Michelle Rhee’s resignation as District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor, effective at the end of October after less than four years on the job, marks the end of a short, but intense and productive period of fundamental reform in the District’s chronically substandard public schools system. City residents — especially those with children — have Rhee and her political patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, to thank for this new focus on holding administrators, principals and teachers accountable for the results of their performance.Rhee made mistakes along the way, including her use of questionable budget figures to close unneeded schools less than a month before classes began and by appearing on Time magazine’s cover with a broom. She also antagonized some voters by publicly working for Fenty during his primary campaign against the eventual winner, D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, and then calling Fenty’s defeat “devastating” for the city’s schoolchildren.
But Rhee also made a lot of enemies, and in all the right places, particularly the Washington Teachers’ Union, the single biggest obstacle to needed reform. The WTU endorsed Gray, spent thousands of dollars on advertising on his behalf and provided much of the energy behind his campaign. Even so, Rhee’s departure is not another example of the all-too-familiar exit of school superintendents who came in promising great reform but were eventually either worn down or pushed out by political infighting.
By courageously standing up to union members who put their own interests before the welfare of the children in their care, Rhee literally reset the bar. Her unrelenting demand that teachers either improve their performance or be fired profoundly changed the terms from a teacher-centered to a student-centered debate. Rhee’s lasting legacy is that DCPS teachers’ performance is now measured by data-driven performance metrics that are directly tied to student achievement. Such accountability has been a long time coming, and could easily be lost if Rhee’s successor is not fully committed to continuing her reforms. Initial signals from Gray, who has asked Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson to serve as interim chancellor, are positive.
As a former Teach for America executive, Henderson knows Rhee and her reforms from the inside, knows the school system, knows the city, and most importantly, knows exactly what remains to be done to preserve Rhee’s vision of DCPS. Gray can reassure D.C. residents, demonstrate a much-needed independence from WTU and take the wind out of the budding write-in Fenty campaign now under way by making clear Henderson will be his choice as Rhee’s permanent replacement.
