The most chilling episode in Richard Whitmire’s biography of Michelle Rhee occurs near the end, when Rhee says to a PBS camera crew, “I’m going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?” Of course they did, and they taped the chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools firing a principal. The victim’s face was not shown, but the episode revealed a woman who relishes humiliating those who have the misfortune to work for her.
“The Bee Eater” is a worshipful portrait of Rhee, who is best known for the Time magazine cover in which she is portrayed broom in hand, ready to sweep clean the filthy stables of the school system. And sweep she did, as nearly half the district’s teaching staff and a third of its principals resigned, retired or were fired during her brief tenure.
‘The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District,’ by Richard Whitmire (Jossey-Bass. 270 pp. $24.95)
Whitmire regrets that she didn’t fire even more teachers, since he feels certain that fully two-thirds were incompetent. Firing so many African Americans may have cost Mayor Adrian Fenty his re-election, Whitmire writes, but it had to be done, and Rhee was the only person tough enough to do it.
Like Rhee, Whitmire believes that students’ academic performance is solely a function of the quality of their teachers. If students have low test scores, it is their teachers’ fault, while students with high scores had great teachers. Neither Whitmire nor Rhee seems aware that social science research has demonstrated for many years that what families do, and the advantages or disadvantages that family income confers, have even more influence on academic performance than what teachers do. Poverty makes a difference: When children start school at age 5, before they ever meet a teacher, there is already a gap in their vocabulary and readiness to learn. But never mind.
Whitmire maintains that Rhee was consistently stymied by the teachers’ union and by racial politics. The union, of course, objected to mass firings. And in his telling, black parents cared more about protecting the jobs of black teachers than about the education of their own children. Rhee alone put the well-being of black children above the “self-interest” of the adults in the system. She was also hobbled, he asserts, by negative reporting in The Washington Post. Careful readers would question that claim, since she received unwavering support from The Post editorial board, as well as from education writer Jay Mathews, and consistently fair treatment from reporter Bill Turque.
Did she succeed? Whitmire insists that she did and points to the District’s test score gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2007 to 2009. But the gains on the federal reading tests under Rhee were no greater than those under her predecessor Superintendent Clifford Janey, which were achieved without the firings and angst of the Rhee era. From 2005-07, under Janey, black fourth-grade students made a five-point gain in reading, but only a three-point gain under Rhee; Hispanic students made a 13-point gain in reading during Janey’s tenure, but only a one-point gain from 2007-09. Reading scores for eighth graders didn’t budge from 2002-09, regardless of who was running the school system. On the federal math tests for fourth grade students, the gains recorded on Rhee’s watch outpaced Janey’s, but the gains from 2003-05 were larger than those achieved under either Janey or Rhee. In eighth-grade math, D.C. students have made steady gains from 2003-09.
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