The New Teacher Project & Beyond | Education Reformist Michelle Rhee

The most pivotal moment early on in the organization that I was running was when I met with the then superintendent of the Compton School District, this guy named Randy Ward, who was like no-nonsense guy. He's like, okay, I need 100 teachers. Can you bring me 100 teachers? I was like, oh yeah, absolutely. We're gonna run this program. It's gonna be great. We're gonna— my model was we recruited mid-career professionals to make a career change to come into education. So it was very similar to Teach for America, but instead of the college students, we were recruiting career changers. And he— so he looks at me and he's like, well, so I'm gonna give you money to recruit my 100 teachers? And I said, yeah, and if you look at our costs, right, it's gonna cost you a whole lot less for our teachers than it currently does through your recruitment processes. He's like, yeah, but— What happens if you fail? If you don't bring me my teachers? I mean, he's like, I would be willing to sign a contract with you if you made it a performance-based contract. So you bring me 100 teachers, I give you all the money that I owe you. You bring me 50 teachers, I give you half the money. And it was like a perfectly logical thing, but I was like, oh crap. Because it's It's not like we had any money, right? And we had to take this huge risk because I was going to take this money from— and then if I didn't produce, then I would have spent this money. He wasn't going to pay me. We were going to be screwed. So— but I figured like this is like one of those defining moments where you have to like decide whether you believe in what you're doing and you believe in this business and this business model or not. So we took it on and had some incredibly dark days along the way. I had 3 clients at first. That sort of ultimately grew to 6, 10, et cetera. And I had days where I'd have to call a superintendent somewhere and say, can you FedEx me your payment check because I need to make payroll? Or I'd have to ask a couple of my staff members, can anybody forego? getting paid this payroll and that sort of thing. But ultimately, it was— the organization was successful. Now it has 400 employees, has a budget of about $40 million a year, and I think is one of the most successful nonprofit organizations in the education reform space. So that is just a lesson to you of like not don't listen to old white guys, but— Don't listen to old white guys who tell you you can't do what you wanna do because a lot of times it's just because it's not sort of within the constructs that they're thinking. So that was one of my major things. After I ran the New Teacher Project for 10 years, I got the offer to go to D.C. And this was sort of interesting because At the time I was running the New Teacher Project, the Deputy Mayor of Education for the City of D.C. was at a conference that I was at, and he said, okay, you know every single school superintendent out there. We have to hire a new school superintendent, so can I take you out to dinner and pick your brain about who we should hire? Because we are about to take over mayoral control of the schools. So I said, sure. I went out to dinner with him. I gave him 4 really solid names. You know, sang for my supper. And then next morning, this guy comes up to me. He's like, okay, I have a crazy idea. He's like, how about you? And I was like, absolutely not. I would never frickin' want to be an urban school superintendent. It's like the worst job in the world. You're not allowed to do anything. You get blamed for everything. No. And he's like, oh, come on. You know, this is going to be different. We're taking over mayor— you know, the mayor's going to be in charge. There will be no school board. You will report directly to him. This guy is gonna, like, you know, revolutionize education as we know it. So I was like, I'm not interested in doing this, but I will help you in whatever way I can. He's like, well, just come and meet with the mayor and talk to him. So I said, okay, fine. Before I knew it, you know, different things had happened, and I'm in front of this guy, and he wants me to, like I said, run the school district. Now, you have to understand that at the time, this was pretty much unheard of. You know, in 2007 when this happened, for the most part, there weren't a lot of nontraditional superintendents, so people who, you know, hadn't come up through the ranks, and there certainly weren't any 37-year-old girls, Korean girls from Toledo, Ohio, who had never run a school, much less a school district, right? And it was an incredibly interesting proposition because what the— at the time that I took over the D.C. Public Schools, it was largely known as the lowest performing and most dysfunctional school district in the entire country. It was the only school district in the nation that was on high-risk status with the U.S. Department of Education. It spent about $20,000 per child per year And yet, the results were absolutely abysmal. So when we inherited the school district, 8% of the 8th graders in the district were on grade level in mathematics. 8%. Which means that 92% of kids were not performing on grade level. And at the same time that that happened— was happening, you had about 98% of the teachers who were being rated as effective, doing excellent work. So you had this huge disconnect. And people largely had written the school district off. It had gone through decades of, you know, Marion Barry running the city and sort of stacking the entire city government and especially school district with a whole lot of people that, you know, employees that it didn't need, absolutely zero accountability, and then all of these government sort of rules and regulations about how you could run the district that was basically hamstrung folks. And so, that's the environment that I came into. They said, now you're allowed to pretty much do whatever you want. And so, I thought, okay, like, let's just run this like any healthy, normal organization with accountability. Rewarding people who are doing great work, moving out those people who are not, closing down schools that are not performing, trying to grow those that are, et cetera. And those things that would seem incredibly just common sense and obvious were met with unbelievable pushback. And so, I spent 3 and a half years kind of being the target of a whole lot of turmoil and opposition in the city. But we pretty much changed the entire landscape of how that government agency worked and made it much more performance-based. And the results, while we did not accomplish everything that we needed to, I think it put the city on a completely different trajectory. So, we went from being a school district that I said was sort of at the bottom of everything to, after the first 2 years, we were leading the nation in gains in both reading and math at both the 4th and 8th grade. In our first 3 years, we were the only large urban school district in the country to see double-digit achievement gains at the secondary level in reading and math. And we had put in place a new teacher evaluation system, which was unlike anything that had ever been implemented anywhere in the country because it actually linked the teacher's evaluation to how well the students were performing academically based on growth. And so, now— that was in 2009 that we did that. Now in 2015, In 2013, actually, it is one of the requirements of the federal government in Race to the Top and sort of other initiatives that school districts actually have to have an evaluation system that does that, but in 2009, nobody had ever heard of it before. So, lots of opposition, lots of successes. Of course, if you listen to my detractors, there were absolutely no successes, and Everything was a sham. But— and I'll stop soon and take questions. But I think for me, the bottom line from that experience was that people will sort of judge you based on your age, your lack of experience, whatever, right? Everything. And the most important thing is you having conviction in what you're doing. If what you think needs to happen makes sense to you, then you have to be able to forge ahead. And I think— I mean, again, we'll sort of take questions, but one of the biggest lessons to me— and I was just down the street at Stanford Business School talking to a business school class about this a few weeks ago. And one of the questions that they asked me there was, well, You were so controversial and you were so unliked, for lack of a better term. Do you think that if you would have just done things differently, right, that you could have brought more people on board and stayed there longer and, and then done more good? for the kids, right? And I told them a quick story, and I'll end on this. So probably about 2 years into my tenure, there was a columnist from the Washington Post who wrote a piece on me. And he said, I like Michelle Rhee. I think she is doing things that are very important for the school district, things that were avoided for 40 years. She, you know, she's— good in this role. I just wish that she would be a little nicer. Right? So that was the whole point of his piece. So I read the thing and I call the student. I'm like, what are you freaking doing? Right? And he's like, you don't understand. I like you. I want you to stay. He's like, but I feel like if you sort of continue down this trajectory that you're on, you know, you make these decisions and people don't like them, then you alienate people. That you're not gonna be here for the long term, and we need you to be here for the long term. And I looked at him and I said, look, you need to decide what you believe the most important characteristics of a school's chancellor is. If you think that warm and fuzzy is the most important, then I am clearly not your girl. Right? But if you think that it takes somebody to be hard-charging, to be aggressive, to be accountability-focused, Then what you need to be writing in your columns is not like, I wish Michelle Rhee would be a little nicer, but like, let's get over our personal issues and try to focus on what's right for the kids and what's producing results for our school system. But— so that's all to say that there are always going to be situations as a leader and as somebody who's trying to start up an organization where somebody, whether it's your employees, whether it's your funders, your investors, whoever it is, that people are not gonna like. Decisions that are gonna be unpopular, et cetera. And there are so many reasons to give in to that. I mean, it's hard not to be liked. It's hard when people are coming after you. It's just easier and it feels It feels better when you can act in a way and make decisions that make everybody comfortable. But what I would say is that with comfort often means no movement whatsoever. Right? And there is no way that you can make everybody happy and actually make progress. So just always think about that. Always think about what your endgame is and keep your eye on that ball because that, in my opinion, is the most important thing to be Being successful. All right, I'm going to stop there.