An Unlikely Gambler

Other parents call her a "dictator" and predict she will flee or be driven into exile. "She gives you this stare as if she's looking right through you. 'I'm listening but I'm not hearing you'," says Clarence Cherry, another local PTA head. "Rhee and her people are not from D.C. They don't understand us. They are here for the money. She'll be here two years, tops." As a Korean-American, Rhee was regarded with suspicion by some in D.C., where 85 percent of public-school students are black, and where racial identity can still matter. But her directness and purposefulness have won over some early critics, like Ray Behbehani, a parent who was initially angered by Guzman's dismissal. "She may not be the warmest person, or maybe it's just me, I don't read Asian faces and people well, but she's got it totally together," he told NEWSWEEK.

Rhee's toughest fight, by far, is coming up. She has proposed a new contract for the union that would undermine tenure, the teachers union holy of holies. The carrot is money. By tapping Mayor Fenty and private philanthropists, she is hoping to make D.C. teachers the best-paid in the country. Current teachers would actually have a choice. If they are willing to go on "probation" for a year—giving up their job security—and can successfully prove their talent, they can earn more than $100,000 a year and as much as $130,000, a huge salary for a teacher, after five years. If not, they still get a generous 28 percent raise over five years and keep their tenure. (All new teachers must sign up for the first option and go on probation for four years.) Rhee predicts that about half the teachers will choose to take their chances on accountability for higher pay, and that within five years the rest will follow, giving up tenure for the shot at merit pay hikes.

She may be overly optimistic about getting the union to accept her terms. The union president, George Parker, has been willing to work with Rhee, but he has taken heat from some union members who accuse him of cozying up to the school chief. Privately, Rhee and Parker have had some shouting matches. Rhee said she would refuse to sign a contract that had provisions that are "bad for kids," and Parker is balking at the probationary period for teachers. (Some of his experienced teachers say they are "insulted" by the probation requirement, but Rhee told NEWSWEEK that probation is "non-negotiable" because it goes to the heart of the matter, the ability to remove teachers who are not performing well.) In one meeting, according to Rhee's own account, she said to Parker: "Either we do this with you or we do this to you." And then she challenged him by saying, "You don't have what it takes to pull this off."

Parker is caught in the middle. At the end of a week of meeting with suspicious and hostile teachers groups in early August, he appeared tired and beaten-down. (Rhee, who had sat in on many of the same meetings, seemed cool and relaxed.) The union's vice president, Nathan Saunders, has sued Parker to open up the negotiations to a wider group of union officials. "George was negotiating as if this was a private contract, one on one," says Saunders. "My reaction was, oh, hell no! The best unions have large negotiating teams. We had two folks dating." Saunders is whipping up opposition in the union. "I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats," says Saunders. A black inner-city kid who made a fortune on real estate, Saunders is a smart dresser who sports bow ties and talks a lot about "due process." Indeed, a critical and so far unresolved question is how teachers will be judged. Rhee will insist on hard data—test scores—showing effectiveness in the classroom, but union members warn about arbitrary firings.

The union can play hard. When Rhee moved to reclassify some central-administration workers so they could be terminated without cause, the union began running 60-second radio ads attacking Rhee, playing "Back Stabbers" by the O'Jays as background music. But Rhee has some sticks to wave as well as carrots. Although she will not go into detail, it is a good bet that she will find other legal tools to hold teachers accountable even if the teachers refuse to sign a contract. "I believe this contract is going to pass," she told NEWSWEEK. "And I believe it is going to have a huge impact." But, she added, "even if it didn't, it would not stop me."

The fact is that D.C.'s school system is shrinking. About a third of D.C. parents now opt to send their kids to charter schools, which are public schools—but where the teachers are non-union. The union has lost more than a thousand of its more than 5,000 teaching slots during the past decade. Rhee, it appears to many, is not interested in protecting turf. If she can open more charter schools that are better than the regular city schools, she seems willing to let the old system wither away. At first charter schools were often no better or even worse than schools in the system, but lately some—particularly the KIPP schools—have been scoring higher on tests. If the union doesn't accept reform, it may not have many jobs left to protect.

Rhee doesn't quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets. Rhee succeeded in Baltimore because she worked like a demon. The KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee's world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on. "There are some absolutely fabulous teachers who have taught in very tough settings for 20 years and have consistently produced stunning growth, and have somehow found the stamina to do it, while some energetic 24-year-olds aren't up to it," says Kati Haycock, president of Education Trust, a longtime reform expert (and former D.C. school parent). "But what we need to do is change the idea that education is the only career that needs to be done for life. There are a lot of smart people who change careers every six or seven years, while education ends up with a bunch of people on the low end of the pile who don't want to compete in the job market."