An Unlikely Gambler

She had an epiphany of sorts. In the demoralized world of inner-city schools, it is easy to become resigned to poor results—and to blame the environment, not the schools themselves. Broken families, crime, drugs, all conspire against academic achievement. But Rhee discovered that teachers could make the critical difference. "It drives me nuts when people say that two thirds of a kid's academic achievement is based on their environment. That is B.S.," says Rhee. She points to her second graders in Baltimore whose scores rose from worst to best. "Those kids, where they lived didn't change. Their parents didn't change. Their diets didn't change. The violence in the community didn't change. The only thing that changed for those 70 kids was the adults who were in front of them every single day teaching them."

Rhee (with parental consent) made the kids go to school on Saturdays and gave them two hours of homework a night, so they would "not watch TV or sit on the stoop or play Nintendo." She slowly won the respect of parents. "My first year of teaching, they were, like, 'We do not want the crazy Korean lady,' and by the time I left, they were, 'Where are you going? You can't leave'."

Rhee stayed in education, starting an organization, The New Teacher Project, devoted to recruiting better teachers for hard-to-staff inner-city schools. She caught the attention of Joel Klein, who was trying to reform the New York City school system under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Klein, in late 2006, recommended Rhee to Adrian Fenty, the newly elected mayor of Washington, D.C., who staked his reputation on fixing D.C.'s chronically poor schools.

At first Rhee said she was not interested. "It's not a job you would want," she says. "You have your hands tied. You have to deal with school boards. It's all about politics. You can't get anything done. It's an impossible job." But Fenty managed to convince Rhee that he was serious. Skeptical (she says she was "not wowed" by the mayor at first), she asked him, "What would you be willing to risk at the chance of being able to transform the schools?" According to Rhee, he "didn't hesitate. He said, 'Everything'." Rhee warned him that she was not politically correct and was sure to cause him political pain. (Last week Fenty told NEWSWEEK, "I don't want to look back on our time and say we were careful, we did the politically correct thing.") Fenty has kept his word to Rhee. His first act was to take away power from the D.C. school board, which had been for many years an obstacle to real reform. He showed a willingness to open up the city's checkbook. At one meeting not long ago, he asked Rhee how much more money she might need. "It would be about $40 million," she answered. (The D.C. school's annual budget is just under $800 million.) The stunned city administrator, Dan Tangherlini, spluttered, "We don't have an extra $40 million." Fenty ordered the administrator to start figuring out a way to get the money, even if it meant citywide reductions in force. (Fenty and Rhee communicate several times a day by e-mail and cell phone.)

Even measured by the low standard of inner-city schools, Washington's have long been among the worst. The math and reading skills of its students lag two or three years behind national norms, despite per-student expenditures greater than in any major city outside of New York. The school bureaucracy had a reputation for bloat and incompetence, and an almost Stalinist resistance to reform. (When she arrived, no one could tell her how many textbooks the schools owned.) The former president of the teachers union, Barbara Bullock, is now serving a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence for embezzling $4.6 million. She admitted using union funds to buy 13 furs, 37 designer handbags and a 288-piece antique Tiffany silver set (she told the judge she is now mentoring young inmates, who call her "Grandma").

Rhee is the seventh person to run the D.C. schools in the past 10 years. Most of her predecessors were, according to Rhee, "smart and worked hard and wanted to do the right thing for kids," but "they didn't get a whole lot done." The reason, she says, is that they "caved in" to the city's educational establishment, whose talk of reform was just that.

Rhee showed she was serious by firing more than a hundred non-union central office workers, including administrators, and 36 principals (one out of four). She even fired the principal of the school where she chose to enroll her own daughters, Starr, 9, and Olivia, 6. "I can't talk about the details, but let's just say I was in that school three days a week. I know what was going on there." The "sad thing," she said, "was when a parent e-mailed me to say that she [Marta Guzman, the fired principal] couldn't possibly have been one of the worst principals in the system. My answer was, is that our standard? Have our expectations been so lowered?" One co-chairman of the school's PTA, Eduardo Barada, accused Rhee of racism for ousting a Hispanic principal. (Guzman told NEWSWEEK that she did not know why she had been fired, a characterization Rhee disputes.) But the other PTA co-chair, Claire Taylor, told NEWSWEEK, "Rhee's making decisions that should have been made years ago, and she's accountable for those decisions. And that is what is so disarming to parents who have been traumatized by this school system." Taylor was impressed by Rhee's cool at raucous parents' meetings. "She clearly is a brave person. I have been in rooms where parents are hysterically upset and she walks in so quietly respectful, telegraphing accountability, and says, 'I'm gonna do something you may not like, but it's for the good of the children, and I'm doing it, it's all me'."