Mayors of other major cities have hired reform-minded school superintendents, but in choosing Michelle Rhee, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty has gone further. He is staking his political career on her success.
“Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg [in New York] and [Richard] Daley [in Chicago] are great people,” Rhee said. “But they don’t hold a candle to Adrian Fenty in terms of the support they offer their superintendents. And I know those superintendents, so I know that none of them even come close.”
Rhee called people with her kind of passion “a dime a dozen,” and said only the mayor’s backing has made her reforms possible.
“Transfer me somewhere else and you’re going to have the same thing you get everywhere else,” Rhee said.
“But where’s a politician anywhere who says ‘You know what? I know people are going to be upset, and yes our phones are going to be ringing off the hooks, but this is the right thing to do for kids. You don’t find people like that in public office.”
Fenty thinks Rhee is being overly modest.
“She’s not a dime a dozen. She’s one of the best managers and school leaders this country has ever seen,” he said.
Whether their close partnership matters in the long run will depend on their ability to dramatically turn around the city’s long-failing schools.
“She promised me — she made all of the right representations about holding people accountable, moving fast and having kids’ priorities first so that everything else would be secondary,” Fenty said.
In return, he promised his unwavering support. And Rhee has tested it, from firing her own daughters’ principal (along with nearly 40 others) to instituting controversial monetary incentives for students with good grades and attendance.
Hayden Wetzel, archivist for nearly 200 years of D.C. school history, said the two young leaders — Fenty is 37, Rhee, 38 — have taken the first critical steps by breaking with the recent past.
“Two mayors, Anthony Williams and Fenty, and now one chancellor in Rhee have decided to declare war on the city’s personnel systems as perpetuating inefficient bureaucracies,” Wetzel said.
“The question is, if they can get rid of this thing, will what they create be any better?”
