Michelle Rhee, photographed May 24, 2010, at a Sacramento Press Club event in Sacramento, Calif. © Sacramento Bee/Zuma Press
In The Bee Eater, education reporter Richard Whitmire explores the personal backstory and public legacy of controversial education reformer Michelle Rhee.
by Julie Ha
If you’ve ever read a profile of Michelle Rhee, the bee eating story should ring—or buzz—familiar. Long before she became arguably this nation’s best known education reformer, and one of the most fierce, the former superintendent of Washington, D.C., public schools was an idealistic 21-year-old teacher struggling to seize control of her second-grade class at Harlem Park Elementary in Baltimore.
As the story goes, one sweltering summer day, the students were characteristically ignoring her lesson. She opened the window for some fresh air, and in flew a bee. The students grew more rowdy upon noticing the insect, so Rhee rolled up her lesson plan, smashed the bee, tossed it in her mouth and swallowed. The class fell silent. It would be several months before Rhee, part of the Teach for America program, gained some measure of control of that class, buttressed by carefully tailored lesson plans and innovative teaching tools, but after watching her swallow the bee, the students seemed a bit more willing to give this petite Korean teacher a chance. After all, she may just be a little crazy.
A crazy bee eater. It turns out that’s exactly the type of person a newly elected mayor in Washington, D.C., in 2007, would need to lead the dramatic overhaul of the nation’s worst-performing school district. At least, that’s the proposition advanced by Richard Whitmire in his just-released book, The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District (Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 2011).
“To push toward becoming a world-class city, [Mayor] Fenty needed his own change agent, someone willing to step on toes daily, maybe even hourly, and turn a deaf ear to squeals,” writes Whitmire, a veteran education reporter formerly with USA Today. “Adrian Fenty needed a bee eater.”
Although The Bee Eater is not an authorized biography, Rhee, whom Whitmire first met while he was president of the National Education Writers Association, cooperated with the book, speaking with him regularly over the course of several months and allowing him access to those closest to her, including her Korean immigrant parents (Rhee apparently gets her firebrand personalty from mom Inza), ex-husband Kevin Huffman (who urged her to take the chancellor job), current fiancé, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, and her team of innovative reformers who pushed for previously unheard-of changes in D.C.’s flailing schools.
During Rhee’s three-and-a-half-year tenure, some 400 teachers would be fired. In other words, she made enemies. Yet, between 2007 and 2009, there would be impressive gains in student achievement on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, with one urban school reform expert telling Whitmire that math and reading leaps made by D.C. fourth- and eighth-graders were “as good or better than any other city over the same period.’”
But Whitmire points out that these kinds of results didn’t lead to a public embrace of Rhee’s aggressive reforms. Instead, last September, the people of D.C. voted out her boss in a primary election that was largely seen as a referendum on her. Rhee resigned.
But the outspoken reformer hasn’t given up her fight. She is leading a national initiative called Students First, hoping to galvanize people who support reform in much the same way the teachers union was able to mobilize those opposing it.
KoreAm spoke with Whitmire last month about the controversial education reformer’s successes and failures, and reveals some little-known tidbits about a woman who’s been called everything from courageous to heartless.
Rhee in 2006 with daughters, Olivia and Starr, and mother Inza, from whom Rhee reportedly gets her “firebrand” personality.
What convinced Michelle Rhee to cooperate with your book?
I think she understood the reason I wanted to do this book, and she understood the design of the book, which is a very narrowly tailored biography essentially trying to answer: Was she on the right track for national urban school reform? Did she have the right solutions, and should they be applied elsewhere?
What aspects of Rhee’s personality would surprise people, given how she was covered in the media?
She comes off as so mean and strict and not smiling, and she’s not like that at all. She invited me to sit in on some of the sessions she runs with her top aides. I’ve been in a lot of [these types of] meetings, and they’re usually pretty stiffly run, but everyone was joking and teasing one another.
The other thing that might surprise people is [Rhee] looks like the kind of person who would eat tofu and greens all day, but she had this incredible hunger for junk food. She would eat slabs of meatloaf with mashed potatoes… [Laughs.]
I was surprised to learn that Rhee once considered becoming a labor activist.
Yeah, she is still personally, ideologically a liberal. So back then, when she was in college [at Cornell], she was interested in labor relations [and] unions. She ended up going in a different direction, but it is this odd thing about her because she’s so beloved by many conservatives, especially Republican governors.
And she became such an enemy of the teachers’ union.
Well, she’s getting to the heart of these issues and she’s having an impact, and they don’t like that. So they fought back harder with Michelle, more than with other [education reformers] frankly because Michelle’s been more effective.
Did Rhee leave the district better than she found it?
I think so. She fired a lot of less-than-competent staff in the [District of Columbia Public Schools] central office. She dismissed a lot of ineffective teachers. She closed schools that were underutilized, and she built a teacher evaluation system that’s a national model. Student achievement rose. Now, in doing all that in three-and-a-half years, she stirred up a lot of enemies, especially after the teacher firings. It triggered some racial politics.
Plus, she made some moves to encourage more middle class families, both white and black, to send their children to D.C. schools (The district has a roughly 80 percent African American student population and serves some of the nation’s poorest, with 70 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches.) In the case of one middle school in Washington’s upscale Georgetown, that [effort] turned out badly for Rhee, with protesting parents saying she was favoring white students. On primary day, that perception hurt the mayor politically.
What do you consider Rhee’s greatest success as chancellor?
It was giving the teacher quality issue a real try. School reformers have been wondering for many years what to do to improve student performance—and it settled, rightly or wrongly, on teacher quality. [Rhee] pushed the teacher quality issue harder and faster than anyone had done. That’ll be her legacy.
Her greatest failure?
She was incredibly naive politically, oddly, so was the mayor. They thought they could improve schools, and the results would be enough. And they’re not enough. You have to explain why you’re doing something, especially in the African American community.
The teacher firings were greatly misunderstood. In the black community here in Washington and elsewhere, teaching has been a real avenue to the middle class. When you’re taking jobs away, livelihoods away, you’re jabbing at the heart of the black middle class.
So [it takes] a lot of political legwork to get out there and say, “These are black principals and black assistant principals and mostly black teachers coming in on behalf of your kids because your kids are not doing well because [the fired] teachers were not teaching well.” You can make that argument, and it’s possibly politically sellable, but that argument was never even tried.
In your book, you write about Sousa Middle School in Anacostia, and it’s probably one of the most dramatic examples of a reform success story under Rhee’s tenure.
For any of your readers who saw Waiting for Superman, you saw that school in the documentary. [Student] Anthony wanted to avoid going to [Sousa] at all costs because it was an academic sinkhole. As the movie was being made, just as Michelle was coming in, they put a real kick-ass principal there, who, over the course of a couple of years, turned over the staff completely and was always in classrooms and insistent on what good teaching looks like. That school’s test score [gains] were just very, very dramatic. (See figures at left.)
You’re critical in your book of the Washington Post’s coverage of Rhee. How influential do you think press coverage was in how the public interpreted her reforms?
It was clear [from official polling I did for the 2010 mayoral primary and my interviews with voters] that people did not understand what was going on. They thought teachers had been fired for no reason at all. They didn’t even get the reforms. It had never been explained to them.
Maybe Rhee should have done it, but I think the Washington Post should have played more of a role. They reported all the Rhee controversies, but they didn’t spend that much time in the schools—saying here’s what’s going on, and here’s the theory on how this [reform] should work, and here’s how it is or is not working.
Although Rhee and Mayor Fenty lost their jobs as a result of their reform push, why do you think we’re not necessarily seeing a retreat in education reform efforts across the country, but quite the opposite?
I asked Michelle’s fiancé [Sacramento Mayor] Kevin Johnson: Considering what happened to Michelle, do you think there will be a pulling back? He said, absolutely not. I mean, she had an avalanche of job offers in spite of what happened. I think governors and mayors are just so desperate to do something with their schools, show some success, some turnaround, that they’re willing to take on some real political liability in exchange for improvements to their schools.
I sense we haven’t seen the last of Rhee.
She’s young, she’s feisty as hell, and [with Students First] she’s taken that D.C. fight national. We’ve definitely not heard the last of her.
