Fixing Washington D.C.'s School System

EnlargeStory Time: Rhee won the rapt attention of third graders at Scott Montgomery with a book about an underappreciated teacher, and a tale from her own days as a Teach for America instructor in inner-city Baltimore when she captured -- and ate -- a bee that flew into her classroom. | photo by Alessandra Petlin

EnlargeMission Critical: After Mayor Adrian Fenty, who won election promising to reform the district's failing schools, managed to get control of the system in June 2007, he named Rhee chancellor. "Every single day, he's spending political capital and losing popularity because of what we're doing," she says. | photo by Alessandra Petlin

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Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C., is one of the worst schools in one of the worst school districts in America.

"The mentality of excellence? We wish we could have that," said principal Harriett Kargbo, as we toured the school one morning in May. "But this," she said, pointing at the metal detector guarding the entrance, "is the reality."

This, too: Dozens of kids wandering the halls during second period. Corridors littered with fliers, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags. One second-floor foyer reeking of marijuana. ("I smell pot smoke," I said. "Really? I don't," Kargbo replied.) In the five-year history of No Child Left Behind, the school has never met the law's benchmarks; in 2007, just 24% of its sophomores tested "proficient" in reading and only 20% made the grade in math.

As we walked from one teaching area to another -- Dunbar is one of D.C.'s last open-plan schools, with dividers and old filing cabinets separating the "class- rooms" -- it became clear why the students weren't learning. Of the dozen classes we visited, only in one history session were all of the students doing something approximating work. "Why isn't anyone teaching?" I asked Kargbo as I watched one student do a meticulous inventory of the contents of her wallet. "It's the end of the period," she said. Half an hour later, second period ended.

That afternoon, Kargbo was fired.

The woman who orchestrated the "contract nonrenewals" of Harriett Kargbo and 30 other principals that day was Michelle Rhee, the 38-year-old chancellor of D.C. Public Schools (DCPS). When she was appointed by Mayor Adrian Fenty just over a year ago, Rhee had never led a school, let alone a school system with 10,000 employees and a budget of nearly $1 billion. Since then, she has shuttered 23 schools, canned 15% of the central-office staff, fired 250 teachers who failed to get NCLB-required certification, and bought out more than 200 others. As the new school year gets under way, she is pushing a revolutionary contract that may simultaneously kill the entrenched seniority hiring system and make Washington's teachers the highest paid in America.

Rhee seems an unlikely crusader. She's a Korean-American doctor's daughter who went to an elite private academy in the burbs of Toledo, Ohio, yet she now has in her care a student population that is 83% black, with 80% poor enough to qualify for free lunch. Everything she does provokes shrieks of protest -- from teachers, parents, and local politicians. But if she has any doubt about the tumultuous course she's taking, she doesn't show it. A few weeks after Kargbo was fired -- on the kind of warm spring day when the hands of classroom clocks seem barely to move -- I accompany the chancellor to Scott Montgomery Elementary (100% black, 95% free-lunch eligible). She's there to read Miss Nelson Is Missing to third graders; it's a classic about kids who don't know how great their teacher is until she's replaced by the witchy substitute Viola Swamp. To get her audience into listening mode, Rhee tells one of her favorite stories, about the ornery third-grade class she taught at an inner-city school in Baltimore in the early 1990s. One day, a bee buzzed into the classroom, and her kids freaked out. "I killed the bee," Rhee says to the kids. ("Whoa!") "Then I popped it into my mouth and I ate it." ("Eeewww!!") "From that day on, they were a little better because they thought I was just a little bit crazy." ("Ohhhh!!!")

Hiring a maverick is always risky, whether for a corporation or a government agency. But perhaps only an outsider -- and someone who may be just a little bit crazy -- could set in motion the fundamental change needed to transform a creaking bureaucracy. "This is a high-octane, political place," says U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. "There are expectations -- and an instant-gratification principle at work. Michelle is a person who will not blink first."

Although the latest test scores show significant improvement over 2007 results, Rhee says it will take at least three years to begin to see sustainable academic progress in D.C. Whether she succeeds or fails in a town where everyone talks about change but few seem committed to making it happen, the implications will extend far beyond the district.

"We have a system that does wrong by poor kids of color," says Rhee, who first encountered what she calls the "stark reality" of urban public education during her senior year of high school, when she volunteered as a teacher's aide in an all-black, inner-city fourth-grade classroom in Toledo. "If we're going to live up to our promise as a country -- supposedly the greatest country -- that has got to stop."

She knows that this is, to borrow a word from her lexicon, a "ginormous" challenge. According to Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, "D.C. is the Superfund site" of public schooling. Tim Quinn, managing director of the nonprofit Broad Superintendents Academy, calls it "the most challenging turnaround in America. This is a business involving our most emotionally loaded, important asset: our children. Imagine trying to fix Enron -- but worse."