The education of Michelle Rhee - POLITICO.com Print View

Michelle Rhee turned up at work last Sept. 15 utterly stunned. “I really did think he was going to win,” she told the staff of her boss, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty. “Yes, we know you did,” came the reply. Rhee was probably the only person in Washington surprised by Fenty’s defeat. Even her fiancé, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, told POLITICO he saw it coming. Rhee had already amply demonstrated that she was terrible at politics. The toast of the Washington Post editorial board for shaking up the city’s troubled school system, she now admits she should have done more explaining — and selling — of her policies. She campaigned openly for Fenty, without apparently realizing that she might be hurting him and that she was ensuring that her job would end when his did. “She really thought that, at the end of the day, people would see the results he had produced and want them to continue,” Johnson said. But in the weeks since that defeat, Rhee, 41, has pivoted hard and emerged, ironically enough, as a national political force to be reckoned with. She’s an important voice among centrist Democrats — led by President Barack Obama — who are pushing a new agenda of teacher quality and high standards in education. She’s an adviser to some of the nation’s most ambitious Republican governors, like Florida’s Rick Scott, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, who envision a more apocalyptic confrontation with teachers unions. And among Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination, there’s something of a Rhee primary underway, with potential candidates regularly dropping her name as a path to both policy credibility and Beltway buzz. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty refers to her as “superwoman,” citing the education policy film “Waiting for Superman.” “Michelle’s passion for reform and her refusal to wait for the bureaucracy to act is what makes her so effective, and one of the ways she will be effective on the national stage is by achieving success on a state-by-state basis, starting with Florida,” Scott, who shares a take-no-prisoners approach to governance with Rhee, his adviser, told POLITICO. Now Rhee is in the process of shifting from political naif to full-fledged power broker. She has created an emphatically political new organization, StudentsFirst, and she told POLITICO she hopes to raise and spend an astonishing $200 million annually — a large sum, even in the deep-pocketed world of education philanthropists. The group intends, she said, to engage in policy battles around the country and to give allies of a policy platform that involves higher standards and more flexibility for teachers the kind of backup that unions have long provided their foes: money and organization. The first battle is a particularly ugly one. With governments around the country facing deep budget deficits, many will lay off teachers. Rhee would like them to fight union-backed “last in, first out” policies and to fire bad teachers, not new ones. Rhee has brushed off concerns about job security, because “seniority layoffs” can mean that good, young teachers are fired; that low-performing schools — with high rates of turnover — lose more teachers; and that districts that could save money by firing a few higher-paid teachers are instead forced to fire more lower-paid ones. “Doing layoffs based on seniority is not helpful to kids — it’s not in the best interest of children,” she said, and she’s been making that case nationally, notably in an op-ed Wednesday with former New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein that described the policy as an “outrage.” The fight against LIFO is the first battle in a campaign for a new education policy that is equal parts ambitious and ill-defined. StudentsFirst has produced a detailed policy platform and, Rhee said, raised $2 million on the Internet. But the $200 million she plans to raise annually could finance anything from the largest ever television advocacy campaign, to an overwhelming lobbying push, to an army of 40,000 staffers. To help, she has a group of experienced political consultants that includes former Obama Communications Director Anita Dunn and Bradley Tusk, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s former campaign manager. Rhee said her central push will be advocacy on broad structural issues and that she won’t get into details of policy, like curriculum. “We are an organization that will be involved in developing and helping to draft policy — but we’ll also be going and helping to get those policies passed,” she said. “We’re focused in on how [to] create the environment for really aggressive school reform to be able to take hold.” And people close to her say groups like the Sierra Club or the Club for Growth, which use lobbying, contributions, and television campaigns to advance policy goals, could serve as models. Klein said he’d talked to Rhee about the campaign allies of Bloomberg’s run to push the New York state legislature to expand charter schools, which included waves of political mailings. “This is a game about power, and I think you have a vacuum on one side,” he said. “She’s concluded — and I think with some wisdom — that there’s really no countervailing force that is well-funded, is well-organized. What I think she wants to build is an organization that can really step up and amass political support and play hardball.” But for now, Rhee has just a skeleton staff of about half a dozen, a sterling reputation among America’s policy elites and big plans. She spoke to POLITICO by mobile phone, apologizing for “sketchy” reception, as a staffer drove her through the mountains en route to Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval’s State of the State address in Carson City, where he called for ending teacher tenure and introducing school vouchers. Rhee “will add her considerable voice to our debate, and I thank her for demonstrating the importance of finally having a frank and honest conversation about public education,” Sandoval said in the speech. “Michelle, I know we will hear your voice as one advocating for students first.” Leaders of teachers unions privately loathe Rhee, but they have tried to associate themselves with the reform cause by showing flexibility on contracts, while pointing out that salaries and benefits are key to attracting good teachers. “My greatest concern is that she takes energy and focus away from the very things we ought to be doing to change things for students,” said National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel. “She’s polarizing in almost everything she does.” Other critics say Rhee has been too quick to fight with labor. “I’m not sure it’s so much the issues. Because you have somebody — a superintendent in Baltimore — who has achieved a contract that has many of the same elements as Rhee. In fact, it may even go farther” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy. “He did not have a knockdown, drag out fight; he was able to negotiate it with the union,” said Jennings. The reality of the education debate in many state capitols, though, will likely be that knockdown, drag out political fight, and the 2012 presidential campaign has some asking which side Rhee, a registered Democrat, is really on. The governors she’s embraced are mostly Republicans, and she’s a powerful ally for them. “She’s strong, she’s courageous, she speaks truth to power — and she has more credibility on the issue in the eyes of some Democrats because she’s a Democrat,” Pawlenty said. “They can’t just say, ‘There they go again, the conservatives spouting off on the usual stuff.’” Rhee finds the GOP adulation “a little odd,” she said. But she’s also allied with a range of Democratic mayors, including Fenty, Johnson and Los Angeles’s Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as Bloomberg, an independent. Unlike many Republican executives, she said public workers, including teachers, deserve the right to unionize and bargain collectively. She’s a “huge fan” of Obama’s education policy, she said, starting with his Race to the Top incentives for standards and labor flexibility. “I very much believe in the Democratic ideals,” she said, recalling that as a second grader in Ohio, she’d asked her father the difference between a Republican and a Democrat. He told her “the difference is that Republicans care more about what’s going on outside of the country and Democrats care more about taking care of people in our own country.” And Rhee may ultimately part company with many Republicans on a central point. She’s at war with labor over education policy, but shares a Democratic commitment to the government role — and spending — in education. Republicans see the battle with teachers unions as part of a broader fight to shrink government and reduce public spending. “One of the things that’s going to come down the pike — maybe in 2012, maybe in 2016 — there’s going to likely be a parting of the ways between these progressive education reformers and the folks who have deeper and more profound concerns about public section unions,” said Frederick Hess, an education scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a temporary alliance.” CORRECTION: The day after Washington, D.C.'s primary election last year was September 15, not September 13. © 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

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