Rhee is pictured on the Time Magazine cover dressed in black and standing in a classroom with a broom- perhaps to encapsulate images of a witch and a muckraking reformer. Who knows? Michelle Rhee is being crowned the latest educational white knight with a silver bullet. Her major accomplishment in her one-and-a-half year D.C. tenor has been to cast a wide web of fear in the teaching and administrative profession as she has moved to dismiss both numerous teachers and administrators.
Hyperbole aside, Rhee has some good ideas. She has proposed eliminating tenure for teachers and substituting a higher pay schedule. That makes sense as tenure was largely a sort of consolation prize handed to the largely female teaching profession early in the twentieth century as a surrogate for better pay and shield against arbitrary dismissal...”Hey we aren’t going to pay you much, but at least you’ve got some job security.” Rhee, of course, would like to be able to clean house at will, similar to what happens in many charter classrooms now. Rhee appears; teacher vanishes. So she will have a real fight to eliminate tenure.
Rhee is also guaranteed style points by going after the teacher’s union- a familiar whipping boy largely because the union has never recognized that it needs to get beyond simply trying to get more money for teachers and actually try and do something to improve education.
Well, first, decades of research have established that the biggest problem with American public schools is the unequal opportunities that children bring to the classoom. That has nothing to do with teaching and everything to do with society’s socio-economic differences, including genetic differences among schoolchildren.
As support, however, for the problem teacher myth, the reporter cites a lone study by Eric Hanushek of Stanford, in which Hanushek found that students with a teacher ranked among the top 15% of all teachers, will show phenomenal growth in test performance while comparable students with another teacher will stuggle. Putting aside the methodological problem of defining the top 15% of teachers, we have our answer! Figure out a way to get 100% of teachers into the top 15% and we can expect that all our students will be above average. Maybe Time should have added a cauldron to the Rhee photo.