Michelle Rhee

Michelle Ann Rhee (born December 25, 1969) is an American educator and advocate for education reform.

She graduated from the private Maumee Valley Country Day School in 1988, and went on to Cornell University where she received a B.A. in government in 1992.

She later earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Inspired by a PBS special that she saw during her senior year in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America, went through their five-week summer training program, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland.

She was assigned to Harlem Park Elementary School, one of the lowest-performing schools.

Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, "I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town."

She said she took courses over the summer and received her teacher's certification, then returned to teach at Harlem Park.

Her "Teach For America" Training did not prepare her well to handle basic classroom management.

She was so unprepared that in order to quiet down a class she taped children's mouths shut.

One of the children's lips bled a little when the tape was removed.

In her second and third years of teaching, Rhee team taught a combined class of the same students with another teacher.

Earlier she had said on her résumé that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile.

In math, her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually.

In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually.

Rhee responded that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones listed on her résumé could be explained by the fact that her principal at the time informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.

In 1997, Rhee founded and began serving as the CEO of The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that within ten years of its founding, trained and supplied urban school districts with 23,000 mid-career professionals wanting to become classroom teachers.

The project primarily serves New York, Chicago, Miami, and Philadelphia.

Beginning in 2000, the project began redesigning the D.C. schools' recruitment and hiring processes.

She was Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools from 2007 to 2010.

In 2007 the D.C. Board of Education was stripped of its decision-making powers and turned into an advisory body, and the new office of chancellor was created—so changes in the public school system could be made without waiting for the approval of the board.

Newly elected D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty quickly offered Rhee the job of chancellor; she accepted after being promised mayoral backing for whatever changes she wanted to make.

Critics noted that Rhee had no experience running a school system, and had not even been a principal.

She had been highly recommended to Fenty, however, by Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City public schools.

Rhee inherited a troubled system; there had been six school chiefs in the previous 10 years, students historically had below-average scores on standardized tests, and according to Rhee, only 8 percent of eighth graders were performing at grade level in mathematics.

The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the U.S. Fenty and Rhee announced that they planned to make revolutionary changes in D.C. schools, and that part of the planned changes was a hoped-for "grand bargain" with teachers under which "greater accountability, including an end to tenure," would be traded "for a nearly 100-percent increase in salaries."

In 2008 she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained.

Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment.

In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit organization that works on education reform.

She began her career by teaching as a Teach for America corps member for three years in an inner city school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project.

Rhee was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second of three children of South Korean immigrants Shang Rhee, a physician, and Inza Rhee, a clothing store owner.

She was raised in the Toledo, Ohio area and educated in public schools, through the sixth grade.

Her parents then sent her to South Korea to attend school for one year.

Upon her return, they enrolled her in a private school because they felt the public school was lacking.

In 2010 Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20 percent pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for "strong student achievement," in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year.

Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice.

Rhee's style of reform created a great deal of controversy.

She told The New York Times that those students had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile.

One common criticism disputes her assertion that, while a teacher, she dramatically increased students' average scores from the 13th percentile to the 90th.

It was a statement that could not be verified during her confirmation process for D.C. Schools Chancellor.

Rhee contended that under her chancellorship, student achievement in the D.C. Public Schools greatly improved.