By Dorothy Rowley
AFRO Staff Writer
Some $603 million has been channeled into the 120 buildings of DC Public Schools under Chancellor Michelle Rhee. (AFRO Photo/Dorothy Rowley)
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(October 28, 2009) - Second of a two-part interview
In the two years that she has been at the helm of the District of Columbia Public Schools, Chancellor Michelle Rhee, 39, has streamlined the central office so more money could be poured into the schools. As a result, for fiscal year 2010, some $603 million has been channeled into the 120 buildings where about 3,800 teachers instruct the system’s 45,000 students.
According to Rhee, student enrollment increased this year and the system, in an effort to overhaul its special education initiatives, has hired additional teachers in that area to build up the capacity of those programs.
While the chancellor believes DCPS can be fixed, she said it probably won’t occur until Mayor Adrian Fenty is well into his second term –" assuming he wins re-election," she said. "If we have six more years, I believe that’s a good timeline." She added however, that the system won’t be fixed until "we put politics and adult issues aside and do what’s right for the kids."
AFRO: We hear a lot about you being hard to get along with. Do people generally find you intimidating?
Rhee: I don’t know how I can necessarily be intimidating, but I am no-nonsense when it comes to running the system in a way that it ensures that we are, first of all, making every decision in what we believe is in the best interest of the children.
I think there are several sides to me. I think that if you talk to anybody who knows me personally, they’ll tell you that, ‘Oh, she can be very charming’ . . . [and that] I can win people over. But there is a side to me where I don’t have a lot of tolerance for adults when I feel like kids are being done a disservice.
AFRO: What is your relationship with students, teachers and parents?
Rhee: I have a good relationship with students, for the most part. I never turn down a meeting with them. Anytime a student asks me to meet with them, I absolutely will. I have a meeting with them a few times a week, either formally or informally.
I think that my relationship with parents is widely misconstrued. People say, ‘The parents are not with her, the community is not with her.’ I actually think that the vast majority of people in this city do support what we are doing. People who’ve been living in this city for a long time know how bad it was, and they see that things are getting better and they are supportive. With this thing surrounding the reductions in force, I’ve gotten tons of e-mails from parents saying that I was doing the right thing.
I think my relationship with teachers is complicated by the fact that we have not done a particularly good job communicating directly with them. So they oftentimes just get all the information from the media and from other people’s quotes. For instance, someone says ‘She’s targeting veteran teachers.’ But it’s because they read those kinds of things and think that it’s fact.
Part of our challenge is that we don’t have a lot of good ways to tell good teachers – those who are really effective– that they don’t have anything to worry about and that they are doing great things every day. That’s [been] problematic, and what we’d hoped to do through the union contract is to identify effective teachers, pay a lot more money and recognize and reward them.
AFRO: What makes for a good teacher?
Rhee: Teaching is not for the faint of heart. A good teacher is committed to what we (DCPS) are doing. Teaching in an urban district is the hardest job you can possibly have. People say I have the hardest job in the city, but I don’t. Being a good teacher is the hardest job without a doubt, and not everyone is up to that challenge.
A good teacher however, is someone who first of all, is really goal-oriented, who can tell you, ‘Here’s where the 23 kids in my class are right now and here’s where I want them to get by the end of the year, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they achieve their goals.’ Kids know when someone cares about and believes in them. And I can’t have somebody [in the classroom] who believes in their heart that there are children who can’t achieve at the highest levels.
AFRO: What happened to the incentive offered last year to veteran teachers?
Rhee: It’s still in limbo. We haven’t been able to come to a resolution with the union on the contract.
AFRO: Are DCPS students really doing better on their state-mandated tests since you took over in 2007?
Rhee: Yes. Our students have seen huge growth in their academic achievement levels. I will caveat this all by saying we are still a really long way from where we need to be – far from declaring victory. But we’ve progressed a lot. If you look at our elementary school kids, in the last two years in mathematics they’ve gained 20 percentage points, which is a huge growth for a two-year period. It’s unprecedented, almost. Whereas less than a third of our kids used to be proficient in math, now we’re right at about half of kids who are proficient. Even though we’re still lagging behind other states, what the recent NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) test results show is that we were the No. 1 state for growth in fourth grade. We were the only state in the country in which every subgroup of kids went up. And even for our eighth-graders, their growth was triple the national growth.
AFRO: Who’s responsible for past failings of the system?
Rhee: People ask me that all the time. There’s not one thing that you can point to at all. In fact, I think it’s so many things that converged on the system that caused the failure. Overall, there might be this concept that there was no lack of accountability in the system.
AFRO: What can be done at this point to improve the overall image of DCPS?
Rhee: I think we’ve started. Before the mayor took over control, whenever you heard about DCPS in the news it was to talk about how it was the worst school district in the [country]. All those sorts of bad things. But I think we’re beginning to turn that tide and while when D.C. public schools have been in the news, it’s been because they’re saying that we’re at the forefront of reform and that we’re really changing things in a way that we should be changing them. To have gone from a situation where they said we were the worst in the nation – we’re still bad – but we’re finally leading the nation in something [as important as growth] and I think that’s significant.
AFRO: What is DCPS doing to attract more students?
Rhee: One example is that we’ve started the Catalyst School Project. Basically what we did was funded schools to become specialty schools in one of three areas: world culture, arts integration and science technology engineering and math (STEM). We funded 13 schools to become Catalyst schools this year and they’re going to go through their training this year and move into full implementation next year. We started this because you hear a lot about a few schools in the District like Oyster Adams – everybody talks about it being bilingual and all the people who want their kids in it. But it shouldn’t feel to parents like you’ve hit the lottery when you get your kid into Oyster. We should just create more programs like Oyster around the city so that anyone who wants their child to be enrolled in such a program can have a spot in one.
We also ran an extensive student recruitment campaign this year for the first time, where we profiled schools that have great academic programs that are on the rise. [Some] aren’t schools that are particularly well-known in the city, but which we think are really promising schools.
AFRO: What’s in the future for DCPS?
Rhee: The mayor and I have a goal to be the highest performing urban school in the country and that we will completely close the achievement gap between White students and students of color, so that a child’s race or economic status is no longer the determining factor of how well they do in school.