Radical

by Michelle Rhee

“We have a real opportunity to do something meaningful here,” Paul Scott said.

  They said they were committed to passing our policy agenda, but something was missing. I didn’t want to launch our state legislative agendas with the support of Republicans alone. I approached Tim Melton, a veteran Democrat serving in the Michigan House. He had chaired the House Education Committee and helped establish Democrats for Education Reform in Michigan. Would Melton help bring Democrats to the table?

  “We are on the same page on most of our issues,” I said at our first meeting. “You can support merit pay and closing failing schools. You favor teacher evaluations based on student data. You want to remove caps on successful charter schools. We should work together on this.”

  Melton agreed to get as many Democrats as possible to support the reform agenda.

  Still, many Michigan legislators started to wilt under the unions’ pressure. We found ourselves losing votes. We mobilized our members. Some wrote emails to their representatives. Some showed up at their doors. Many called.

  It was effective. So much so that one House member called StudentsFirst and said, “Please stop the emails. I get it already! I am going to vote for the reform.”

  With pressure from our members and the help of Tim Melton, Michigan passed a slate of strong reform laws on bipartisan votes.

  The teachers unions were not pleased. The Michigan Education Association and its allies sought retribution. Their target was Paul Scott. They gathered enough signatures for a recall. StudentsFirst joined the fight on Scott’s side. At the start of the campaign, our polls showed Scott was down by 20 points. With an aggressive campaign in support of Scott, we helped narrow the polls to almost even. In the end, Paul Scott lost, but by fewer than 250 votes.

  We passed all of our laws, but we lost Paul Scott. I mourned the defeat of one our staunchest supporters. But the education reformers in the Michigan legislature were undeterred. They were angry at Scott’s demise, and our defense of their colleague built trust between StudentsFirst and many legislators.

  WE WANTED TO ENSURE that we passed laws with bipartisan support. If we were affiliated with a specific party, it would compromise our ability to appeal to our broad base of members. We wanted the membership of StudentsFirst to reflect the diverse America we hoped to serve. People were flocking to StudentsFirst. Membership rose steadily, from one hundred thousand when we launched with Oprah to nearly a million by the end of our first year. But who were they? Did they comprise a diverse group?

  “How do we go about building a broad-based organization?” KMJ always asked. “If we don’t have Democrats, Latinos, and African Americans represented, we’re going to fail, just as we did in D.C.”

  I agreed.

  It made intrinsic sense. As a Democrat, I believe that access to a high-quality education is not only essential for the health of our democracy and economy, but a civil right fundamental to fulfilling the American creed. I believe civil rights delayed are civil rights denied. And the right to a high-quality education was being denied to too many of our children—especially those of color and in low-income communities.

  “I am one of the kids you’re trying to help, just forty-six years older,” KMJ said. “I came up here in Sacramento with lousy schools defined by my zip code. That was my reality.”

  “What do you propose?” I asked.

  “We have to reach out to Latino and African American communities. We must be driving the reforms for our own kids,” he said. “Let me take that on.”

  KMJ knew the terrain. Remember that he and I had met because he created St. HOPE Public Schools to give poor kids in Sacramento a better choice for public schools. So he knew about the challenges to improving schools in poor neighborhoods. In 2009, he had launched STAND UP, an organization to support high-quality schools in Sacramento.

  KMJ introduced our StudentsFirst policy agenda to the Urban League and NAACP in California. He brought it before the National Conference of Black Mayors and convinced the group to adopt our policies. At the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he chaired the education task force and aligned the conference with our agenda as part of its goals. The feedback was incredibly encouraging. These groups were clear with us that they had always wanted to make a difference on these issues, but hadn’t always been engaged by the reform community before. We were reaching out to them in the hopes of building the movement together.

  At the same time, more high-profile Democrats joined our small band. Tali Stein, a veteran Democratic fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, among others, came on to help us raise money. Hari Sevugan, a former teacher and then the spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, came on to take over our communications shop. Like me, our staff had always been predominantly young Democrats, but we were adding more credibility to our bipartisan nature with these new hires.

  Critics have tried to paint us into a corner populated by only white Republicans. If they check our supporters and our membership, they would be surprised to find teachers, police officers, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, stay-at-home moms, and farmers—in all colors, races, and income levels.

  The only absolute that our members have in common is a willingness to act on behalf of students.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2011, soon after I left DCPS, USA Today published an investigative story on standardized testing procedures in the District of Columbia. It revealed an unusual number of erasure marks on the local standardized tests of our students between 2008 and 2010. It caused quite a ruckus because it implied that the gains that our students had demonstrated weren’t real.

  I reacted as someone who had seen firsthand how much hard work the teachers, parents, and students of D.C. had put in over the past three years. I knew how much real change we had accomplished. I was resentful that anyone would question the ability of kids raised in challenging circumstances to succeed.

  Our impulse was to attack the messenger. “How dare they question the success of our students?” “There will always be cynics that can’t see—or maybe don’t want to see—our kids succeed with the right support.”

  We were misguided.

  There will always be doubters. Journalists will scrutinize school systems. It’s their role. But our reaction shouldn’t be to push back at every cynic or negative article. We have to welcome scrutiny. We don’t want any doubt about the success of our students. If that means we audit every test, so be it. Journalists and investigators are critical to showing us what we are doing well and where we need work. If audits and investigations expose cheating on tests, we are cheating our kids.

  Well before USA Today raised questions, we ordered a comprehensive review of allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the some teachers and administrators in D.C. For the first time in the history of DCPS, we brought in an outside expert to examine and audit our system. Caveon Test Security—the leading expert in the field at the time—assessed our tests, results, and security measures. Their investigators interviewed teachers, principals, and administrators.

  Caveon found no evidence of systematic cheating. None. Moreover, the District of Columbia inspector general conducted a seventeen-month examination of testing procedures and results. It found problems in only one school. The report concluded there was “insufficient evidence on which to conclude that there was widespread cheating” on tests across the city from 2008 to 2010.

  D.C. students are proving the doubters wrong with their continued progress. Since the initial tests that the USA Today story focused on, DCPS has released six sets of standardized test scores for public school students. Each of these exams has been administered under greater scrutiny and increased testing security. Some tests have included greater numbers of special education and students not yet proficient in the English language. If there had been rampant systematic cheating, as some allege, you would expect to see dramatic drop-offs in these scores after new security measures were implemented. We saw the opposite. As a whole, D.C. students have either held steady or made significant gains.

&nb
sp; The Washington Post noted these results in a series of editorials under the headlines “CHEATING ALLEGATIONS CAN’T MASK REAL GAINS IN D.C.’S SCHOOLS” and “MORE EVIDENCE THAT D.C. EDUCATION REFORMS ARE WORKING.”

  Investigations into testing procedures are ongoing. Test scores keep rising. The best response to allegations of cheating is more transparency and higher achievement.

  OUR FIRST YEAR WASN’T easy. We had ambitious goals but didn’t yet have the infrastructure in place to always support our efforts the way we wanted to. We were flying the plane as we were building it. In many ways, we were a typical start-up.

  But the dedication of our staff and our members was remarkable. By the end of year one, we had met our goals and exceeded some. We had helped change more than sixty policies in seven states. We had attracted more than a million members. We were making headway with our fund-raising goals. Given that we had started from scratch in January, we engineered an encouraging start.

  I came away with a new understanding of our potential.

  The power of StudentsFirst is not in playing the inside game. The teachers unions have a thirty-year head start on walking the halls of state capitols, bonding legislators to their causes and meting out retribution to those who cross them. We are not going to beat them at that game.

  We have to play and win in the outside game. We have to bring pressure on legislators through our members. In Florida, we brought in teachers to testify for our agenda. We mobilized so many members in Michigan that legislators begged for mercy.

  In the long term, if we are going to be successful, it will take focused and concerted action by our members. We will have to put pressure on legislators they have never felt from anyone other than unions. We will need to counterbalance the unions’ money with our members.

  Part II

  The Movement

  8

  Honoring Teachers

  I met Wanda Smith midway through my third year as chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools. Little did I know that we would leave a lasting imprint on each other.

  Wanda taught kindergarten at Kimball Elementary School, in a predominantly African American neighborhood east of the Anacostia River, at the foot of Fort Dupont Park. For two years the school had done a solid job of raising student achievement.

  When I talked to the principal about it, she said, “Great! Can you come out and meet my teachers? They were afraid you’d be disappointed!”

  A few weeks later I ordered lunch for the staff. We broke bread, and I congratulated them for taking their students to new levels in both math and reading. Many of their students came to school every morning from difficult circumstances. The staff, such as fifth-grade teacher William Taylor, whose gains with students were among the best in the city, set high expectations, and the students met them.

  As I was leaving, one of the teachers approached me. She was older and had that knowing look behind her bright eyes and broad smile. “My name is Wanda Smith,” she said. “I want you to come to my classroom.”

  Wanda had been at Kimball for about fifteen years. She had been a dependable teacher of young kindergartners. When I visited, her classroom was orderly, her kids were attentive, and her lessons were sound. I could tell that she sent her students to the first grade with the tools to continue their progress.

  Wanda and I started up an email correspondence. We talked about her classroom and the latest in pedagogy. And we gossiped about our lives.

  “What are you doing with that fine man you have?” she asked when she heard I was dating Kevin Johnson. When she learned we had gotten engaged, she wrote, “I want to plan your wedding.” The next week she brought a wedding planning book to my office. “I know you’re too busy to do this stuff, so I thought I’d give you some assistance,” she joked.

  What I didn’t realize at the time is that I had been giving some assistance to Wanda Smith, too. True, she had been a good teacher before I became chancellor. But she took my challenge that “we can’t keep making excuses in DCPS” and “every child can learn, and every child will learn” to heart.

  Wanda Smith had upped her game.

  At the end of the year, we invited teachers who had been rated “highly effective” in the IMPACT evaluations to a reception at Union Station. Since this was our first group of highly effective teachers, we wanted to celebrate them in a resounding way. We announced that each of them would be receiving a check ranging from $3,000 to $25,000 and that we would be holding a black-tie gala in their honor at the Kennedy Center in a few weeks. The teachers were thrilled.

  Wanda Smith ran up to me. Of course she had made it.

  “I want you to know you made me highly effective,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I had nothing to do with it! You have been a great teacher for years before I showed up.”

  “Not the case,” she said. “I’ve been teaching for fifteen years, and I was an okay teacher, but I didn’t know how to be really good until you laid it out for me. You established the expectations for being an excellent teacher. I haven’t always been as good as I was this year.

  “You made that happen.”

  Several weeks later, Wanda was one of the 662 teachers honored at the Kennedy Center in the first “Standing Ovation for DC Teachers.” It was the last night of my tenure as chancellor, and it might also have been the best night.

  THE CONFLICTS AND CONTROVERSIES of my three years made headlines and dominated coverage: the layoffs, the union protests, the school closings.

  What got lost were the stories of the great teachers who took the new culture we brought to DCPS and ran with it. Wanda Smith was not alone.

  Holding people to a high standard is a way of showing respect. I hold students to a high standard because I am pro-student. I hold teachers to a high standard because I am pro-teacher.

  So it is with utter dismay that I find some people portraying me as anti-teacher. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

  How can I be against teachers when I come from teachers? Teachers made me who I am. My father’s father was a principal in Korea. My mother’s mother taught kindergarten. Inspired by their example, I spent the first three years of my career after college as a full-time teacher in a classroom in Baltimore that served primarily disadvantaged students. Many of my aunts were teachers and came to the United States to help make supplies for me when I taught in Baltimore. My best friend and sister-in-law are both teachers. After graduate school, I launched a nonprofit focused on recruiting and placing teachers.

  But more than that: how can I be anti-teacher when I believe, and research has repeatedly shown, that it’s teachers—high-quality teachers—who hold the key to improving student achievement?

  To paint me as anti-teacher is simply inaccurate, a caricature to fit a political agenda. It is neither honest nor real.

  This myth was especially clear during my time as chancellor of DCPS. The reality in DCPS was that, for the first time, we finally raised our expectations and appreciated the potential of great teachers like Wanda Smith.

  Consider the case of Eric Bethel, a fifth-grade teacher who had been teaching for seven years at DCPS before IMPACT was rolled out. When StudentsFirst launched in 2010, he wrote on our blog: “It was extremely enriching to finally receive feedback that could help move my teaching forward. In the seven years prior, I never received feedback from an evaluation that allowed me to grow specific areas of instruction.” Eric Bethel wanted feedback that would help him grow as a professional. At StudentsFirst, we have conducted many surveys of teachers, and significant majorities of teachers want what Eric Bethel and Wanda Smith wanted: high expectations and clear feedback that will help them develop.

  Crucially, at DCPS and StudentsFirst, we also paired high expectations with high compensation. It’s not all about the money, but significant compensation rewards for excellent teachers are a way of signaling appreciation, raising the status of the profession, and retaining great teachers.

  As Eric wr
ote in that same blog post: “Lastly, but certainly not least, especially if you ask my wife who has been dreaming of us owning our first home for years now, is the compensation connected with being a highly effective teacher. In the next few weeks, I am set to receive a highly effective bonus that is about half of my entire teacher’s salary from last year. This bonus will greatly contribute to our dream. It is incredible that my district has moved beyond the lip service that teachers have become accustomed to hearing and has actually decided to show that they get how meaningful yet challenging teaching is. They are showing that they get it by appropriately compensating teachers who can do a great job at this extremely meaningful and incredibly challenging work.”

  STORIES LIKE THOSE OF Wanda and Eric too often get lost in a more negative narrative. Consider the media stories about the District of Columbia’s IMPACT evaluation system in July 2011, nearly a year after I had resigned from DCPS. At that time, 227 teachers were asked to leave the system for poor performance: 65 who received “ineffective” ratings that year, and another 141 who were “minimally effective” for the second year in a row. These headlines were reported in many newspapers. But you had to read deep into the stories, and sometimes search through several newspapers, to find out that 663 teachers—three times as many teachers as were let go—were rated as highly effective, making them eligible for bonuses of up to $25,000. And another 2,765—more than thirteen times as many as were let go—were rated as “effective,” meeting the raised standards that we placed on them.

  But it’s not just about evaluations. It’s also about listening. One of the major unreported stories of school reform is that it is the reformers who are actually listening to teachers, while the status quo is demanding silence and conformity.

  During my time in D.C., we held teacher listening sessions a few times a month. I would choose a school and show up for a meeting after class. There was no agenda. Administrators were not allowed to attend. It was simply an opportunity for teachers to ask questions, express concerns, share ideas, and tell me whether our reforms were working for them. These sessions were a great way for me to keep my finger on the pulse of classroom teachers. They were not always easy or positive. Teachers were honest. They trusted me enough to air their concerns. We were able to oftentimes establish strong, true bonds.