The Root: D.C.'s outgoing mayor and his schools chancellor used education reform as something to do to black people instead of with black people

Education Reform: What Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee Got Wrong

D.C.'s outgoing mayor and his schools chancellor used education reform as something to do to black people instead of with black people. Reform advocates around the country should be taking notes. This is a local story with national implications.

• By: Michael Lomax | Posted: September 21, 2010 at 4:00 PM

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For three years, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee promoted the notion that education reform could happen only if she was totally in charge and everything was done her way. It was her way -- or her way. She justified every policy, every action, by saying that it was all about the kids, not about adults.
Nothing in her tenure so typified her approach as the ending of it. The day after the defeat of her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, when DCPS students could have benefited from an example of civility and graciousness in defeat, she called Fenty's loss -- and, by implication, her own departure -- "devastating" for D.C. children. In the end, it was not about the kids; it was about the adults, and one adult in particular: her.
And that, in many ways, was the problem. Rhee came to Washington with experience only as a classroom teacher -- for three years, through Teach for America -- and as head of her own nonprofit organization. She had never really worked for anybody or been institutionally accountable to anyone. She declared "cooperation, collaboration and consensus building [to be] way overrated." With Fenty's support -- or at least without his ever publicly reining her in -- she stiffed the City Council and its chair, Vincent Gray, the man who defeated Fenty. She stiffed teachers and the union that represented them.

And she stiffed the parents and the predominantly African-American communities they lived in. She did education reform to blacks, not with them.

It's possible to see the rise and fall of Michelle Rhee as a Washington story, a story about local politics in a city that, despite its status as the nation's capital, is still the country's 26th-largest city, just below Milwaukee and just above Las Vegas, a city all the more atypical because of its status as a sort of territory or protectorate, without full home rule or voting representation in Congress.

But that is not how the story is being seen -- or how it is being covered by the media. The NBC Nightly News, for example, devoted two stories to Rhee in the days after the election. A story on The Daily Beast saw the defeat of Fenty and Rhee as evidence that "significant segments of the public -- including the urban public school parents who have the most potentially to gain -- are skeptical of the White House's school reform agenda."

D.C. voters, I believe, repudiated not the substance of education reform but its style: high-handed, disrespectful, autocratic. And it would be too bad -- and truly devastating, both for D.C. students and for the cause of education reform -- if the education-reform movement retreated or trimmed its sails in the wake of the D.C. elections.

Instead, D.C.'s likely mayor, Vincent Gray, should take this as an opportunity, rare in politics or policymaking, for a do-over, a chance to build on what was good about Rhee's reform agenda and move forward. Education reform is bigger than one chancellor -- or one mayor.

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