Michelle A. Rhee is an american educator who was the former chancellor of Washington D.C.’s public schools. Her academic pedigree looks like this: Michelle graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in government. She also received a Masters in public policy from Harvard’s prestigious John F. Kennedy school of government.
Shortly after these accomplishments,
she was assigned to under-performing schools in Baltimore, Maryland;
then she went to Harlem, New York’s Park Elementary school.
Now Michelle fancied herself, or was
sold to the public as a bit of a revolutionary. She was the face of
over-achievement and higher standards for all students, and she was
going to single-handedly reform the D.C. schools and the swarthy
populous that attended them. At least again, this was the bill of goods
sold to the public.
Unable to bridge the cultural gaps
between her and her students, Michelle said the pressures of teaching
those first years made her literally break out in hives. One method she
thought might work to control a group of students, was putting masking
tape on their mouths so they could be quiet on their way to the lunch
room. As she peeled the pieces of tape off these eight year olds, they
began crying out in pain. At one point Michelle says she had
“Thirty-five kids who were crying.” So much for the Harvard education.
After this fiasco, she took a
teaching course and got her official teacher’s certification. She then
returned to Harlem’s Park Elementary. The grades of students in Rhee’s
class dropped significantly after her return. Average math percentiles
fell from 64% to 17%; while the reading scores dropped from 37% to 21%.
In her second and third years of
teaching, Rhee’s students made a slight improvement in overall test
scores, but those scores were contested by a retired math teacher as
being less than half of what she originally stated.
In 1997 Rhee founded ‘The New Teacher
Project’ that supplied the D.C. area with 23,000 mid-career
professionals wanting to be teachers. It was instrumental in
re-designing the D.C. schools recruitment and hiring process.
After this, Rhee was offered the
chancellor’s job for the D.C.’s school districts. Mind you, she had no
experience running a school system and was never even a principal. Other
teachers and education officials thought there were more qualified
people for the job.
Rhee inherited a failing school
system where students were performing below the averages of state
standardized tests. So what did Rhee do? She closed 23 schools, fired 36
principals, and cut 121 office jobs. Way to go! When asked why she made
these cuts, the stated reasons were under-enrollment and various school
complex’s ‘excessive square footage’. What?
Rhee also renegotiated teacher’s
salaries saying they’d have a chance to make upwards of $140,000 a year,
provided they met her requirements for ‘student achievement’. You
know…the kind she failed to produce in her classrooms. The biggest
caveat would be these teachers loss of tenure rights or their smaller
pay raises with tenure rights retained.
After the contracts were finalized, Rhee fired 241 teachers and put 737 more school employees on notice for termination.
Now I’ve said all that to say this; Rhee had no intentions of helping these failing schools. She was sent to eviscerate them.
There’s
been wide spread criticism of
her actions, and rightfully so. But americans need to wake up to a
reality that many of us don’t want to face. America has always loved
cheap labor.
So there must always be a ready-made segment of this country to fill
that void. And guess where they’re slated to come from…you got it, poor
neighborhoods and under-performing schools. That’s the reason these
schools stay over-crowded and under-funded. For this country to be ‘one
of the richest’ in the world, our oligarchs feel that not everyone
should have access to a quality education; these people NEED to be
exploitable. And like Sam Jackson said in ‘Do the right thing’…that’s
the truth, Ruth.
Now, while looking up this woman’s
history I found an interesting stat; it said that D.C. schools were
performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest
rates of spending per student in the U.S. This stat was provided by
Reuters on May 24th, 2007. It also stated that D.C. spends $8,701 per
student on average. Here’s the problem, there’s no break down on how
much of that goes to ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ schools.
One stat I looked up said on average
in N.Y.C., which has the largest urban public school system in this
country, operating expenses per student were $4,351. Which is $1-$2,000
less than its ‘suburban’ counter-parts; like Westchester which spends
$6,605, Nassau county which spends $6,539, Rockland county which spends
$6,189, and Suffolk county which spends $5,852.
Now which students, urban or suburban, do you think this government’s slated for its ‘cheap labor’ work force?
Lionel Drummond
