the head of the table as people filed in. They smiled and waved at me. I didn’t smile back. We were in serious trouble, and I wanted them to know it.

  “Good morning,” I began. “Since I attended the meeting last week, I sent a team out to the schools to determine our readiness. The bottom line is we’re not ready. Not even close. Jenny?”

  I handed the meeting over to Jenny and her deputy, Anthony deGuzman, who walked through a slide deck that showed in painstaking detail how ill-prepared we were. When they were done, the lights went up in the room.

  “Needless to say,” I said, “we’re going to have to be working every waking hour between now and August twenty-fourth to get ready. Any questions?”

  I could hear some murmurings and saw uncomfortable shifts in the room.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Well, Chancellor,” someone piped up hesitantly, “a number of us are slated to take our vacation days over the next few weeks.”

  “You know,” another one said sheepishly, “get rested up before school starts.”

  I stood up and left the room.

  I WENT BACK INTO my office. I laid my throbbing head on the desk.

  Liz interrupted the ache: “Lisa Ruda is on the line!”

  Salvation!

  During my years at The New Teacher Project we worked with most of the large, urban school districts in the country. Great talent was hard to come by. When Kaya and I tried to think of any administrators who had district experience that we wanted to hire, we both immediately thought of Lisa Ruda.

  She had served as the chief of staff of the Cleveland Municipal School District. Tough and no-nonsense, she got things done. I wanted her on the team.

  “Lisa Ruda!” I said excitedly into the phone.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “I heard the news.”

  “Let me cut to the chase. I need you here. Yesterday. This place is a mess,” I said.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “For starters, I just got out of a school-opening meeting, and we’re totally jacked. The buildings are a wreck, no supplies and books. This is going to be a disaster.”

  “That’s how it was when I got to Cleveland,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll get better. It’s bumpy at first but you just have to put the right systems in place. Now I can open schools with my eyes closed.”

  “That’s why I need you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m flattered, but I can’t,” she said. She explained that after serving as chief of staff for years, she was made interim CEO for a stretch, which put her out of her element. She was a behind-the-scenes type, not an out-in-front one, and she was burned-out.

  “I’ve decided to go back into private practice and accepted a job with a white-shoe law firm,” she said.

  “Please,” I pleaded. “This world doesn’t need any more lawyers. We do need great schools, though. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This mayor is unbelievable. He’s given me full authority to do whatever I need to fix the district. At least come out and visit.”

  Two days later she was in D.C. I sicced the mayor on her to put on the hard sell. On her way back to the airport, I was scheduled to meet with her. I was trying to figure out how to seal the deal.

  She walked into my office.

  “I’m in,” she said.

  We were lucky that Lisa brought Sherry Ulery and Tracy Martin with her from Cleveland to work on schools and curriculum and instruction.

  “The first order of business,” Lisa said, “is that we put a moratorium on vacations for all central office employees. No one goes anywhere until these schools are ready to open!”

  WHAT WE SET IN motion that first summer before schools opened, and the talented team that we established, would help organize and propel us for the next three years. The people attracted to our cause and goals were equally committed and decisive.

  Fewer roofs were leaky as we got closer to August 27, the day schools were scheduled to open. Mayor Fenty had appointed Allen Lew to manage school facilities. Lew had overseen the development of D.C.’s new convention center and baseball stadium. He was the perfect person to repair all the schools, renovate some, and build new ones from scratch. During the summer of 2007, Lew and his contractors completed thousands of work orders that had been piling up for years. They fixed toilets, refurbished heating systems, patched roofs, and painted walls.

  Still, as we got closer to August 27, I was not convinced every school would be ready to welcome students with supplies and books and teachers.

  In mid-August we gathered all five thousand teachers at the Washington Convention Center. They didn’t know much about me. I would imagine they were as apprehensive as the parents at Angela Copeland’s house. I took the stage, looked across the room, and smiled.

  “I am Michelle Rhee. I’m the new chancellor of the D.C. public schools,” I said. “Just in case there was any confusion, I am, in fact, Korean. I am thirty-seven years old. And, no, I have never run a school district before.”

  I thought I saw a few smiles out there. After telling them a bit about my years as a teacher in Baltimore, I set out the challenges we faced.

  “All the eyes of the country are now on Washington, D.C.,” I told them. “I believe what we are embarking upon is a fight for the lives of children. And we can accomplish it, together.”

  A week or so later, students from one end of D.C. to the other started class on schedule. All 144 schools were clean, staffed, and ready. Not every one of those new books we had ordered was in the hands of the teachers—it was not a perfect opening day—but we notched a success and passed the first test of the year.

  EVERY NOW AND THEN I would stroll the halls of the school system’s bureaucracy. The central administrators worked out of an office building on North Capitol Street, across from the U.S. Government Printing Office. We could walk outside and see the U.S. Capitol dome a few blocks away.

  One day I ducked into an office, introduced myself, and asked the woman behind the desk, “What do you do?”

  She gave me her title.

  “I see that,” I said, “but what do you do every day? What are your tasks? What do you do for the schools? The students?”

  She said, “Well, I do whatever Mrs. Johnson tells me to do.”

  That’s a fine response in a bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate itself, but I knew D.C. schools needed workers downtown who were focused on tasks that had a direct impact on children and who understood that everything they did or didn’t do would impact kids. That wasn’t everyone that I found when I first started.
>
  In his four terms as mayor, Marion Barry had grown the city bureaucracy to more than forty thousand employees, and even though he had no direct control over the schools, his culture of using the D.C. government as an engine of employment had seeped into the school system. It had grown to nearly a thousand employees, and I was not convinced that all of them were needed or doing essential tasks for students.

  The “Central-Office Hydra” is what Colbert King, a Washington Post columnist who covered the city, called the DCPS administration in an essay the summer I arrived. “It is a large and powerful creature,” he wrote. “It has kept schools from opening on time, swallowed repair orders by the thousands, made teachers’ paychecks disappear, consumed tax dollars by the millions without producing any discernible results and, ultimately, acquired a well-deserved reputation for treating schoolchildren as if they are nuisances.”

  I knew there were many downtown workers who were committed to quality education, and I was determined to find them, keep them, and reward them. The ones who were using the school system for a paycheck would have to go.

  From experience I knew that things could get done. I got a call one morning from Susan Schaeffler, head of the DC KIPP charter schools and an old friend from TFA Baltimore. She was running summer school in one of our buildings.

  “The kids are supposed to show up tomorrow and the air-conditioning doesn’t work. I know this is so petty to bring to you but anything you could do would be great,” she said.

  I called maintenance and told them to fix it.

  A few hours later Susan called back.

  “I don’t know what you did but two trucks just rolled up in front of the school. They fixed the air conditioners. I don’t know how to thank you. Wow! If this is any indication of how things will change, I’m in!” she said.