I was surprised, but not that surprised, last month when my father-in-law gave me Michelle Rhee’s campaign-style autobiography, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First, as a Christmas gift. My father-in-law and I see more or less eye to eye on most things, but we also enjoy nuanced discussions about politics and current events, especially when they intersect with education. “It’s good to read people you don’t necessarily agree with,” he said. On that point, I agreed whole-heartedly. I promised to read the entire book and to do so with an open mind.
I have now completed my reading assignment. It was light and quick reading. It perhaps goes without saying, but I will start by pointing out the obvious: Michelle Rhee is a very accomplished woman. She graduated from two Ivy League schools. She taught elementary school in Baltimore. She founded and ran The New Teacher Project (TNTP), revamping teacher recruitment and hiring in several large urban school districts and publishing influential public policy reports on teacher hiring and evaluation. She ran the Washington, D.C. Public Schools. She founded a non-partisan political advocacy organization, StudentsFirst. In telling her story, Rhee touches on each of these roles and gives an inside look at how her thinking evolved on matters of education policy. Mostly, though, this book reads like a campaign brochure: offering up humanizing stories about a public figure who has been endlessly (and sometimes unfairly) caricatured, while relentlessly pressing a message about quality teachers and greater accountability.
Without a doubt, the book is strongest when Rhee is recollecting her personal journey. In the early chapters, she breezily strings together several memorable turns in her life – including the culture shock of spending her seventh grade year in Korea with her extended family, volunteering in a Toledo elementary school classroom, her political awakening at Cornell, even the summer job managing a deli where she fired her first employee. Like many adolescents and young adults, the younger Rhee is searching for her identity – trying to navigate several worlds and make sense of sometimes contradictory worldviews – but the older Rhee writing these words is bold, assertive, and confident in who she is and what she stands for. And so the underlying theme that unites the stories from her childhood and young adulthood is one that would be recognizable to anyone who knows Rhee’s public narrative: she is an outsider adapting to new contexts so that she can assert control over and transform them. Given the rampant inequality affecting America’s schools, it is hard not to find such a story – and thus, a figure like Rhee – compelling. But I do think that eminent Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson was well overstating the case when he wrote a book blurb claiming that Radical was “one of the most important and compelling books” he has ever read.
Throughout the book, Rhee offers candid reflection on what shaped her worldview and how she learned from failure. She shows a refreshing deference and appreciation for mentors and teachers – including her family, her students, and her many colleagues. Moreover, I agree with her observations that the provision of education in this country is unequal – with some students receiving a decidedly higher quality education than others, often determined by where they were born – and that such inequality is unjust. Related to this, I also agree that bold, even radical, changes are needed to transform education policy and practice. In general, I think that we have different opinions about what radical change is needed, but I admit that at several points I found myself nodding along to her story.
Education policy too often involves uncomfortable choices, nearly all of them either/or choices and almost never both/and choices. Reading about how Rhee navigates seemingly lose-lose propositions, like the closing of schools, invited an unexpected sympathy for her predicament and an appreciation of the complex dynamics confronting the leader of a large urban district like Washington, D.C. In 2007, Rhee notes that the district had 50,000 students in its public schools (plus another 20,000 in charter schools), down from a peak of 146,000 in the 1960s. As a result, it had a surplus of school buildings, many of which were operating well below capacity. Such a mismatch between the number of students and the number of school buildings poses an uncomfortable dilemma for district leaders. On the one hand, schools – even under-enrolled schools – are often the epicenter of communities, gathering places and points of pride. By shuttering them, districts invite more blight and disinvestment. On the other hand, the costs involved in keeping under-enrolled schools open – electricity, heat, general maintenance – can preclude fully staffing each school, and the positions deemed most expendable tend to be the ones most valued by families and communities. Rhee writes, “We knew that if we closed the twenty-seven schools… we could ensure that every school in the district had an art, music, and physical education teacher as well as a librarian, nurse, and guidance counselor/social worker. It was what families across the city had told me they wanted” (p. 135). I appreciated the data gathering and due diligence that Rhee reports undertaking in making her decision to close schools, but the process she recounts is still largely top-down and thus perhaps not surprising that it stirred up so much community opposition. It is possible, in other words, that the right policy was implemented with the wrong process.
Despite occasional areas of agreement and points of sympathy, however, I found Rhee’s diagnosis of the problems in education and her vision for reform notably lacking in nuance. Her meteoric rise from teacher to policy advocate to district leader to national education reform figurehead enabled her to build constructive relationships with stakeholders across our education system (many of which are reconstructed in her narrative). And yet, in spite of Rhee’s relatively global perspective on the U.S. education system, she was curiously quick to assign blame for the varied ills of our education system on a single source: the intransigence and oversized political power of teachers unions. To be sure, teachers unions do not come off looking very well in Rhee’s account. She has special (and for all I know deserved) disdain for Randi Weingarten’s role in D.C. contract negotiations. That said, I hardly find it credible that unions deserve all of the blame she lays at their feet. (In fact, Ben Spielberg points out that unions as a whole – including teachers unions – have over time been a potent force for reducing income inequality.) One could, I suppose, see Rhee’s consistent finger-pointing as a boost for her reliability, evidence that each of her many positions in the education sector led her to the same conclusion. However, Rhee’s tone undercuts her credibility. In her relentless critique of unions, Rhee comes off as a vengeful and spiteful antagonist.
Despite this, I think it would be an unfair caricature to say that Rhee is unequivocally “anti-teacher.” She makes a direct defense of this charge in the book, equating her support for performance pay to her respect for teachers. But I think her more convincing defense may be in her own experience. In summing up her first few months in the classroom, Rhee demonstrates a humility that many (if not most) first-year teachers would surely echo: “I have gone through some difficult and painful times in my life,” she writes, “but nothing compares to my first year as a teacher. It was the hardest time of my life, period.” As a district leader, Rhee reports trying to keep in touch with the teachers’ perspective by holding “teacher listening sessions,” after school meetings without administrators and with no agenda: “simply an opportunity for teachers to ask questions, express concerns, share ideas, and tell me whether our reforms were working for them” (pp. 205-206).
I take at face value Rhee’s assertion that she admires and wants to honor good teachers (which for her means differentiating teacher performance through evaluation using value-added measures, then paying performance bonuses for the high achievers and removing the low achievers). In laying out her case for honoring teachers, though, Rhee seems to believe that teacher quality is a largely individual attribute – and one that can be more or less accurately represented by a number. Rhee’s view of teacher quality as an individual attribute is evident in the story she tells about her own transformation as a teacher. Indeed, it is a familiar trope: disheartened, she realizes that she is the problem and considers quitting but decides to persevere; wise veteran teachers tell her to plan more engaging lessons and expect more from her students; newly determined to improve, she gets tougher and earns respect from students and families alike; she enters her second year determined to apply the lessons she’s learned and does so to great acclaim. Though it sounds like a cliché, I have to assume that Rhee is writing a truthful account of her experience, and there are surely valuable lessons for novice teachers in her story.
That said, her story’s arc – and the vision of teaching that infuses the rest of her book – reinforces a perilous myth about education: that of the maverick teacher. When discussing teachers from whom she has learned, Rhee paints them as lone rangers, as people whose grit and perseverance enables them to succeed where others fail. As someone who had a handful of great teachers and who is now married to a teacher, I admit that I am as susceptible to this myth as anyone. When someone like Rhee tells me that “[t]reating teachers with respect means that we acknowledge how difficult it is to be a teacher” (p. 217), I nod my head in vigorous agreement. But her corollary to this argument – the one that gives me pause – is that, because great teachers are so transformative, we must find ways to differentiate between them so that we can reward the great ones and remove the bad ones.
I agree that successful teachers are determined and independent, but just as research has uncovered the large effect of teachers on student learning considerable research has also found that that successful schools are not merely aggregations of successful individuals. Rather, schools are ecosystems with dynamic and collaborative communities where teachers feel responsible for each other. Rhee is right to applaud those teachers who were so influential to her, but she should not be so quick to wave off the veteran teachers who she says “scoffed at” her successful use teaching techniques (p. 50). Such divisiveness ultimately has negative effects on students.
This is not to say that Rhee – or anyone else – should merely abide substandard practice in the name of community-building, but education and education reform cannot be reduced to such a simple either/or binary. Indeed, to see education and education reform as either supporting bold anti-union reform or an unjust “status quo” is a myopic and false choice. To frame complex issues in such a manner is not a service to serious deliberations. It is, however, a savvy political move. And in the end, Michelle Rhee is a savvy political figure and this is her political campaign book. To treat political rhetoric too seriously is to get sucked into a swirl of false choices and lose-lose conversations.
Although Michelle Rhee did not succeed in signing me up for her campaign through this book, I am not sorry I read it. I am only sorry that she did not choose to write something different.