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Trump may appoint brave school reformer as education secretar
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Trump meets with school reformer, Democrat Michelle Rhee
What a Michelle Rhee appointment would tell us about Donald Trump’s education plans
Donald Trump’s rounds in search of an education secretary include a meeting this weekend with Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief and StudentsFirst founder.
If she is offered and accepts the position, here are five reasonable conclusions we can draw:
1. Trump’s cabinet will contain some diversity of opinion when it comes to undocumented immigrants.
Trump campaigned on promises of ridding the country of people who came here illegally. That includes, he has said, children and young adults who immigrated illegally with their families — people who would be protected by a federal DREAM Act that fell short multiple times in recent years. Rhee came out in favor of the DREAM Act in 2011, citing her direct experience with families who would be protected by it.
“Immigration is not my area of expertise, but I know that the current policy has implications for our education system and isn’t working for kids,” she wrote in a blog post announcing her position. “No child should be forced to live in the shadows and hide their identity, nor should any teacher or mentor have to cover up the truth.”
Many educators have been hoping that the Trump administration will adjust its hard-line position to include amnesty for children brought here by their parents. If Rhee is nominated, she could open the door for the idea to at least get a hearing.
2. Trump meant it when he said he’d champion school choice.
How much is Trump planning to follow through on his campaign promises? In education, one big vow he made was to use federal funds to encourage states to make school choice available to all poor students, including through publicly operated charter schools and vouchers that allow families to take public funding to private schools.
Rhee famously broke with Democratic party dogma three years ago after announcing support for vouchers, so she’s a true believer. If she comes out of her meeting with Trump wanting to serve in his administration, we can assume he convinced her that he plans to move forward with his promises to embrace charter schools and vouchers.
That said, among voucher supporters, Rhee is relatively mild. In a 2012 interview with Education Week, she said she only favors vouchers for low-income students with no high-quality public school options. “This is not about choice for choice’s sake,” she said. Trump’s proposal would offer vouchers to poor families only, but his vice president, Mike Pence, has supported publicly funded private school vouchers for both low- and middle-income families.
3. As for ending Common Core — not so much.
The conservative movement that helped elect Trump cheered when he claimed on the campaign trail that he would end the Common Core standards. The standards are also opposed from the left, by teachers and parents fed up with the tests that standards bring and the test companies that publish them.
Rhee, though, falls with the Obama education reform mainline on this issue: She hasstrongly supported the Common Core as a path to improving schools for poor children and a way to prepare students for the global economy.
Avoiding the issue in a Trump administration would be relatively easy, complaints from a conservative base aside: Trump did promise to “end” Common Core on the campaign trail. But you can’t repeal something the federal government never actually passed.
4. Urban will still dominate rural — at least when it comes to the education secretary’s most direct experience.
Trump’s support came largely from rural voters, some of whom said the Obama administration hadn’t been attentive to their needs. Indeed, on education, the administration’s leaders did come almost entirely from cities — from Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago public schools, to the current education secretary, John King, who led charter schools in Boston and New York City.
Rhee also grew up in the education world serving big cities. She started in Baltimore, as a Teach For America corps member, then went on to work on urban teacher contract issues by founding The New Teacher Project (now called TNTP), and finally made her national reputation reshaping the public school district in Washington, D.C.
But Rhee has a long relationship with red states, too. StudentsFirst, the advocacy group she founded after leaving D.C., lobbied for laws curtailing seniority protections for teachers. Before it merged with another advocacy group last year, StudentsFirstgained the most traction in states such as Tennessee and Indiana where elected officials were less sympathetic to the concerns of teachers unions.
5. The education reform community Rhee helped to shape will face a new division: how to deal with Trump.
The education reform world as we currently know it arguably settled into place in 2009, when Barack Obama took office and eventually picked one side over the other ina heated debate over the future of public education.
Michelle Rhee was then the fierce chancellor of the D.C. public schools who spent her time firing principals and appearing on national magazine covers with a symbolic broom. In other words, she was the extreme edge of the side Obama picked when he chose Arne Duncan of Chicago as his education secretary and Duncan chose to go all out, if in a friendlier-than-Rhee way, for teacher evaluations and charter schools.
If Trump picks Rhee as his education secretary and she accepts, it could reshape the landscape of the education world again, shifting former allies to opposite sides. Already, we know that some hardcore reformers have come out strongly against any of their own accepting a role in a Trump administration. If Rhee joins the administration, her old friends will have to decide whether to follow that line of thinking and oppose her — or work with her.
亚裔有望入阁？特朗普会晤赵小兰李洋姬
当选总统川普近日来密集约见可能入阁人选，他星期一在纽约会会见了前劳工部长赵小兰等人，川普还在上周末与韩裔教育改革家李洋姬（Michelle Rhee）举行会面，有传言称，川普或考虑选择李洋姬为教育部长。
上周末，川普在新泽西还会晤了以教育改革出名的李洋姬 (Michelle Rhee)。报道称，父母是韩国移民的李洋姬是川普正在考虑的教育部长人选之一。
46岁的李洋姬上星期六在丈夫，加州首府Sacramento市长强生（Kevin Johnson）的陪伴下，和川普见面。强生本人此前是NBA球星，不过他也被指是联系性侵犯。
曾上过《时代周刊》的李洋姬过去是民主党，但她支持用教育券增加弱势生的就学选项、大刀阔斧改革低成就学校的立场，与川普的理念相近。而她不留情面的铁血作风，可能才是获川普欣赏的关键。
出身密歇根韩裔医生家庭的李洋姬，初、高中读的是私校，大学念康乃尔大学和哈佛大学。她以“学习成绩”为取向的评估方式让非裔占大多数的华盛顿公立学校教师、学生都很难适应。
李洋姬曾任华盛顿特区学区总监，曾在2007年用考绩赶走不适合任职的学校教师（36名），关闭学生标准测验表现不合格的学校（23所）。用发奖金、现金的方式鼓励各校师生提高教学和学习成绩。部分低成绩的华盛顿学校成绩也因此改进。
2010年，她又辞退了241名不合格的教师。她的事迹还被拍成纪录片“Waiting for Superman”。如果她能够执掌教育部，亚裔也将在内阁有了一个位置，同时，全美基础教育也有望提高。
川普星期一在纽约会见了布什总统时期的劳工部长赵小兰等人，以及前德州州长佩里（Rick Perry）、奥克拉荷马州州长范林（Mary Fallin）、前众院议长金里奇（Newt Gingrich）等人。
Trump meets with school reformer, Democrat Michelle Rhee with education secretary post still open
By Joseph Weber
President-elect Donald Trump will meet Saturday with Michelle Rhee, a Democrat and former District of Columbia public schools leader who is considered in the running for secretary of education.
Rhee will meet with Trump, a Republican, at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where he is also meeting with former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, purportedly being considered for secretary of state.
Jason Miller, Trump communications director, confirmed the Rhee meeting Saturday morning with FoxNews.com.
Like Trump, Rhee has been a supporter of school choice, backing some public money for charter schools while the D.C. schools chancellor from 2007 to 2010.
Trump’s School Choice Policy released in September calls for his incoming administration to “immediately” redirect $20 billion in federal funds to school choice -- in the form of block grants for an estimate 11 million school-age children living in poverty.
“We want every disadvantaged child to be able to choose the local public, private, charter or magnet school that is best for them and their family,” the Trump campaign said in announcing the plan. “Each state will develop its own formula, but the dollars should follow the student.”
Rhee was hired to lead D.C. schools under Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty, who gave her essentially unprecedented autonomy to change the costly and under-performing city’s school system.
Known as a visionary education reformer, Rhee shot to national prominence after her picture appeared on the Dec. 2008 cover of Time magazine next to the headline “How to Fix America’s Schools.”
But the picture of Rhee holding a broom enraged teachers, union leaders and others who said the image made clear Rhee’s intentions to improve the school system by trying to sweep out the most experience teachers -- in her effort to pay them based on performance, not tenure.
Trump also supports merit-based pay for teachers, which he and his campaign say rewards “great teachers … instead of the failed tenure system that currently exists, which rewards bad teachers and punishes good ones.”
However, Rhee, the daughter of Korean immigrants, has in the past been a supporter of the Common Core educational standards that Trump has frequently called a “total disaster.”
During Rhee’s tenure in the District of Columbia, graduation rates and standardized test scores in math and reading improved. But she increasingly lost the support of parents and others who complained that she made such decisions as firing teachers and principals and closing schools with little public input.
Rhee unapologetically fired 241 teachers in 2010, the same year Fenty lost his reelection bid to Vince Gray and she resigned, in what many considered the city’s return to ward politics.
Trump is also scheduled to meet Saturday with Betsy Davos, a wealth donor, school choice advocate and the former leader of the Michigan Republican Party. Davos has also been mentioned as a possible education secretary candidate.
Trump met earlier this week with Eva Moskowitz, a charter school leader from New York. However, she reportedly dropped out of the competition to run the Education Department after meeting with Trump earlier this week.
Rhee is married to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a Democrat, and leads the board of St. Hope Public Schools, a Sacramento-based charter school group.
Michelle A. Rhee (born December 25, 1969) is an American educator and advocate for education reform.[1] She wasChancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit organization that works on education reform.[2]
She began her career by teaching for three years in an inner city school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project.
Early life and education[edit]
Rhee was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second of three children of South Korean immigrants Shang Rhee, a physician, and Inza Rhee, a clothing store owner.[3][4][5][6]She was raised in the Toledo, Ohio area and educated in public schools, through the sixth grade. Her parents then sent her to South Korea to attend school for one year. Upon her return, they enrolled her in a private school because they felt the public school was lacking. She graduated from the private Maumee Valley Country Day School in 1988, and went on to Cornell University where she received a B.A. in government in 1992. She later earned a Master of Public Policy from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Teaching[edit]
Inspired by a PBS special that she saw during her senior year in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America, went through their five-week summer training program, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland.[5][7] She was assigned to Harlem Park Elementary School, one of the lowest-performing schools.[6] Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, "I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town." She said she took courses over the summer and received her teacher's certification, then returned to teach at Harlem Park.[5] Her "Teach For America" Training did not prepare her well to handle basic classroom management. She was so unprepared that in order to quiet down a class she taped children's mouths shut. One of the children's lips bled a little when the tape was removed.[8]
In her second and third years of teaching, Rhee team taught a combined class of the same students with another teacher.[9] She told The New York Times that those students had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile.[7] Earlier she had said on her resume that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile.[10] In math, her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually.[11] In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually.[11] Rhee responded that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones listed on her resume could be explained by the fact that her principal at the time informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.[10]
The New Teacher Project[edit]
In 1997, Rhee founded and began serving as the CEO of The New Teacher Project, a non-profit which within ten years of its founding, trained and supplied urban school districts with 23,000 mid-career professionals wanting to become classroom teachers.[7] The Project primarily serves New York, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia.[7]Beginning in 2000, the Project began redesigning the D.C. schools' recruitment and hiring processes.[3]
Chancellor of D.C. public schools[edit]
In 2007 the D.C. Board of Education was stripped of its decision-making powers and turned into an advisory body, and the new office of Chancellor was created—so changes in the public school system could be made without waiting for the approval of the board.[5][6] Newly elected D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty quickly offered Rhee the job of Chancellor;[5] she accepted after being promised mayoral backing for whatever changes she wanted to make.[12] Critics noted that Rhee had no experience running a school system,[5] and had not even been a principal. She had been highly recommended to Fenty, however, by Joel Klein, the Chancellor of the New York City public schools.[13]
Rhee inherited a troubled system; there had been six school chiefs in the previous 10 years,[5] students historically had below-average scores on standardized tests,[14]and according to Rhee, only eight percent of eighth graders were performing at grade level in mathematics.[15] The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the U.S.[16] Fenty and Rhee announced that they planned to make revolutionary changes in D.C. schools, and that part of the planned changes was a hoped-for "grand bargain" with teachers under which "greater accountability, including an end to tenure," would be traded "for a nearly 100-percent increase in salaries."[17]
In 2008, she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained. Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment.[18]
In 2010, Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20 percent pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for "strong student achievement", in exchange for weakened teachers' seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice.[19]
Criticism[edit]
Rhee's style of reform created a great deal of controversy. One common criticism disputes her assertion that, while a teacher, she dramatically increased students' average scores from the 13th percentile to the 90th. It was a statement that could not be verified during her confirmation process for D.C. Schools Chancellor.[20]
Rhee contended that under her chancellorship, student achievement in the D.C. Public Schools greatly improved. Since 2007, secondary schools have improved their standardized test pass rates by 14% in reading and 17% in math, while elementary school pass rates have improved 6% in reading and 15% in math. System-wide high school graduation rates also improved by 3%, up to 72% in 2009.[21] By 2010, D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reading pass rates had increased by 14 percentage points, and math pass rates had increased by 17 percentage points. Enrollment decreased by one percent, a slower decline than prior years.[21] However, significant achievement gaps remained between students in high-performing and low-performing school districts, and between white and black students. Education expertDiane Ravitch questioned the legitimacy of Rhee's results, alleging that "cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum" were the true outcomes of Rhee's tenure in D.C. schools.[22]
Some D.C. parents and community leaders complained that despite these improvements, the speed with which Rhee enacted her reforms left them without input on the changes. The District Council also criticized Rhee for being unresponsive to Council members' requests for information about school operations. From 2008 to 2010, Rhee's approval ratings decreased from 59% to 43%. In 2010, 28% of African Americans supported Rhee, down from 50% in 2008. Yet even "as residents grow less supportive of Fenty's designated change agent for the schools," noted the Washington Post, "they still approve of some of the changes. The proportion of parents in the city who see violence or crime as a 'big problem' has declined from 78 to 65 percent.... The quality and availability of books and other instructional materials is viewed as less of a major problem by all parents, dropping from 67 percent to 48 percent." Also, the Post indicated that, "Rhee's efforts to raise the quality of teaching through improved training, evaluation and dismissals might be gaining traction as well."[23]
Rhee fired several administrators and school principals, including Marta Guzman, the principal of the high-performing Oyster-Adams Bilingual Elementary School, which Rhee's own children attended.[6][24] Some parents alleged that the firing process was neither transparent nor fair. According to the Washington Post, "the departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wondered why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories. The move also heightened ethnic and class tensions within the school's diverse community. Eduardo Barada, co-chairman of the Oyster-Adams Community Council, the school's PTA, said Guzman was toppled by a cadre of dissatisfied and largely affluent Anglo parents with the ear of a woman who was both a fellow parent and the chancellor".[24] Rhee also fired a principal she had hired seven weeks before in Shepherd Elementary, another high-performing school in the upper Northwest neighborhood.[25]
Rhee was criticized for closing several D.C. schools without holding public hearings,[26] for not reporting complete budget figures at D.C. council hearings,[26] for not involving parents to a sufficient degree,[27] hiring former supporters to conduct an evaluation of her performance,[28] and for spending considerable time before the national media (Time, PBS, lecture circuit) instead of visiting schools.[26] When Rhee outlined a proposed new security plan in a talk at Woodrow Wilson High School, many students protested and proposed an alternative plan, Rhee responded indicating that she found the student plan well thought out and that she would consider incorporating aspects into the final plan.[29]
Referring to the 266 teachers she laid off, Rhee told a national business magazine: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" George Parker, president of the teachers union, called Rhee's statements "reckless", said they had no factual basis, and demanded that Rhee apologize to the 266 teachers for making these remarks.[30] Rhee, declined to apologize for her statement, claimed that one of the 266 dismissed employees had been accused of sexual misconduct, six had been suspended for using corporal punishment, and two had been absent without leave, while many others also had egregious time and attendance records.[31]
2010 election and resignation[edit]
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The 2010 Mayoral Election in Washington D.C. was interpreted by some political observers as, in part, a referendum on Rhee's tenure as school chancellor.[32] Following the defeat of incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty in the 2010 Democratic primary election, Fenty announced on October 13, 2010 that Rhee had resigned. Rhee launched a personal website, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page soon thereafter.[33]
Test erasures[edit]
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Opponents of Rhee, arguing that she had not genuinely improved education in D.C. schools, maintained that improvement in test scores must have been due to cheating, and attempted to show that changes made on some students’ tests, in which wrong answers were erased and correct answers substituted, indicated a systematic pattern of answer-changing, presumably at Rhee’s direction.[34] These complaints led to studies of the alleged erasures.[35] In 2012, District of Columbia's inspector general conducted an investigation at Noyes Education Campus, and based on that investigation, it concluded "investigators found no evidence to corroborate these allegations", and that there was "no evidence of criminal activity or widespread cheating on the DC CAS exams".[36]
In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education released the results of their investigation finding that there was no evidence of widespread cheating in the D.C. public schools. The investigation focused on a single school out of the dozens of schools where high rates of test erasures were reported. The investigation also excluded Rhee's first year. Only one incident of cheating that may have affected funding was found.[37][disputed ]
School choice and school vouchers[edit]
Rhee was originally neutral on school vouchers, issuing a 2008 statement that she had not "taken a formal position on vouchers" and that she disagreed "with the notion that vouchers are the remedy for repairing the city’s school system."[38] In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on January 11, 2011, Rhee endorsed vouchers, saying that she supported "giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools." She added that "All children deserve the chance to get a great education; no family should be forced to send kids to a school they know is failing."[39] In a February 2011 speech before Georgia's legislature, she indicated she had supported the D.C. voucher program as a supplement to the charter school alternative. She said that if a parent did not win the lottery to get a child into a charter school, then "who am I to deny them a $7,500 voucher to send their child to a great Catholic school."[40]
After D.C. schools[edit]
On December 6, 2010, Rhee went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to announce that she had declined all job offers resulting from her high-profile work as D.C. Chancellor and would be focusing on a new advocacy organization she had formed called StudentsFirst.[41] She told Winfrey's audience she wanted to have one million members and raise one billion dollars in order to catalyze education reform in the United States.[41] According to The New York Times abolishing teacher tenure is a main objective of Rhee and the group.[42] Within weeks of its founding, Rhee and StudentsFirst had advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey on abolishing teacher tenure and other issues related to public education reform.[42] In 2010–2011, Rhee served on the transition team of Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott.[43]
She has also been a visible figure in the national media, appearing on television shows, radio programs, and the documentary film Waiting for Superman. In May 2011, Rhee spoke in favor of school choice alongside the Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker at an event hosted by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice education organization founded and funded by Betsy DeVos.[44]
In 2013, Rhee wrote Radical: Fighting to Put Students First.
In August 2014, Rhee replaced Jim Scheible as chair of St. Hope Public Schools, a charter school chain run by her husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson,[45] and subsequently announced that she would be stepping down as CEO of StudentsFirst.[46] On March 29, 2016, StudentsFirst announced some of its state chapters would merge with 50CAN, a nonprofit education advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.[47]
On November 19, 2016, Rhee met with President elect Donald Trump and Vice President elect Mike Pence, in consideration for Secretary of Education.[48][49]
Awards and recognition[edit]
Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality,[50] and the National Center for Alternative Certification.[51] She was a special guest ofFirst Lady Laura Bush at President George W. Bush's 2008 State of the Union address.[52]
Family and personal life[edit]
While Rhee was teaching, she met Kevin Huffman, who was also a member of Teach for America and later became head of public affairs of the organization.[6] The couple married two years after meeting; while married they had two daughters. They divorced in 2007.[53] Both daughters attend private schools, the Harpeth Hall School inNashville, Tennessee,[54] and the Chattanooga Christian School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In March 2010, Rhee became engaged to Kevin Johnson, mayor ofSacramento, California, and former NBA player.[55][56][57] The two married in September 2011 in a small ceremony at Blackberry Farm near Knoxville, Tennessee.[58][59]
See also[edit]
Comments follow Trump meets with school reformer, Democrat Michelle Rhee
Rhee will keep common core intact and will never give the power back to the states. If he picked her it would be yet another broken promise.