Fixing Washington D.C.'s School System

By: Jeff ChuThu Aug 7, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Aiming High: At Scott Montgomery Elementary, all the kids are black and 95% qualify for free lunch. "We have a system that does wrong by poor kids of color," Rhee says. "If we're going to live up to our promise as a country, that has got to stop." | photo by Alessandra Petlin

No one is attacking Washington, D.C.'s stagnant culture more boldly than Michelle Rhee, head of the city's failing schools. Is there a lesson here for our nation's leaders?

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Story Time: Rhee won the rapt attention of third graders at Scott Montgomery with a book about an underappreciated teacher, and a tale from her own days as a Teach for America instructor in inner-city Baltimore when she captured -- and ate -- a bee that flew into her classroom. | photo by Alessandra Petlin

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Mission Critical: After Mayor Adrian Fenty, who won election promising to reform the district's failing schools, managed to get control of the system in June 2007, he named Rhee chancellor. "Every single day, he's spending political capital and losing popularity because of what we're doing," she says. | photo by Alessandra Petlin

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Rhee refuses to play the traditional, subservient role of a D.C. agency chief with the city council, which, despite its limited authority over DCPS, has repeatedly questioned her decision making and management. Sometimes, late at night, she says, she'll turn on the TV, watch a council hearing, and see her own version of a horror movie: "There's this crazy dynamic where every agency head is kowtowing. They sit there and get beat down. I'm not going to sit on public TV and take a beating I don't deserve. I don't take that crap."

In other ways, however, she's playing a more conventional political game. She freely and frequently acknowledges that she can do her job only with Mayor Fenty's support. She's out in the community shaking hands, giving speeches, attending community meetings, even throwing out the first pitch at a Nationals game. She also does some strategic micromanagement. "In the long term, if the AC is broken in a school, that shouldn't be my problem," she says. "In the short term, it's important that people feel that they have access. If they email me, I will respond personally to every single email, so they know I will get that AC fixed. I've got to make people feel like there's some sort of change happening."

Rhee has shown she's willing to be persuaded -- if the data are there. When Bruce-Monroe Elementary, a majority-Hispanic school, found itself on the closure list, parents and teachers quickly mobilized. They wrote letters. They called the papers. They protested in the streets. They collected signatures for a petition. Most important, they marshaled evidence to present to Rhee: The school had made adequate yearly progress under NCLB and was not underenrolled. When the final closings list was released in February -- this time, council members were notified ahead of time -- Bruce-Monroe wasn't on it.

The district's contract with the Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) expired last October, putting Rhee in the position of having to negotiate a new one a few months into her job. Education policy makers around the country have been watching closely to see what she would ask for -- and what she would get. "This is an industry in transformation," says Andrew J. Rotherham, codirector of the think tank Education Sector. "This is really no different from other quasi- monopolistic industries in the process of being deregulated -- and Michelle Rhee's loyalties really lie with the consumers."

Rhee has long argued that principals need more autonomy to hire and fire, and if the union and the city council ratify this contract, they will get it. The seniority system for filling jobs will be replaced with the "mutual consent" procedure used in most industries: Teachers apply for jobs they want, and bosses make their picks, ending what some D.C. parents call the "dance of the lemons," in which bad teachers bounce from school to school. Teachers will be subject to yearly performance reviews. And those who lose their jobs and can't find new ones will be classified as substitutes for a year, after which, if they aren't hired, for permanent positions, they're out.

No other major district has launched such an effective attack against the seniority system. (New York has mutual consent but no mechanism for removing unwanted teachers -- it pays them a total of $40 million a year to sit in so-called rubber rooms, where they knit, read, and collect their checks.) Most districts haven't even tried. When the D.C. negotiators told counterparts in other cities about the contract terms, Rhee says, "They were like, 'Holy crap! How on God's green earth did you get any kind of sign-off on that?' " She plays the ingenue card: "We didn't know any better. We'd never negotiated a union contract before. We just asked."

She also offered a big carrot: D.C. public-school teachers could become America's highest paid. According to a source with knowledge of the negotiations, starting salaries, now $42,000, will rise to $55,000. (The national average is around $34,000.) A fifth-year teacher with a master's, now paid $52,000, could earn $99,000. Teachers whose students show strong year-over-year gains are eligible for bonuses of up to $20,000. Teachers with 15 years' experience may be able to make more than $130,000, something even a 30-year veteran can't do now. (Existing DCPS teachers will have the option to stick with their current pay scale, but new ones will automatically be placed on the performance-based track.)

The revamped salary scale will create yet another challenge for Rhee: how to pay for it. Some of the money will come from existing city funds. But the rest will depend on the new D.C. Public Education Fund, an independent nonprofit closely aligned with Rhee. Its fund-raising goal, which will test her ability to monetize the business community's enthusiasm: $75 million per year.