Radical (10 page)

“Unintended Consequences” also presented very specific recommendations for change. We gave districts a road map for a better teachers union contract. Among our recommendations: Teachers could transfer from one school to another, but they could no longer force a school to accept them. If a teacher lost his or her job at one school—for poor performance, falling student enrollment, or any other reason—he could apply for a job at another school, but he was not guaranteed a position. Promising new teachers would not be the first to be laid off, and senior teachers could no longer bump those with less experience. Contracts would include procedures for evaluating teachers, training those who were not measuring up, and rewarding the best ones.

The report got the attention of teachers unions. They went on the attack. We also got the attention of Joel Klein, who had succeeded Harold Levy as chancellor of New York City schools. New York was one of the districts that we had gathered data from for “Unintended Consequences.” Klein was doing battle with the unions at the time. After two years of negotiating unsuccessfully with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the school system and the union were heading toward binding arbitration. The UFT is the New York affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. Randi Weingarten, already a powerful and legendary union boss, ran the UFT at the time.

Many of the disputes revolved around staffing and seniority, matters we had investigated at TNTP. Klein asked for my help.

I loved Joel Klein from the moment I first spoke with him. Upon Harold Levy's departure, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had named Joel his new chancellor. The choice was a total shock to many. Klein was not an education professional—not even close. He had worked in the Clinton administration and as the CEO of the U.S. corporate arm of the Bertelsmann media conglomerate. But he was a New York kid, the son of first-generation Americans. He grew up poor and attributed his success to the great education he got in New York public schools. Still, he was an unlikely candidate for the head of the largest school district in the country.

Before Klein started his new job as chancellor, he called me to have a conversation. By that time, we were the largest supplier of new teachers to the New York public schools, supplying two thousand new Teaching Fellows every year.

“What's wrong with the way we hire teachers?” he asked.

At first I was a bit skeptical, so I stayed on the reserved side, unsure of what his reaction would be. But we connected, and I warmed to the task. I ran down what we had found with “Missed Opportunities” and our theory on union contracts. I told him how we had structured our Teaching Fellows program to work around the bureaucracy, and I described our success to date.

“Okay,” he said, “can you do more?”

“More Teaching Fellows?” I asked.

“No, more to solve the fundamental problem. I get the Teaching Fellows piece, that's great. Keep doing it. But you're saying that the HR function for hiring traditionally certified teachers is broken. Why can't you start a program like Teaching Fellows to go after those folks? Circumvent the system again.”

“Umm,” I mumbled, “your HR department may not be so excited about that.”

“I'm not worried about them,” said Klein. “Can you do it or not?”

“Okay,” I said tentatively. “How many do you want?”

“How many can you do?” he asked.

“I'll have to talk to my staff and get back to you,” I said.

“Yeah, get back to me,” he said, nonchalantly.

I went back to my staff and relayed my conversation with the new chancellor.

Karla Oakley quickly chimed in. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The HR department barely tolerates us as it is. This would put us in direct competition with them. And that would not be good.”

“Why not?” I asked again.

“ 'Cause we'd probably kick their butts,” she replied, “and
that
would not be good.”

After some rigorous debate, we decided to put together a proposal to locate another five hundred recruits for the new program. I sent it to Klein but half expected the idea to die on the vine. After all, the guy was about to take over a system of 1.1 million kids. He was having conversations with hundreds of experts in school law, finance, special education, food service, and transportation, just to name a few. He probably wouldn't even remember our conversation.

In what I would later learn was true Joel Klein fashion, he got back to me immediately.

“Let's go” was his answer.

This guy was no joke. He totally won me over.

I
N
2005, K
LEIN AND
his labor negotiator, Dan Weisberg, asked me to get involved in their stalemate with the UFT. I agreed immediately.

By then Klein had been battling for two years to change the union work rules, such as the one that forced principals to hire incompetent teachers. But Klein had unearthed another outrage. Teachers who had been deemed incompetent or unsafe—some because they had been accused of abusing students—were still on the payroll. The disciplinary system to assess and perhaps dismiss failed teachers was so cumbersome and lengthy that hundreds of teachers caught in the process were warehoused in what was dubbed “the rubber room.” Rather than go to a classroom, they came every day to bare rooms in school buildings. They read, they ate, they slept. And they cost Klein's system $40–50 million a year.

Klein and the UFT were at war. Under state rules, deadlocked negotiations with public unions come before an arbitration panel of three judges. Klein and Weisberg figured I could help their case. I had no idea that the stage was set for the first skirmish in what would become a wide-ranging battle over the union's grip on public education.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yeah, what do you mean?” I replied.

“It's just that most of the people whom we've asked to testify at the panel have turned us down. They're all terrified of the UFT.”

Indeed, elected officials and education experts alike knew that supporting Klein and the schools against Randi Weingarten and her union was tantamount to excommunication from the UFT's good graces—and campaign cash.

“I'm good.”

I
T WASN'T THAT
I was being brave. It's that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

Several weeks later I was asked to report to the offices of Proskauer Rose, a top Manhattan law firm. I was directed to the room where the arbitration was taking place. It was set up with four sets of tables forming a square. The head table was the arbitration panel. The UFT and New York public school teams were set up facing each other, perpendicular to the panel. The fourth table, facing the panel, was set up for the witnesses.

I slid into a seat behind the school system's table. One of Klein's staffers tapped him on the shoulder, whispered into his ear, and motioned toward me. Joel turned around, smiled his broad smile, and leaned forward. I leaned forward to meet him.

“Welcome to the madhouse. Thanks for coming, kiddo,” he said, and then turned back around.

I listened for a while and then was called to give my testimony. My part was pretty simple. Since we had gathered data directly from New York City schools, I was not hypothesizing about what might be happening. I was presenting facts.

I talked through “last in, first out” policies, by which promising new teachers could be let go if a veteran teacher wanted his or her job. I described the time-consuming thicket of rules a principal had to follow to fire an incompetent teacher. I walked the panel through the forced-placement rules, which required principals to hire teachers who had failed at other schools—“the dance of the lemons,” in the words of some principals. I ran through other provisions of the union contract that were detrimental to creating successful schools.

With each example, I presented data to show the negative impact on students.

At the conclusion, I shared our recommendations. I laid out five changes that should be made to the union contract to make it better for kids.

Then came the questions. The panel asked me a few. The school's lawyers also asked me a couple. Last was the UFT's turn.

“Ms. Rhee,” one union lawyer asked, “isn't it true that you run an organization that has a multimillion-dollar contract with the NYCDOE? And that your organization would stand to benefit by helping the DOE?”

“Yes, we do have a contract with the DOE, but my testimony is not about helping the DOE, it's about the facts.”

Randi Weingarten shot me a level stare. If looks could kill, I would have been dead.

I stood up, grabbed my things, and exited the room. Joel came out after me.

“You were dazzling, kid. Really good. You're ballsy.”

The panel ruled for Klein and the New York public schools. It struck down forced placement and replaced it with mutual consent, which meant a principal had to agree to accept a teacher from another school. The arbitrators accepted four of my five recommendations.

Compared with Randi Weingarten, I considered myself a peon at the time. I had no idea that I had created an enemy.

4

The Road to D.C.

T
oward the end of my first meeting in Washington, D.C., about running the public school system, I was trying to figure out how to break it to the city administrator that I didn't want the job. A trim fellow with a shaved head walked in.

“Hi, I'm Adrian Fenty,” he said. “How are you?”

“Fine, sir, it's an honor to meet you.”

The new mayor of the nation's capital seemed young and energetic but not particularly impressive. He was wearing a white shirt, blue tie, blazer, and rumpled khakis. He looked like a mayoral aide, rather than the chief executive of a city with a $10 billion budget.

“As you know, I'm taking over the schools and I'm looking for a chancellor to lead the district. I don't want one of the usual suspects. I'm looking for someone with a different profile.”

He looked around a lot and seemed distracted. He had two BlackBerrys going at once.

“We went up to New York, and I was incredibly impressed by Joel Klein,” he continued. “I told him I needed someone like him, and he recommended you.” Klein, Fenty said, had described me as someone who knows education and how school districts work, but that I came with a fresh perspective from outside the system.

“That's exactly what I'm looking for,” he said. Then he typed an email on his BlackBerry.

“I appreciate the chancellor's kind words,” I responded, “and while I do know education and understand how some aspects of school systems work, I have a specific expertise in teacher quality and HR. I don't have a broad base of experience in running a school district.”

During our first meeting, Adrian Fenty failed to impress me. I wasn't sure that I wanted to run a school district for him.

T
WO YEARS AFTER MY
initial run-in with Randi Weingarten in New York, I was getting restless.

TNTP was doing well. By 2007, we had built a staff of about 150 people and had an annual budget of more than $20 million. And I had long ago paid off the original $833,000 loan from Don Fisher at the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. I should have been thrilled and content. I had a great job where I was doing meaningful work and was my own boss. But I kept getting the nagging feeling that it was time to go. I just didn't know where.

I had read somewhere that well-organized leaders always plan for their succession, and that they do it well in advance of their departure. My departure was not imminent, or so I thought. I couldn't imagine another job where I'd feel like I was having nearly as much direct impact as I was having—and not have to answer to a boss. That was an important piece to the puzzle. I am not great at taking orders, and in most jobs, you have a boss. So what could I possibly do next?

Without an answer to that question, I started planning. My number two, Ariela Rozman, was an incredibly competent woman. We complemented one another perfectly. I would go out and do all of the external work, like closing contracts and making presentations. Ari was a taskmaster. She made the trains run on time, and there was no one better at it.

I'd originally brought her in to be the vice president of marketing. It wasn't a great fit for her, but I immediately saw her gift. She became the chief operating officer, which was the perfect role for her. As I considered her, I thought she had about 80 percent of what it would take to be a great CEO. But what about the other 20 percent? We needed someone to be the face of the organization to represent us to the outside world. I thought about the rest of the management team. All of them were incredibly talented and driven. There was Victoria Van Cleef, my vice president of marketing; Robin Siegel, my chief financial officer; and Jessica Levin, my chief knowledge officer. But none of them was exactly right. I considered people outside the organization, but I didn't love the idea of bringing in a stranger.

Then my thoughts turned to Tim Daly. We had hired Tim when he was twenty-three. I still remember interviewing him to this day. He knocked my socks off, and I watched him ascend from selection coordinator to selection manager to program director with our New York City public school system contracts. He was incredibly impressive, and I thought he had that presence that one would need to wow the clients.

However, he couldn't hold a candle to Ari on the management and operations front. Also, I would probably have a mutiny on my hands if I promoted a kid four levels down as the new CEO. I wasn't sure what to do. I scheduled a one-on-one dinner with Ari to talk about her future.

“I'm succession planning,” I said.

“What?
Where are you going? You can't leave!” she screamed.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I responded. “At least not yet. I just feel that it's time to move on, but it's a little terrifying because I don't know where to go. Anyways, this is a few years off.”

I
N
M
AY
2007 I went down to New Orleans for the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, education reform's version of the World Economic Forum, held every year in Davos, Switzerland. The buzz was all about Washington, D.C. The nation's capital had just elected a new, young mayor—Adrian Fenty. Word was that he wanted to take over the schools, and he wanted to push through bold reforms. I was invited to a late-night brainstorming session with about two dozen reformers to discuss what the new mayor might do.

The session was a total snoozer. The usual suspects said the usual things. Nothing new or innovative emerged. I remember leaving thinking, “Jeez, these people have no clue what they're going to do.”

The next day Victor Reinoso, D.C.'s deputy mayor for education, who had led the previous night's session, found me.

“Hey, I need to talk to you!” he said.

“Sure, what do you need?” I asked.

“A superintendent. We need a rock star. You've worked with all of the best people across the country. I need you to tell me who's good and who's not. Can we discuss it over dinner tonight?”

“No problem,” I said. “See you then.”

We went to Jacques Imo's, a favorite New Orleans haunt, and over alligator cheesecake, I gave him four names.

“If anyone can turn that crazy system around,” I said, “these are your best bets. I just don't know that you can talk any of them into doing it!”

I left feeling good. I'd sung for my supper and gave them the only people who might have a shot at turning around the D.C. schools.

I knew what I was talking about, too. TNTP had been working with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for years. We had profiled it in our studies. The school system was one of the worst bureaucracies we'd run across. In fact, we were about to pull out of our contract. Given that we worked with all of the most dysfunctional school districts in the country, you knew that meant DCPS was a whole different level of bad.

I
N THE WEEKS LEADING
up to the summit, I'd had some tense conversations and communications with Clifford Janey, the superintendent in D.C. He was a good guy, and we actually liked him. He seemed focused on kids, and he was thoughtful.

But Cliff Janey was not a quick decision maker. He moved slowly, and it was causing us problems. We'd recruit all of these great teacher candidates and have them ready to hire. Then at the last minute he would make a decision to hire math coaches for all the schools, or to close a few schools, and that would throw all of the staffing functions into turmoil. He would make the decisions so late in the game that it would push hiring new teachers back until right before school, making our jobs impossible.

“It just isn't a good use of their money,” explained Kaya Henderson, our vice president, who oversaw the D.C. contract. “We charge them money to source these candidates, and we find the best. But they can't hire them in a timely manner, so they all leave. What's the point? If all we cared about was making money, we could have a contract here forever without having to produce any results.”

“But that's not us,” I said.

“My point exactly,” Kaya said.

So we decided it was best to terminate the TNTP contract. We wanted to give Janey a heads-up so, I called him. He didn't want us to leave. I explained our rationale, and we had some conversations and left messages back and forth. I was still pretty sure that we were going to quit working with his school system.

In D.C., I had gotten to know Jim Shelton, program director for education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Jim had grown up and lived in D.C. and was incredibly frustrated with how the public schools were operating.

“Don't leave,” he pleaded. “You have to hang in there.” He also told me that mayoral control under Fenty could be a game-changer. “Don't end the contract now. Just wait a little while,” he said. “As soon as the mayor makes the transition and hires a chancellor, it'll be a different ball game for you guys. I promise.”

I was skeptical. I'd seen my fair share of superintendents come and go. Each transition brought the promise of a new way of operating, but it rarely panned out.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
V
ICTOR
R
EINOSO
sought me out again.

“Hey, can I grab you for a minute?” he asked.

He led me into a side room off the conference's main corridor.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What
about
me?” I asked him back, confused.

“You becoming the chancellor in D.C.!” he said excitedly.

“Abso-freakin-lutely not. No way!” I answered.

“Why not? Last night you said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the right person.”

“Right, the operative term being
right person.
I am the
wrong
person.”

“Aw, come on, you wouldn't even think about it?” he pleaded.

I was thinking, for starters, about how hard it would be to uproot my family from our base in Denver, where Kevin Huffman and I had settled down after being somewhat nomadic.

“Nope,” I told Victor. “I have two kids in Denver.”

Kevin and I had married in the mid-1990s and moved to D.C., then to Toledo to be near my parents. In 2004 we moved to Denver, again to be close to my parents, who had moved there once Shang retired. They were helping us raise our two daughters: Starr, who had been born in D.C. in 1998, and Olivia, who came along in 2002 when we were living in Toledo.

Kevin had gotten his law degree and was working for Teach For America. Working out of Denver, I was on the road much of the time, which took a toll on our marriage but not on our focus on the girls.

“Really?” Victor said facetiously. “Because we have a lot of schools in D.C. that they could attend.”

“Seriously, Victor, give it up. Being an urban superintendent is the worst job in the world. Your hands are tied so you can't actually do anything, but you get blamed for everything. Not gonna happen.”

“Would you just come out and meet Mayor Fenty?”

“I'll meet with the mayor but not about the job. I'll meet with him to tell him how critical it is that he not hire a bozo and tell him what needs to happen in the district with HR.”

“Okay, fine,” Victor said. “I'll take just that.”

A
COUPLE DAYS BEFORE
the D.C. visit, I was in New York with my entire family to attend the Teach For America annual gala dinner. The board had decided to establish an award in honor of Peter Jennings, the legendary ABC News anchor, for TFA alums who had demonstrated leadership and accomplished significant education reform after leaving the corps. The selection committee had chosen me as the first recipient.

My parents were thrilled. Shang and Inza flew to New York with Starr, Olivia, and Kevin Huffman. Though we had grown apart and would later divorce, Kevin and I were still friends and confidants.

Meanwhile, Shang and Inza were about to understand what their crazy daughter had been up to. My folks would have asked the same questions that came from the retired businessman who called my idea nuts before I even started TNTP. They never really knew why I was flying all over the country to talk to school administrators. But being in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom with a thousand people watching their daughter receive an award by Peter Jennings's widow—
that
they could understand. Even my girls, who were too young to grasp school reform, were impressed.

I was scheduled to sit at the head table next to Joel Klein. When he saw me approach, he came over and kissed me on the cheek.

“Some of the others were advocating for other candidates,” he whispered. He had been on the selection committee. “I told them they all paled in comparison to you. No one has your kind of guts. Congratulations.”

I went onstage, gave a short acceptance speech, and returned to my family's table. Shang and Inza were beaming. The girls were digging into chocolate-covered strawberries. All was right with the world.

T
HE NEXT MORNING MY
phone rang. It was Victor. He was frantic.

“What's the matter?” I asked him.

“A few weeks back, we had taken the city council up to visit New York, speak with Mayor Bloomberg, and see what mayoral control of the schools looked like. Fenty fell in love with Klein and said, ‘I need the next Joel Klein.' ”

“Good for him!” I said. “You absolutely do!”

“Well, this is where it gets tricky. Joel Klein called the mayor this morning,” Reinoso said. “He told him he should hire you!”

“What?” I asked.

Klein and I hadn't even talked about D.C. the night before. “Why would he do that?”

“I don't know. All I know is the mayor woke me up at five a.m. this morning saying, ‘Who's Michelle Rhee? Joel Klein says I should hire Michelle Rhee. If she's that good, why isn't she on any of these lists you gave me, and why haven't I met her yet?' ” Victor paused. “And . . .”