The day after Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid last September, Michelle Rhee, the city’s schools chancellor and No. 1 lightning rod, had an OMG moment. For three years, Fenty had constantly spent political capital defending Rhee as she fired hundreds of teachers and principals, closed schools, and earned both education reformers’ adoration and teachers’ unions’ wrath. He eventually paid with his job — and she knew she’d soon pay with hers. What am I going to do? she thought.
She went to Hawaii with her fiancé, Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star, charter-school founder, and Sacramento mayor. At this point, she was flooded with job offers. “I know how you are. You just want to make a decision and jump into the next thing,” Johnson said to Rhee. “I’m not going to let you do that. We’re going to take our time.” She replied, “That’s not how I operate.” “Well, this is the way you’re going to do it this time,” he said.
On October 13th, Rhee announced her resignation. Suitors — rumored to include Chicago mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — kept coming after her. She says one private-sector exec offered her well north of $1 million a year, “and I literally wasn’t going to have to do anything.” Says Johnson: “She was getting really antsy because she doesn’t like being in limbo.”
In October, Charlie Rose interviewed Rhee at the Forstmann Little conference in Aspen, Colorado. As they discussed the problems with America’s education system, a plan began to crystallize in her mind. Later that day, Rhee flew to Sacramento and went with Johnson and his mother to dinner at Mulvaney’s, one of her favorite restaurants. Johnson could sense something was up. “She just had this clarity and this peace,” he recalls. He gave Rhee his business card, and she started scribbling on the back. By dinner’s end, they had the outline of an organization that would throw huge amounts of money behind the brand of reform that Rhee has long advocated, first as founding CEO of the New Teacher Project and then as D.C. chancellor. It would be set up not as a charity but as a political-advocacy and membership group, along the lines of AARP or the NRA, and it would rely on private donations and Rhee’s star power. “This is it,” Johnson told her with a smile.
