In August 2007, nearly 5,000 teachers and principals gathered at Washington DC’s convention center to meet their new leader. Though Michelle Rhee had never worked in the DC school system, she was already a familiar face: since receiving the mayor’s nomination in June, Rhee had weathered a storm of national press. Could a 37-year-old former classroom teacher and CEO who had never been a superintendent, let alone a school principal, turn around one of the worst school systems in the country?
Facing the crowd, Rhee acknowledged the pressure. “All eyes are on DC. And I truly believe that what we do here will change the way that the country thinks about urban education.” Her audience could be forgiven some degree of skepticism. Rhee is DC’s seventh schools leader in ten years. Enrollment in the district has plummeted by nearly 13,000 students in the last five years. School buildings are in gross disrepair – many with urgent plumbing and electrical problems – and xyz. Per-pupil spending is among the highest in the nation. Most staggering is the low level of student achievement. Two out of three students are not proficient in reading. And in 2006, just 28 of the district’s 148 schools met the district’s targets for student performance.
Any history of the DC public school system, and of Michelle Rhee’s attempt to reform it, is necessarily a history of Washington, DC’s struggle for local democratic control. “I don’t think most Americans experience anything like we do, where we are completely at the mercy of Congress, our budget has to be approved by the President of the United States,” says leading parent advocate Margot Berkey. The license plate on her car, and on most cars in the district, reads “Taxation Without Representation.”
When the city’s first Board of Education was formed in 1968, it represented Washington, DC’s first locally elected body. And as “the only game in town,” as education policy analyst Mike Usdan called it, the school board necessarily attracted members with interests that extended outside the public school system. Accountability for the success or failure of the schools grew even more diffuse over the next 30 years as groups including Congress, the DC City Council and Mayor, an Emergency Control Board, and a state superintendent’s office all assumed some level of responsibility.
Today, things are different. Accountability for the troubled schools rests on the shoulders of just one person, new mayor Adrian Fenty. “We will not rest until we have moved all of our schools into the category of excellent.,” said Fenty after the city council approved his bid to takeover the schools. Though Fenty is a staunch advocate of Home Rule – giving DC residents the right to voting members of Congress – he argues that school reform has a better chance of taking hold in DC with the elimination of locally elected school board. And that wasn’t the only big change Fenty had planned: just one day after assuming control of the system, he fired Superintendent Clifford Janey and nominated Michelle Rhee.
“She says change is going to come and I’m going to believe her,” a DCPS librarian said of Chancellor Rhee on the first day of school. “I’ll believe her until I see that it is not going to come.”
