Radical (14 page)

I knew there were many downtown workers who were committed to quality education, and I was determined to find them, keep them, and reward them. The ones who were using the school system for a paycheck would have to go.

From experience I knew that things could get done. I got a call one morning from Susan Schaeffler, head of the DC KIPP charter schools and an old friend from TFA Baltimore. She was running summer school in one of our buildings.

“The kids are supposed to show up tomorrow and the air-conditioning doesn't work. I know this is so petty to bring to you but anything you could do would be great,” she said.

I called maintenance and told them to fix it.

A few hours later Susan called back.

“I don't know what you did but two trucks just rolled up in front of the school. They fixed the air conditioners. I don't know how to thank you. Wow! If this is any indication of how things will change, I'm in!” she said.

It was sad to me, though. Susan had been calling the central office for weeks for help, to no avail. She wasn't alone. I had gotten an email from a teacher who said that for the entire year he had deductions taken from his paycheck for health care for him and his wife. His wife had been in an accident and taken to the hospital but was told that she had been rejected by the insurance company as not being covered. He was frantic. In a last-ditch effort, he emailed me. It turned out that his wife's paperwork had never been filed, so while we were taking his money, his wife wasn't being covered.

“Totally frustrating,” he wrote.

I was able to fix it.

During my first few weeks, I brought the central office staff together.

“As I walk around the halls of the central office,” I said, “and I listen to how people operate, listen to the way they answer the phone or the way they deal with people coming into the building, it sounds like they are annoyed. That has to change. This is not a nuisance. This is your job.

“So if you consider answering questions from parents and teachers, fulfilling their requests or giving them information an annoyance, this is not the place for you to work.”

Some clapped. I froze hiring.

M
AYOR
A
DRIAN
F
ENTY WAS
by my side when I met with the central office staff. In every way, whenever I needed him, he was there. Our connection, our commitment to education, and our capacity to support one another were paramount.

Fenty broke the mold when he was elected mayor in 2006. At thirty-five, he was the youngest to run and win. He was the city's sixth mayor and the second native Washingtonian to hold the office. His mom, Jeanette, came from Italian roots; his father, Phil, grew up in Buffalo, New York, but Phil's parents were originally from Panama and Barbados. Jeanette and Phil came to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, became active in civil rights, and then opened Fleet Feet, an athletic-shoe store in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Adrian, a middle child, grew up in Mount Pleasant, a community with a mix of white, black, and Hispanic working- and middle-class families. He attended D.C. public schools but graduated from Mackin Catholic High School. He attended Oberlin College, where he focused on English and economics, then returned to Washington to get a law degree at Howard University.

Fenty worked on Capitol Hill for a few years, then entered the D.C. political scene as a council aide—with higher ambitions. In 2000 he campaigned door-to-door in Ward 4, home to both the city's African American elite and rough neighborhoods along Georgia Avenue. He knocked off veteran politician Charlene Drew Jarvis and emerged as the highly energetic, fresh face in an ossified legislature. Fenty was restless and impatient on the city council. He focused on constituent services and easily won a second term. Then he shocked the political establishment by taking on council chair Linda Cropp, a stalwart of the old guard, in the decisive Democratic mayoral primary. He walked neighborhoods in all eight wards. Against all odds, he won.

Even before he took office, Fenty started showing signs that he would not be governing within the limits that had become accepted and familiar in D.C. He vowed to apply best practices to running the city. He cast a wide net to staff his government and brought on national leaders as agency heads. He embarked on well-publicized pilgrimages to take pointers from big-city mayors. He visited Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was attempting to take control of his city's public schools. Chicago's Richard M. Daley had taken over his city's schools. Boston mayor Tom Menino encouraged Fenty to be bold and decisive. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had taken over the school system and advised Fenty to do the same.

In one of his last acts on the council, Fenty engineered passage of a $1 billion commitment to completely refurbish D.C.'s public schools. Then, on his first day as mayor, in January 2007, he introduced legislation to dissolve the board of education and place the D.C. public schools under mayoral control.

If I could distill Fenty's style into three elements, they would be speed, no excuses, and accountability. None of the three had been a feature of local government in the nation's capital, particularly in the school system. Especially accountability.

The flip side of accountability is consequences. I started testing Fenty's backbone on that score, early and often.

In my first months as chancellor, I met with all 144 principals. We had already gathered data on how their students were scoring on achievement tests. We knew which schools were improving, which were in decline. I asked them to set goals and present them when we met. I fired two principals on the spot.

Word was getting out that business as usual was over, and that I would fire people if necessary. It soon got back to Mayor Fenty, through city council members and political operatives, that his new school chancellor might be causing too much trouble, with political costs coming his way.

Fenty called together his top staff, from the attorney general to the city administrator to the chief of staff.

“I want everyone in this room to know that Michelle Rhee has my one hundred percent support, at whatever she does,” Fenty said. “The number one priority of this government is to improve the schools. There's only one person who's allowed to say no to the chancellor and that's me. Anyone else who does will be looking for a new job.”

M
AYOR
F
ENTY'S RESOLVE WAS
about to be tested: we needed to close dozens of public schools.

In the mid-1960s, DCPS schools topped out at 146,000 students. The number of students had been in steady decline since. Middle-class families had moved to the suburbs. The city's population had been falling, new residents were not starting families, and many who remained were elderly. Charter schools were attracting students from the public schools. By 2001, there were 66,000 students in the public schools and 11,000 in charters. When I became chancellor, the total number of students in both public and charter schools was around 70,000—half of the number in 1967. More than 20,000 were in charter schools, which had opened 70 new campuses. Yet DCPS had closed fewer than 10 schools.

The result was that many schools east of Rock Creek Park and the Anacostia River were half full. We couldn't staff them with art, music, or language teachers, so the students were getting half an education. Take Slowe Elementary, built for 300 students but currently teaching 90. Keeping every school open was not an option.

Starting in October 2007, I called in three well-respected, local research organizations—the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the 21st Century School Fund. I asked them to analyze enrollment patterns and neighborhood demographics to provide a foundation for our difficult decisions on which schools to close. I assigned Abby Smith and Eric Lerum the task of distilling the raw data down to neighborhoods and their schools. Which schools could we expand as educational and community hubs? Which were too old and too depopulated to save? Which neighborhoods could live together? They had to advise us on those granular decisions and choreograph the process.

Fenty was involved from the start. He knew that superintendents had attempted to close schools in the past. He had witnessed the way they had been beaten down by opposition in the neighborhoods and the city council. I briefed Fenty early on in the process. I said we might have to close or consolidate as many as forty schools.

“Do it,” he said. “Rip the Band-Aid off. Don't peel it.”

Much easier said than done.

We considered every aspect of each school that was a candidate for closing: from the condition of the facility to the connection to the community; from the safety and walkability for students to the quality of the teachers; from the pattern of feeder schools to the expectation of population growth. We arrived at twenty-three schools that we wanted to shutter. Then the hard work began.

Race and class immediately became fulcrums of controversy. The facts were that many of the schools in Ward 3, home to the majority of D.C.'s white families, were filled to capacity or bursting at the seams. Take Lafayette Elementary, in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of D.C., adjacent to Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was so stuffed, the District of Columbia had to put trailers on the basketball court to accommodate neighborhood students. All of the schools slated to be closed were in the city's eastern wards. Seven of the twenty-three schools were in Ward 5, a working-class black neighborhood with a sprawling industrial zone. Those folks were not pleased.

Knowing that we would be kicking over hornets' nests—twenty-three of them, to be exact—we planned to break the news to council members and principals before the list went public. We had a carefully conceived plan.

It went awry. The night before we were scheduled to brief the council and district staff, a list of schools was leaked to the
Washington Post
on November 28, 2007—with errors. It was a nightmare. Once again people across town felt betrayed, especially council members.

For the next six weeks I met with students, parents, teachers, principals, and council members. I didn't decline a single request for a meeting. I walked into community meetings with Eric Lerum and Abby Smith or alone and stood my ground as people yelled in my face, because I knew that operating half-empty school buildings was part of the reason our schools felt so poorly resourced.

Immediately, I got a call from Marion Barry's office.

“The councilman would like to meet you to discuss school closings,” his office said.

We arranged to meet at Draper Elementary, in his ward; the school that had fewer than a hundred students. I decided to arrive early. We parked at the school and I headed across the street to a housing project where a number of older gentlemen were sitting outside.

“Ma'am,” Jimmy, my driver, said, “I don't know if this is a good idea.”

“I'll be fine,” I said, and hopped across the street.

I approached the group of men.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm Michelle Rhee, the new chancellor of the D.C. public schools.”

“Oh yeah, I know you. I've seen you on the TV,” one of them noted.

“What brings you here?” asked another.

“Well, we're considering closing some schools and this is one of the schools on the list,” I said.

“Oh no, you can't close this school,” said one of the men. “This here is a great school. The principal has been here for thirty-some years. She's wonderful. The teachers are wonderful. The school is wonderful. You can't close down this school. Look at this neighborhood. Do you think what we need is another boarded-up vacant building?”

He was right. The neighborhood was filled with abandoned buildings. But he was wrong about the school. It wasn't a wonderful school. At the time, only 16 percent of the children at the school were working at grade level in math. Sixteen percent! How could anyone think that was wonderful?

They could because in the midst of the despair in the neighborhood, the school was a beacon. It served as a foundation for the community. The familiarity of the institution, the faculty, and its purpose were stabilizing forces in an otherwise chaotic world. For these men, the value of the school wasn't simply in its reading proficiency rates; it was in the constancy it represented in the community.

I saw Marion Barry's Mercedes pull up. I thanked the gentlemen for their insights and walked back across the street.

“Morning, Chancellor,” he said.

“Good morning, Councilman Barry,” I responded.

“You don't know Ward Eight, but you have to know Ward Eight. Come with me,” he said and opened his car door.

I could see Jimmy's eyes widening.

“We can follow you in our car,” I said.

“Nonsense, get in!” he said, and I jumped in. In the rearview mirror I could see Jimmy trailing us.

He drove me around from school to school pointing out different landmarks along the way.

“You can't just close schools. That's not the way things work here,” he said. “You need to understand the community. These schools are anchors of the community. Like me. I know the community, I am the community, that's why they love me.”

“Marion Barry! Marion Barry!” I heard the screams as if on cue.

A group of kids had spotted Barry's car and were jumping up and down excitedly, waving their arms. One little boy ran up to the car.

“Marion Barry!” he exclaimed. “Will you buy a raffle ticket from me?”

“Nah, I don't want no raffle ticket. Why are you selling those anyways?” he asked.

“ 'Cause we need money!” said the kid.

“For what?” Barry asked.

“I need a soda and some chips,” said the kid.

Barry reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.

“Here,” he said, “go get you some chips and a soda. And stay out of trouble, hear?”

There was no doubt about it. They loved Marion Barry.