Rhee to Politics Daily: Weingarten Lied

She has closed 23 schools, fired 63 principals and assistant principals, and decreased the central office payroll by 122 employees. Although she's now back at the bargaining table, her initial fractious negotiations with the Washington Teacher's Union resulted in a stalemate, largely over the issues of teacher compensation and job security. But now, she has the ear of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the president is touting her ideas about teacher effectiveness. In the spirit of full disclosure, Rhee's younger daughter and my son attend the same high-performing D.C. elementary school. We spoke for the first time during an interview in her office. Her answers have been edited for clarity.

MR: People come up to me and say that every day . . . (but) I have a ton of confidence that we're going to get there. We have (advantages) that other districts don't. I don't have a school board that I have to manage. I'm directly managed by the mayor; he's fully supportive of everything I do, (and) we can make decisions and move quickly without a whole lot of politics. When we have an issue and we need a state policy change, the state superintendent reports to the deputy mayor and we can move quickly. The mayor made a commitment and did protect the schools' budgets. There's no other school district in the country that's not going to take significant cuts. The fact that he said, 'No, we're going to move forward with these reform efforts; we're not going to let money be the deciding factor'-that's huge. I feel like all of the stars are aligned right now to make this happen. Now, do we have some challenges? Sure. Are there some people who don't like what we're doing? Absolutely. Are they going to fight-yeah, that's all part of the game.

MR: There are six work areas. The first is creating a compelling school portfolio-high-functioning schools all over the city that serve kids well and that give parents choices. The second is human capital (great school leaders and great teachers). The third is data. We have to have data about what's working, what's not working, which schools are doing well, which schools aren't. The fourth is basic operations. Can we get people paid on time? Can we get good lunches to kids? The fifth is an aligned instructional approach. Right now our teachers are confused. They have standards, they have the curriculum, they have pacing guides. We want one model. We want to be able to say to every educator and every parent across the city, 'This is what good teaching and learning looks like' and then align teacher compensation, teacher evaluations, professional development, and resources toward that one instructional approach. The last is parent and community engagement.

MR: One, that we are the highest performing urban school district in this country. And two, we close the achievement gap between white kids and minority kids, so that race and income are no longer determinants of academic success. That every child is taught by an excellent teacher. I think that's the right of every kid. Not a satisfactory teacher; not a teacher who meets expectations, but an excellent teacher. That's what I think every kid deserves. For parents, dealing with the school district (should not be) a pain. Right now it's a big bureaucracy that drives parents crazy. That shouldn't be the case. We should give you information about your kids that's easy to understand and that's convenient to get. We should be here to serve you. You would walk into every school building and it would be well resourced. Those things matter. Six years from now...the mayor and I believe we will have turned around the district, (so) those things won't be issues any more.

MR: Seventeen years ago I taught in Baltimore through Teach for America with a guy, and when I got (to Washington), he was the principal at one of our highest performing elementary schools. I gave him a little bit of a guilt trip. I said (that school) will be just fine. You should go be a principal of a school where they need a great leader. This year, I placed him at what was the lowest performing elementary school in the district, just a sad place. It's one of the most violent communities in the city. In the Pre-K classroom the walls were bare. There were no books. The kids were taking a nap on these dirty cots. It literally looked like it was a jail for babies. Walking through the hallways, the kids were fighting. You could just feel the thickness of the environment. He was telling me that the kids come in on Mondays and they're just off the walls-they're so angry because of all the stuff that's happening at home.

Over the course of the week things start to calm down because of the structure, and then by Friday things are actually good, and then Monday it all happens over again. He's brought in this group of new teachers, and these people are working their butts off. Parents at (his old school) donated money so that they could buy books for their library. I had a listening session there with teachers, and when I got there, there was a teacher on the phone telling a parent, 'I really need you to help me out here. We need to be sending the same messages.' The challenges are so significant, but it is miraculous what has happened at that school over the course of a few short months. They still have a really long way to go. But you walk in the classrooms, and there's fantastic teaching going on. There are books everywhere. It's a wholly different environment. And that's all attributable to that leader and to those teachers who are slugging it out every single day.

MR: One of the things I get the most flak for is talking about the fact that I think that ineffective teachers need to go. People don't often talk about the need to remove ineffective people. It's not the only thing, but it is something that we do have to address. Now the president is talking about it. And he actually doesn't say anything different from what I say, which is support people, reward people who are doing a great job, and if you're not and we can't get you there, then you have to go. And people haven't gone ballistic on him; they've been relatively accepting. And the more that people can talk about it and it becomes more widely accepted, it's going to make it easier for other superintendents to take it on.

MR: In my second and third years of Teach for America-I taught a group of 70 kids there with another teacher-we took a group of kids who were performing at the bottom and took them to the top. What it showed me very clearly is that everything people were attributing to their low achievement levels-poverty, the lack of two-parent households, those sorts of things-were not the determinants of these kids' success. (Their success) could be impacted dramatically by the teachers in the classroom. If I worked my tail off for three years and despite everything I tried, the achievement level of those kids didn't move, I would have left thinking, 'You have to solve these social ills.' But the experience I had was exactly the opposite. That informs and drives everything that I do.

In my 10 years running the New Teacher Project, I saw how bureaucracy and the status quo hold school districts back. Being in this job, it's astonishing at times. I don't think there is (anyone) in this field who doesn't want to do the right thing for kids or who is actively working against children. It's more misplaced priorities. Any time we're making policy decisions based on keeping adults happy and forgetting the impact that's having on kids, that's what drives me nuts.

MR: I believe in our obligation to build up our people. But I'm also looking at this from the perspective of a parent. If (my daughter's principal) said to me, 'There's (her) teacher, and she's not so good, but we're going to spend this year professionally developing her so she can get better and we think that's the right thing,' and meanwhile (my daughter) and these 23 other kids might not learn how to read this year, I would never accept that.

Say we made the decision that it's worth it to keep this teacher and professionally develop her. What if those kids are unlucky enough the next year to have an ineffective teacher? The research shows that if kids have three highly effective teachers in a row versus three ineffective teachers, particularly for poor minority kids, it can change their life trajectory. Are we willing to waste two-thirds of a kid's opportunity to be successful in life because we want to professionally develop two adults? Those are the balances that I'm always trying to strike in my head, and I get why some people say, 'She's not thinking enough about how we develop these adults.' That's actually not true. I am thinking about those things, and I think they're important. But I'm also balancing them against what we are giving up, and that is not popular in some realms.

MR: We're not creating everything from scratch. There are districts across the country that have done certain portions of what we're trying to do. We're trying to grab the best practices and bring it all together here. Joel Klein and what's he's done on school accountability stuff in New York has been great. Arne Duncan on what he did in Chicago around closing and opening schools, that's been great. There's not another urban superintendent anywhere who wouldn't want to do the exact same things that I'm doing. I'm not all that remarkable. The difference, frankly, is Adrian Fenty. No one else has a mayor who's willing to give the political backing. Other politicians across the country are either scared of (losing) votes or the teachers' union not funding their campaign. I think every other urban superintendent sees us and says, 'If I had a guy like that, I could do and would do all that.'

MR: I am very frank, very blunt. It's important to be honest with people about the situation we're in. Some good things are happening in this city. I could spend all my time talking about them. But the reality is that (only) 8 percent of our 8^th graders are on grade level in mathematics. That means that 92 percent of our kids are not on grade level in math. That is a crime in my mind. I use language like that. And people don't like that, (but) we don't have time to wait for 10 more years.

MR: I've made mistakes, but I don't have any regrets, because even the mistakes (helped us) move forward in a much better way.

MR: Last July, when we were close to making the teacher's union contract happen, the press reported stuff about the contract that was incorrect. We were abiding by the collective bargaining laws (and) were not allowed to talk about the negotiations. The misinformation became fact in people's minds. We're still trying to undo all of those bits of information. I was trying to follow rules and do the right thing, but it wasn't the right call.

MR: That we were going to make everyone give up their tenure, that I was trying to fire people. That's not the case. I don't have any interest in making people give up their tenure. We wanted to provide a choice to people and, regardless of what choice you made, everyone was going to get paid more money. That was what made it to me a no- brainer. What was communicated was that everyone had to give up their tenure and your evaluation is going to be all based on test scores. The AFT still says this -- Randi Weingarten said this the other day -- that it's all predicated on moving older teachers out and moving younger teachers in. That's just a lie.

MR: Not really. What I will say is that I think we're at a point right now where we have a process in place that I think will allow us to come to a resolution. I can't guarantee that it will result in a contract, but at least we have something laid out. I think it's not going to be dragging on for two more years.