In case you haven’t heard, the UA Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock has a lot going for it; not the least is a fantastic speaker series.  And the series has boasted many speakers of national import discussing education policy issues – this week, Dean Skip Rutherford and the talented Clinton School students played host to the charismatic and controversial Michelle Rhee, the precocious Chancellor of Public Schools in Washington DC (you can check out the special series on Michelle Rhee from PBS’s John Merrow here) .

During the hour-long talk, Rhee introduced herself to the packed room, described her reluctance to take on this job, and was effusive in her praise of her boss in the DC Mayor’s office, Adrian Fenty.  Since her appointment by Fenty in May 2007 of the 45,000 student system, the 39-year-old Cornell and Harvard grad Rhee has made a name for herself as a no-nonsense leader willing to take on entrenched interests.

Rhee talked about her early days in the district.  After spending a great deal of time meeting with people and learning about the district, she began to do what all turnaround CEOs do – “I started firing people.” But, apparently, you had to do something really egregious to get fired.

This desire to clean house of ineffective employees, she recalls, was her first “mistake”.  It led to an outcry from employees and from her cabinet who told the Chancellor that she can’t simply fire people … in fact, they didn’t like to use the word “fire”.  Rather, people were “separated from the system”.   Faced with all of the obstacles in the way of firing incompetent employees — or separating them from the system – Rhee and Mayor Fenty introduced legislation to make all central office employees “at will” employees.  This change encouraged many to ask about the fairness of such measures.  What, they asked, about job security and due process? Rhee viewed such questions as one-sided because they focused on the adults rather than the kids; Rhee was more focused on due process for the kids!

What happens, for instance, if due process forces Rhee to assign children to languish in the classroom of an ineffective teacher while the teacher is given the opportunity to improve?  This scenario, to Rhee, is unacceptable as it treats the needs of the kids as secondary to those of the adults.  Indeed, Rhee contends that our society’s view of teaching needs to undergo a mentality shift in two important areas:

1. The system needs to stop treating teachers as identical and interchangeable.  They are not.  There are real and important differences in teacher quality and the system should treat teachers accordingly (perhaps this is why Rhee is working hard to implement performance based pay for teachers in DC schools).
2. The system must reduce the numerous barriers in the way of removing ineffective teachers (in fact, Rhee has discussed a compensation strategy in which teachers are given substantial increases in salary in return for decreased job protection.  In this way, great teachers would be richly rewarded and poor ones would be swiftly “separated from the system”.)

She recounted a conversation with a school principal that reveals the standards she hopes to set in the way of effective teaching.  She asked the principal and assistant principal, “how many ineffective teachers do you have in this school?”  After some back and forth, the two school leaders were not ready to label any of the school’s teachers in that way.  Rhee pressed a bit, finding it hard to believe that all of the teachers in the school were highly effective.  Focusing on one teacher who appeared to be less competent than some of her peers, Rhee asked the school principal, “would you put your grand-daughter in her class?”

Sadly, the principal responded, “well, if that’s the standard then I don’t have any effective teachers”.  According to Michelle Rhee, the “grand-daughter standard” is the one to which our schools should aspire.

Rhee closed (and so will I) with a statement that is clearly true, but is rarely spoken.  She reminded us that “no one has a right to be a teacher.”  Rather, she said, “it is a privilege to teach our nation’s children”.  In the case of schools, we must always remember that the fundamental rights belong to the kids compelled to attend, not the adults who come in of their own free will and are compensated for doing so.