Rhee engineering education: has D.C.'s radical experiment in school reform really worked?

• Author: Toch, Thomas
• Position: On political books - The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District - Book review

The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District

by Richard Whitmire

Jossey-Bass, 296 pp.

Most people who have heard of Michelle Rhee know her as the unforgiving face of contemporary school reform, the hard-edged chancellor of the long-failing Washington, D.C., public schools who graced the cover of Time standing in a classroom with a broom in her hands--only to be swept from the nation's capital herself when her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost a reelection bid last September that was in large part a referendum on Rhee's reforms.

Less well known is that Rhee is part of a generational shift in school reform. She's one of a new breed of "social entrepreneurs" who have sought to create a performance-driven brand of public schooling on behalf of the nation's disadvantaged students. Some of these new education entrepreneurs are shaping federal education priorities as senior officials in the Obama administration's Department of Education, where they have pushed for school reform through the federal Race to the Top competition and other signature Obama plans.

Like many of the new reformers, including Richard Barth, the chief executive of the well-known KIPP network of charter schools, and Kim Smith, a founder of the venture philanthropy NewSchools Venture Fund, Rhee got her start at Teach for America. Founded in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, TFA is a public service program that aims to end "educational inequity [and] the reality that where a child is born determines the quality of his or her education and life prospects." It recruits students from the nation's best colleges and universities, who spend at least two years teaching in some of America's worst schools.

Rhee, herself an Ivy Leaguer, put in three tough years at a failing Baltimore elementary school that had been turned over to a for-profit company. In 1997, she left TFA to launch the New Teacher Project, a TFA offshoot that contracts with public school systems to recruit new teachers from outside schools of education, which attract few of the nation's best and brightest college students.

In 2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, at Kopp's urging, brought Rhee to Washington and tasked her with fixing the city's dysfunctional school system, which couldn't manage to calculate daily attendance, deliver textbooks on time, or keep its buildings clean, much less successfully educate its 48,000 students. With the help of a veritable SWAT team of former TFAers and others, Rhee closed nearly two dozen underenrolled schools, introduced twenty-first-century information technology, slashed the system's bloated bureaucracy, and replaced nearly a third of the city's principals. Most notably, she won a new teacher contract that ended tenure, introduced...