An Unlikely Gambler

Not long after Michelle Rhee took over as head of the Washington, D.C., public schools a year ago, she announced a plan to shut down almost two dozen schools in D.C.'s decrepit, shrinking, public-education system. At a meeting at one school, parents began screaming at Rhee and throwing things. As it happened, Rhee's own parents were in Washington, visiting from Denver, and they saw the confrontation on TV. "So I come home at 11 o'clock at night," Rhee recalled in a recent interview with NEWSWEEK. "I am making myself a peanut-butter sandwich. My mother is, like, 'Are you OK?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm fine.' She said, 'You know, when you were young, you never used to care what people thought about you, and I always thought that you were going to be antisocial, but now I see this serving you well.' I was, like, 'Yeah'."

Rhee says she doesn't mind getting yelled at. "I don't take things personally," she says. Indeed, she seems unflappable, a slender, pretty young woman with a straightforward, though not humorless, manner. A tireless single mother of two young girls, she taps away at two BlackBerrys (one for her close friends and staff, the other for the city and the public at large) from early morning until after midnight, answering every e-mail personally. Her candor can be disarming, though risky in her position. "She is without guile," says her mentor, Joel Klein, the head of the New York City public schools, who adds, a little wistfully, "so rare in public life."

That is not to say that Rhee is relaxed. She says she wakes up every morning with a "knot in my stomach," and that she is "angry," though "angry in a good way." She is angry at a system of education that puts "the interests of adults" over the "interests of children," i.e., a system that values job protection for teachers over their effectiveness in the classroom. Rhee is trying to change that system. In a way that few realistic observers thought was possible, she has a chance to succeed, not just in Washington, but also around the country. She is entering into a struggle with the local teachers union that will test whether an urban school district can weed out its weak teachers—a profound threat to politically powerful teachers unions nationwide. "If she can pull it off, it's big," says Klein, who has battled, with mixed success, to tame the teachers union in New York City. Rhee's own story is a flicker, potentially a flame, of hope in the relentlessly depressing story of inner-city education.

For many years, high-achieving students chose not to be teachers (the average SAT of would-be elementary-school teachers taking a popular licensing exam is significantly below the national average for all college grads). The daughter of a doctor, Rhee, who was raised in Toledo, Ohio, describes herself as "a relatively high-achieving kid all through high school and college. So nobody tells you to go into education," she says, in her matter-of-fact way, not trying to be ironic. "You know, people are telling you to go be a doctor or a lawyer or a stockbroker. They are not telling you to be a teacher." Not sure what she wanted to do with her life as she graduated from Cornell in 1992, Rhee joined Teach For America, a then brand-new organization, created by a Princeton student, to get Ivy Leaguers to work in poor inner-city schools for a couple of years. The experience, she says, "has shaped every single day of my life since then."

Rhee was placed in one of the lowest-performing schools in Baltimore as a second-grade teacher. "It was a total culture shock for me," she recalls. While she was talking to her students as they lined up for lunch, one of the students fell down on the floor. "Each kid, as they were walking by, kicked the kid that was down," Rhee says. "I was, like, 'What are they doing?' But it was like second nature to them. The kid is down. Kick him."

Rhee was unable to stop the kids, or control them in the classroom for most of her first year. At Christmas, she went home scratching at huge welts on her arm. A doctor diagnosed stress. Her mother said, "You can apply for law school second semester." Her father, a strong believer in the work ethic and rooting for the underdog, said, "Suck it up and get back in there."

Rhee "sort of became obsessed," she says. "I was not going to let 8-year-olds run me out of town." Over the next two years, working with another teacher, she took a group of 70 kids who had been scoring "at almost rock bottom on standardized tests" to "absolutely at the top," she says. (Baltimore does not keep records by classroom, so NEWSWEEK was unable to confirm this assertion.) The key to success was, in her word, "sweat," on the part of the teacher and the students. "I wouldn't say I was a great teacher. I've seen great. I worked hard," says Rhee.