Education Reform: Report from the Front

You really should read Katherine Mangu-Ward’s article on Michelle Rhee’s effort to reform D.C. schools.

Here are some key passages:


• Rhee’s approach goes right to the heart of a decades-long political debate about what schools really need, more money or fewer lousy teachers. On that question her position is clear: No real change is possible unless good teachers are hired and bad teachers fired.

• [Rhee] offered the teachers a whole lot of money [and] two choices. With the first option, teachers would get a $10,000 bonus—a bribe, really—and a 20% raise. . . Benefits, rights, and privileges would remain as they were. Under the second option, teachers would receive a $10,000 bonus, a 45% increase in base salary, and the possibility of total earnings up to $131,000 a year through bonuses tied to student performance. In exchange, they would have to forfeit their tenure protections.

• No one is better positioned to throw together an afternoon protest rally than a bunch of teachers. They have poster board and markers on hand at all times, and they get off work at 3 p.m.

• Randi Weingarten, the head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers . . . is no dummy. Rhee’s endgame, which she has made fairly explicit, is to seize control of hiring and firing from the unions. And with the national union involved, the D.C. contract is imbued with more precedent-setting value. . . If the unions accept Rhee’s bribes, their stranglehold on the nation’s schools will be endangered.

• Teachers unions contribute more than $60 million a year to political campaigns, topping contributor lists at the state and federal levels, and nearly all of the money goes to Democrats. That investment buys the continuation of the status quo plus some platitudes about class size and teacher pay from every prominent Democrat. Reformers have virtually no presence on Capitol Hill.