Radical (16 page)

N
OT LONG AFTER OUR
red-and-green proposal was unveiled prematurely, Randi Weingarten invited me to her office in the national office of the American Federation of Teachers, on New Jersey Avenue, not far from the U.S. Capitol. It didn't look nearly as posh as a K Street lobbying firm from the outside, but Weingarten's suite on the top floor was not too shabby, with lovely wood paneling and high ceilings.

I arrived on time—and waited. And waited. Finally an aide ushered me in to see Weingarten. A petite woman, she flashed her wide, toothy smile and grabbed my hand in a firm grip. We sat in a small room attached to her grand office, just the two of us.

“I have studied your first offer, if you can call it that,” she said. “George finally gave me what you describe as the red-and-green proposal. Would you call that an offer?”

“It's not an offer,” I said. “It's the agreement that we want to put up for a vote.”

The smile was gone.

“Let me tell you what's not going to work,” she said. “Teachers at the same school cannot work under two different sets of work rules.”

Interesting. She was saying that two schools could have different rules but not two teachers within the same school. Apparently, my plan to give teachers a choice between two tracks with different pay plans was out, at least in Randi Weingarten's mind. I would have expected nothing else.

Weingarten was born in New York, the daughter of a teacher who was active in the union. One of the stories she tells everyone is her early memory of her mother going out on strike and getting docked pay, at the time her father was out of work as an electrical engineer. The family suffered and struggled. She says it seared in her mind the need for a strong union that protected the rights of teachers.

No doubt Weingarten is smart—and committed. She has an undergraduate degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell and a law degree from Cardozo. Right out of law school she was making big bucks at the Wall Street firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, but she tossed it aside for the union. She became general counsel to Sandra Feldman, head of New York's United Federation of Teachers (UFT), rising through the union ranks to become president of the UFT, which represented an estimated 200,000 members, including 75,000 teachers.

Weingarten was a union powerhouse in Manhattan, but she had bigger ambitions. Political office? Perhaps a run for the U.S. Senate in New York? In the summer of 2008, she was elected president of the American Federation of Teachers, moved to Washington, and set up shop in the union's national headquarters. She also announced she was taking a hand in the local negotiations between DCPS and the city—which is why she had invited me for a chat.

“Here's what else is out,” she said. “We are not going to give up tenure. And we cannot have individual pay for performance.”

“My turn?” I asked.

She nodded.

“We must be able to pay individual teachers for the work that they're doing and results they attain,” I said. “Tenure as a job for life regardless of performance doesn't work for me. And we must have mutual consent. No more forcing ineffective teachers onto schools.”

Weingarten was as unsurprised by my reaction as was I by her approach. We knew one another's positions. We were worthy gladiators. We said our cordial good-byes.

Weingarten tried to get to Mayor Fenty. She requested a meeting. No response. She called him directly. He didn't return her call. It must have driven her crazy. In New York, she had Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ear. When she differed with school chief Joel Klein, she could call Bloomberg, and he would hear her out. Bloomberg was a seasoned, smart politician. He knew Weingarten had a significant power base that could swing elections. Randi knew how to work New York. She was comfortable with the dynamic she had on her home turf.

Now she was in new territory. Fenty ignored her. She was livid.

W
HY DID
I
GO
through the painful process of closing twenty-three schools my first year as chancellor?

Certainly, I was justified by the raw numbers, since so many schools were half empty. But there was another reason: I believed that art, music, and physical education were not extras, as they had been for decades at some schools because the number of students could not support teachers.

My goal was to make sure that students at every school could take art, music, and physical education. Each child deserved to attend a school that also had a librarian, a nurse, and a guidance counselor or social worker. On the first day of school in 2008, we delivered. Schools were ready for children; textbooks and supplies awaited them; we had begun to bring in stronger principals and teachers.

Test scores in reading and math began to rise dramatically for the first time in decades, in both D.C. and national tests. Our DC-CAS tests showed that elementary school reading scores rose by 8 points, math by 11. In high schools, reading rose 10 points and math moved up by 9. The numbers of students showing proficiency were still way too low, but we were on the right trajectory.

Why? Did the students get smarter just because I showed up? Hardly.

Achievement levels increased because we set the bar higher and asked principals to show improvement in student learning. Our critical response teams were one call away. They took many nagging problems off the table. When principals didn't have to worry about leaky roofs, textbooks, or teachers who had lost interest, they could direct their teams to improving academics and the curriculum.

The quality of the principals made a difference, too. I had been scouring the nation for great school leaders and had found a few, in nearby Maryland school districts. I had convinced a few to join us—such as Dwan Jordon at Sousa Middle School, Pete Cahall at Wilson High, and Darrin Slade at Ron Brown Middle School. And they were setting new standards.

People were starting to notice—not just within the city but outside as well. Our actions and the subsequent progress were winning the attention of the national press. Reporters were intrigued by the story of the Korean girl from Toledo, Ohio, who took over the worst school district in the country.

The press was helping me attract fans and detractors by the thousands.

I had never sought the limelight. In choosing education as my life's work, I was not making a media play. As a breed, educators are focused, serious wonks. So I was more than a little taken aback when reporters from national newspapers and magazines started requesting interviews. PBS proposed a yearlong series of videos for its
NewsHour
.

I became what they call good copy. I wasn't savvy enough to say no and manage the press, which a more seasoned professional might have done.

Amanda Ripley, a reporter with
Time
magazine, requested an interview in the early fall of 2008. Ripley had written on education, and I knew her work. I agreed to the interview and let her follow me in action. Her article, in the November 26, 2008, issue, was thorough and fair. It was the photo that wound up sticking in the collective consciousness.

The photographer must have taken a thousand pictures of me, or so it seemed. Most of the shots showed me with a group of students. At the end, however, she took pictures of me holding a variety of rulers, pencils, and teaching tools. I called it quits.

“One more, please,” she pleaded. Her assistant grabbed a broom and asked me to stand with it in my hands. “Straight face, please.”

The picture with the broom made the cover.

That photo would wind up defining me, for better or worse, in a one-dimensional way. Fans saw me as an agent of necessary change; plenty of future enemies latched on to the image of a tough, brusque dictator bent on change, whatever the cost.

I got my fair share of hate mail after the
Time
cover, but I could find solace in the quiet of private emails.

A teacher in Hawaii wrote: “The students are behind and the expectations are low. I say if you are a good teacher then you should have no problem laying your job on the line. People need to man/woman up and realize this isn't just about holding kids' hands. We can't baby another generation. Keep up the good work.”

And from Portland, Oregon: “I would like to be part of a higher mission to try and reform our public school system in America. If you are looking for teachers outside your district, please feel free to contact me.”

And a short one from closer to home: “A DC voter, NW. No kids yet but when I have them I want to send them to your schools—so stay tough RHEE!”

Those helped.

I
N
F
EBRUARY
2009, R
ANDI
W
EINGARTEN
inserted herself into the negotiations and ushered George Parker and the WTU to the sidelines. Her mother had recently passed away, and she spent the first twenty minutes of the first negotiating session talking about growing up the daughter of a teacher, and what it felt like to be an orphan. She was warming us up.

Then she said, “I know you'll be upset when I say this, but I feel like we're more at the beginning of the negotiations at this point than the end.”

“You've only gotten involved in the past fifteen days,” I said, completely annoyed.

“I know you are very frustrated, Michelle.”

Frustrated and not at all interested in starting over. By that point, we had been in talks with the WTU for a year and a half. We had made progress. The union wanted the 20 percent raises and generous professional development we had offered, but it balked at the reforms we were demanding in exchange. Four months before Weingarten stepped in we had reached a stalemate.

We couldn't remain in limbo. The reforms had to move forward.

The federal control board that had taken the city's fiscal reins in 1995 had given DCPS the ability to develop a teacher evaluation system. It needed only to consult with the union, but not reach agreement with it. Lacking movement toward agreement on the contract, I directed my staff to develop a new teacher evaluation system with strong input from our rank-and-file teachers. They did. I called a press conference.

“We must do everything in our power to provide high-quality teachers for every student,” I said, with Mayor Fenty by my side.

We unveiled a new performance evaluation system that would essentially bypass tenure. Instead of everyone being rated as satisfactory, we would finally begin to differentiate within the teaching force. Teachers were rated in one of four categories: highly effective, effective, minimally effective, or ineffective. Ineffective teachers would be subject to termination. Minimally effective teachers would have one more year to improve their practice. If they couldn't, they would also be subject to termination.

Our hope was that the union would agree to the contract so that we could also recognize and reward the highly effective teachers who could receive double the pay of the old system. With the leverage of the new evaluation system, we thought that the union would see that there was a lot of downside, but upside only if they agreed to the contract.

G
IVEN
R
ANDI'S INSISTENCE ON
her nonnegotiables and my equally ardent demands, we could agree on one matter: we needed a mediator. We each proposed and rejected a few candidates. We finally settled on Kurt Schmoke, then dean of Howard University Law School. Schmoke had been mayor of Baltimore when I taught at Harlem Park in the 1990s. It was Schmoke who encouraged reforms at Baltimore's worst schools, so I was encouraged that he would help us reach our goals within the collective bargaining process.

Schmoke made it clear he wanted to come to an agreement in June 2009. We would—a year later—in part because Weingarten did not want to give an inch. She often showed up late to bargaining sessions and left early. She would occasionally look across the table at me and say, “I can tell this is your first serious contract negotiation. This just isn't the way it's done.”

She spent a lot of time focused on the evaluation system. Our lawyers instructed us to stay away from the topic. We already were using our authority to unilaterally impose a system. The minute we brought the evaluation system into the contract, our lawyers told us, we would lose that authority, and it would become subject to collective bargaining. Randi knew this, too, so she insisted that we couldn't continue until we addressed it.

I staunchly refused. Teacher input on the evaluation system was critical, but we'd gotten that. We had held scores of focus groups and work sessions with teachers to get their insights on the new evaluation system. We felt good about how we'd engaged with them on its development. But we weren't going to be held captive by the union bosses. That's where we drew the line.

We were also stuck on due process, which described how, when, and why teachers could be fired—and their recourse and review.

I believed in due process and thought it was necessary. I'd seen too many examples of good teachers who had been railroaded by ineffective administrators. Those teachers had to have a structure through which they could appeal evaluations when appropriate. However, due process had come to mean that it was impossible to fire an ineffective teacher because of all the hoops administrators had to jump through. In many other cities, it routinely cost several hundred thousand dollars and several years to fire a teacher because of the process.

In one of the first negotiating sessions with Kurt Schmoke, Randi pulled out the due process procedures she'd negotiated in New York. They set up a cumbersome process for firing teachers, even if they had been accused of assault or sexual abuse. It took years of hearings and reports. It was costing New York millions to pay teachers as they sat idle during their evaluation process. As mentioned earlier, they spent their days in what became known as the rubber room, where teachers who had failed in the classroom had been bounced until their due process had been exhausted—sometimes never. It was the bane of Joel Klein's life as chancellor.