Fenty Going Where Villaraigosa Couldn’t
At midnight last night, Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the public schools of Washington DC. David Nakamura of the Washington Post reports on Fenty’s choice for superintendent:
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has chosen to fire D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey and replace him with the founder of a New York-based teacher-training organization, a dramatic step that signals the mayor’s desire to bring “radical change” to the failing 55,000-student system.
After assuming control of the schools at midnight, Fenty (D) planned to announce at a 9:30 a.m. news conference today that he has tapped Michelle A. Rhee for the new job of schools chancellor.
Rhee, 37, operates the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group created in 1997 that recruits and trains teachers to serve in urban districts. Fenty said she would fulfill his desire for a strong manager who would bring new ideas from the outside and remain in the position a long time.
Rhee is well-known in education circles but could prove to be a tough sell with school employees, parents and D.C. Council members, who must confirm the appointment.
She would be the first schools chief in the District who didn’t have superintendent experience since retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr. left in frustration nearly a decade ago. She has spent just three years working within a school system, as an elementary teacher in Baltimore in the mid-1990s. And, as a Korean American, Rhee would be the system’s first non-black chief in nearly four decades.
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Rhee, who lives in Denver, has a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University and a master’s in public policy, with a concentration in education policy, from Harvard University.
After spending three years in the Teach for America program, assigned to a Baltimore elementary school, Rhee founded the New Teacher Project in 1997, during the peak of a national teacher shortage.
The organization, which recruits and trains teachers to serve low-performing urban systems, has a contract with D.C. public schools. Rhee’s company has grown to 120 employees, but that is tiny compared with the size of her new job.
The D.C. public schools have 11,500 employees, a $1 billion operating budget and a $2.3 billion school modernization program. Many school buildings have leaky roofs, broken plumbing and cracked windows.
“It will be a challenge . . . but I see the potential,” Rhee said. “I have seen how the system is run and how it has the potential to run better. That can be done by changing the path.”
Rhee said her experience in Baltimore led her to believe that good teachers are the key to improving schools.
During her first year in the classroom, teaching second- and third-graders, Rhee said the students “ran over me.”
“I was not a successful teacher,” she said. “I was determined from then not to let 8-year-olds run my life.”
The next two years, Rhee said, she and another teacher co-taught a group of 70 students, of which only 13 percent were reading on grade level when they entered the class. By the end of two years, she said, 90 percent were reading on grade level. According to the New Teacher Project Web site, Rhee’s work in Baltimore was featured on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program.
“The lesson I took from that was that teachers are everything,” she said.
