The Lightning Rod Makes Time

Last month I drew notice to an Atlantic story about (and an interview with) Michelle Rhee, the Washington, D.C., school chancellor who is aggressively pressing reforms in that district, most notably an effort to replace tenured teacher tracks with a system emphasizing higher salaries but more accountability and merit pay. She's been controversial, to say the least. She'll get only more so now that she's on the cover of this week's Time.

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made.

Others have pointed to other factors for our lagging performance, noting, for instance, that kids in other countries spend longer and more days in school; that their curricula are often both more diverse (invariably including foreign languages from early on, something that's absent from many U.S. districts); and that most other countries have more consistent national standards that let them more easily evaluate and use what works best. And in "First, Kill All the School Boards," an article in the January/February 2008 Atlantic ,Matt Miller argued that the dominance in U.S. education of "local control" by local school boards effectively leaves education policy in the hands of much more powerful statewide teachers' unions that resist reform and teacher accountability and dominate everything from curricula to school calendars.

The reformers may emphasize different problems, but they generally circle around to a similar stance: The need to shift power from teachers' unions to school leaders and to empower administrators to enact best practices. Michelle Rhee represents, in a personality hard to ignore, exactly that approach, and she does so in a personality and presence that clearly means business:

ONE DAY IN AUGUST, I SPENT THE MORNING with Rhee as she made surprise visits to Washington public schools. She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom.

ONE DAY IN AUGUST, I SPENT THE MORNING with Rhee as she made surprise visits to Washington public schools. She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first. Within two minutes, she had seen enough, and she stalked out to the next classroom.

You can why she badly scares a lot of teachers (and some parents) and inspires many reformers (and some parents). She has become what the reform debate has long lacked: a national focal point.

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is attempting to do this through a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. This fall, Rhee was asked to meet with both presidential campaigns to discuss school reform. In the last debate, each candidate tried to claim her as his own, with Barack Obama calling her a "wonderful new superintendent."

Her appearance on the cover of Time -- and paragraphs like that one -- will only elevate her profile. She may fade away. Or she may take the debate over school reform -- and the so-far inconsequential 25-year-old debate over how to save America's schools -- into a new, more serious phase.