Pushback Greets Rhee's Radical Reforms of D.C. Education System

District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was appointed two years ago to revamp and radically reform the D. C. public school system. Her unconventional, some would say illegal, policies have the teacher's union and the council up in arms.

As the Washington Post noted on Saturday, October 31, "Mayors from Boston to San Jose have been taking over school districts since the early 1990s, recognizing that their city's economic growth and their political longevity are inextricably linked to the quality of the local educational system." In Washington this didn't happen until 2007. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced the Education Transition Strategy on April 27, 2007. A few months later Michelle Rhee was brought in as Chancellor, tasked with converting the policy into practice and practicalities. According to Washington Post staff writer Bill Turque, "in 28 months, she has upended almost every sector of public school operations, from school closures to classroom instruction to teacher evaluations to labor relations" in the District of Columbia, Public Schools (DCPS) The latest battleground has been labor relations and the opponents have been Rhee, the teachers' union and D.C. Council Chairman, Vincent C Gray. Over the summer of 2009 Rhee hired 934 new teachers, approximately double the number typically hired each summer. In July she told the Lehrer News Hour that DCPS is "so fortunate, in that the economy, as bad as it is, has not impacted DCPS in the way that it has other jurisdictions, which I think might make us the only school district in the country that is not making any cuts." New hires, no budget cuts, 25 schools closed and half the principals in the system replaced in 28 months. To all appearances Rhee was successfully and relatively peacefully carrying out rapid and radical change successfully. The picture changed significantly for all parties in October. Rhee announced that the system was facing a budget shortfall of $44 million and had to take radical action. The radical action included laying off 388 school employees, including 266 teachers. The Reduction-in-Force (RIF) layoffs were met with howls of protest from the teachers and their union. According to the contract RIF layoffs, inspired by budgetary reasons, do not have to respect seniority or any of the other labor relations clauses of the contract. Rhee and principals simply selected teachers regardless of their experience or qualifications and told them they were out. The union claims that the entire process was the culmination of a long-term strategy. They argue that Rhee over-hired intentionally to provoke a budget crisis and create a situation where she could 'target' layoffs at specific teachers she deemed to be unproductive, restive or problematic in any other way. Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) president George Parker supports this theory:

I think, to some degree, there might have been an intentional effort to target some teachers to get rid of them. And the way you do that is that you go out and you hire additional teachers, because, somewhere down the line, you intend to use those teachers to replace certain targeted teachers.

Advocates of this view can point to very strong circumstantial evidence, particularly, comments made by Cheryl Krehbiel, Head of Professional Development, DCPS, "Fifty percent [of our teachers] don't have the right mind-set, and there's a possibility that more of them don't have the content knowledge to do the job." On the same edition of News Hour (April 2, 2008) Michelle Rhee stated, " There will be some schools where a significant amount of the teaching force will turn over. I think that we are going to need a different breed of educators." She made this comment shortly after having fired 98 members of her office staff. Parents and the WTU have both attempted to obtain injunctions to overturn the layoffs. D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Bartnoff has yet to rule on he WTU's case.