Despite having one of the highest rates of spending per student among large school systems in the United States, the Washington D.C. public school system (how can I put it gently?) sucks.
The city’s relatively new (appointed last year) chancellor, Korean-American Michelle Rhee, is trying to change that.
Her appointment last year raised some eyebrows:
Her appointment stunned the city. Rhee, then 37, had no experience running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranks last in math among 11 urban school systems. When [Mayor Adrian] Fenty called her, she was running a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which helps schools recruit good teachers. Most problematic of all, Rhee is not from Washington. She is from Ohio, and she is Korean American in a majority-African-American city. “I was,” she says now, “the worst pick on the face of the earth.”
Her biggest reform so far is the ongoing process of removing ineffective teachers and administrators from the system, that has naturally gotten her off of the Christmas card list of the teacher’s union, some city officials and at least one blogger.
Perhaps someone in the ancestral homeland would like to hire her to clean things up in hagwonland.
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Is it just me or is that blogger, uh, not very good.
Death to the N.E.A and the U.F.T.
the atlantic did a much better piece.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/michelle-rhee
And wasn’t there a thread on her on this site a couple of months back?
yes, dogbertt. There was a thread that she was a rabid Obama fan.
Let’s see if she can deliver it.
It’s in the right direction.
NEA cares foremost about teachers, not students, not education. NEA, UAW, same thing.
would be interesting if Obama will screw over the unions during his reign. Highly doubt it.
KAs will make America better, one town at a time.
DC is the first one.
# 4,
Yeah I did back around mid-October.
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/10/18/she-may-not-be-joe-the-plumber-but/
Still… my gut tells me we’ll hear more about Ms. Rhee in the future.
What, you folks actually expect me to read this blog before I post?
So, it’s good enough for you to write for, but not for you to read?
And Baduk, get back on yer meds.
Here’s an interview with Charlie Rose
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9170
I think it’s a bit ironic, to say the least, how so many westerners go berserk over how korean education emphasizes test results way too much when Michelle Rhee is getting all kinds of accolade for setting DC education in the same direction.
# 10,
I think the U.S. educational system needs a little bit of Korea and the Korean educational system needs a little bit of the U.S.
yeah, there’s something good to find in-between them…
Despite having one of the highest rates of spending per student among large school systems in the United States, the Washington D.C. public school system (how can I put it gently?) sucks.
TFA mentions that most of that money gets sucked into the wasteful bureaucracy rather than actually being spent on the students. Yet one doesn’t hear about her doing anything about that.
The increased pay for merit concept goes only so far in the high-need areas. You can have the greatest teacher in the world. You put her in one of the worst schools and after about a year that teacher winds up a cynical and disillusioned person whose ready to quit. What the schools need are tough, discipline-mined principals (preferably men) who have the teacher’s back, who will not tolerate out-of-control behavior in the classrooms. You can’t be a good teacher if you’re spending most of your time doing “classroom management” rather than actually teaching.
Furthermore, I’d have for respect for Michelle Rhee if she had many years of experience as an actual teacher, grinding away in the classroom, dealing with deluded parents who think their child does no wrong and putting up with idiotic administrators. Her two stint in Teach for America? Give me a break. This is a multi-faceted problem that demands a multi-faceted solution. Teachers are overworked, underpaid and are only trying to do their job in a highly unsympathetic environment. They are NOT the source of the problem.
The number of male principals is disproportionate to the number of male teachers, and I’ve not seen any evidence of a relationship between gender and toughness. Nobody messed with the 5’1″ female principal of a middle school where I used to teach. The principal of the alternative school for troubled youth in the same district was a tough broad who was both fair and firm.
Exactly, and that’s where competent administrators take over. Our school’s administrators are outstanding at either dealing directly with the child or collaborating with teachers to find strategies that work. Sadly, there are a growing number of children for whom no known interventions work. As a teacher, I see the future workforce that will support us in our retirement, and among them are a fair number who will become net consumers rather than producers, spending time in jail or on public assistance. Folks may gripe about illegal immigrants, but by and large, their children aren’t the ones literally being carried out of the classrooms for extreme, non-compliant behavior.
this might be counter-intuitive/crazy, but maybe they needed someone who was already hated and ridiculed to actually do things for which they would be hated and ridiculed. Maybe those who were actually liked would be too obsessed with keeping their reputation to make the unpopular changes. As much as the D.C. system sucks, no one likes changes, especially when it means their jobs are at risk. I don’t like putting the entire D.C. system in the hands of someone who is grossly unqualified…but at this point maybe it is time to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
“Here is part of what I was thinking to post on this earlier but decided against (editorial decision)”:
While education is a very contentious issue in Korea, regarding the cost-to-quality relationship and the economic impact upon households in Korea, Michelle Rhee, the current chancellor of public schools in Washington, D.C., (and Korean-American) has proposed a new idea in the local school system that has captured the attention of many. She has offered teachers in her school system a large salary increase if they give up their right to tenure.
Ms. Rhee is essentially union-busting since both good and bad teachers get tenure, the only way to flush out the poor teachers is to get past the tenure barrier.
The question, then, is “is this good for the students and system?”
According to follow-up letters on this issue, Christopher L. Doyle of Simsbury, Conn is a high school teacher and has written, regarding this proposal, that:
This is not to mention the increase in cost to the parent and system to support such an approach. Then there is another letter that mentions the effects of having unionized education:
As for Ms. Rhee, she says “People who aren’t achieving results for kids — that’s where we’re going to be more prescriptive,” . . . in the end, they have to be willing to take personal responsibility.”
One did a bang up job in Blacksburg, Virginia.
wjk, she is not a rabid Obama fan. She said she almost voted for Mccain http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/29/AR2008112902104.html. In a city that is 95% democrat, that makes her quite far on the conservative side relatively.
She has cut the bureaucracy quite a bit. She let go a large number of central office staff. That was her first goal, to get at will firing authority for the administrative staff. Her now second goal is to get the same authority for teachers.
As to her lack of teaching experience, I don’t think that is a bad thing. Why does experience with what doesn’t work good? Yes she has limited experience, but it was with exactly the kind of students DC has, and by all accounts she did improve scores in the classes she taught.
The teacher’s unions are not idiots. Rhee is promising six figure salaries in return for giving up tenure. Unless one is extremely naive, the 6 figure salary is mostly an illusion. However, once you give up that tenure, it’s gone. You’d be a fool to accept that kind of deal. They will be fighting Rhee in a long, drawn-out battle tooth and nail. This is where she will devote most of her energies, while other critical matters languish.
The other major flaw with her reform is that there is a fundamental implicit assumption that most of the teachers will somehow turn out to be hyper-idealistic superheros who will consistently teach effectively, meeting the standards, while putting up with all the myriad difficulties that a teacher faces working in inner-city schools. Bullshit. Maybe Rhee somehow figured out a way to circumvent the law of averages or the standard distribution curve but I think this will turn out to be a fatal miscalculation. For what I gather, she’s all about demanding great teachers but nothing about creating the kind of environment in the schools where such teachers can thrive and where learning can happen. This to me is like putting the cart before the horse. She has no clue, for instance, about how to deal with student violence. The very people who are supposed to do the actual grunt work of carrying out Rhee’s reforms, the teachers, have been demoralized by her actions. She expects teachers to be leaders in the classroom but she as chancellor has shown poor leadership.
She was not meant for this job.
Michelle Rhee is basically a corporate-style goon set loose in education. There’s nothing original about her ideas or tactics, they are all borrowed from the business world. What has she actually accomplished in the past 1.5 years to deserve to be on the cover of Time besides firing a bunch of people and creating a ton of enemies? Nothing really.
Comments about how “hot” Ms. Rhee is conspicuously missing this time around…
It is a myth that tenured teachers can’t be fired. They can if the school takes the time and effort to document unsatsifactory performance and failure to improve. Ms. Rhee has fired teachers in a union district.
If unions are a cause of the decline in educational achievement, then one would expect non-union districts to perform better than union ones. The states that consistently score at the bottom in educational achievement are in the non-union South. There is probably no cause-effect relationship between unions and achievement although there may be a correlation – states with fewer at-risk children may be more union-friendly.
I think Netty Kim is a liberal, because his day time job is school teaching.
I love her idea of surprise inspections. That’s got to freak the shit out of some principals and VPs who’ve made a career out of bullshitting. I only wish she could be given carte blanche dictatorial power over some Korean school districts.
There is typically a three-year probationary period. Good principals recommend good teachers for re-employment because their own jobs depend on competent teachers. If a school fails to meet AYP for three consecutive years, the federal government can come and fire any personnel, including principals.
Skinner!!!!
If unions are a cause of the decline in educational achievement, then one would expect non-union districts to perform better than union ones.
One would also expect charter schools in Washington DC itself to perform way better than the unionized public schools. But the data simply does not reflect that. Michelle Rhee claims that she is data-driven, which is obviously not true. The empirical evidence does not justify her anti-union agenda.
I don’t believe for a moment that Michelle Rhee has no agenda and that she’s just “all about the kids”. Give me a break. She’s a public official, in a highly political environment, and she definitely has an agenda. Rhee is a pawn of the right-wing planted in the school system. She is trying to apply elements of free-market ideology to the public schools. Her anti-union stance attracts corporate sponsorship. In fact, that’s how she raised a billion dollars. It’s about money, not the kids.
The reason why distressed schools remain distressed is because the qualified teachers all flee to the suburbs. Because teachers get assaulted by their own students. There is no law and order in the schools. Restoring discipline, order, and respect for authority should be the priority number one.
I think Netty Kim is a liberal, because his day time job is school teaching.
I am not a teacher. But I am a liberal. Have you accept Barack Obama as your personal lord and savior?
I have accepted Obama as the new leader.
It is interesting to me, personally, that he is staffing himself with Clinton’s people.
It is also interesting that he’s not going to follow thru on his tax hike on the rich.
Whatever. As long as he gets the job done.
I think he used race and the war to get where he is.
I really don’t care at all about FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT ever.
That is called reverse racism.
In light of Mumbai, I think W did a damn good job on that matter.
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