Michelle Rhee, Public Innovator

Michelle Rhee, Public Innovator

Posted on 12. Nov, 2009 in Public Innovation, Role of Government

As many of you know, one of my main focuses at the moment is on enabling government to become more actively engaged with on-the-ground, community-based solutions. So from time to time on this blog I plan to highlight what I call public innovators – those who work at the city, state or federal levels of government and exemplify an ‘invest in what works’ state of mind.

I recently read Tom Friedman’s op ed piece entitled “The New Untouchables,” which inspired me to start off with Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools. Before I tell you a bit about why I think Rhee is a public innovator herself, let me provide some general principles that a public innovator embodies and that I think are essential to advancing social innovation:

The public innovator:

  1. Encourages social innovation: Public innovators can encourage social innovation and help spur the testing of promising new approaches to solving social problems.
  2. Fosters a supportive policy environment: The very nature of innovation means that social entrepreneurs will be heading into new territory, and they often encounter unexpected barriers along the way. Public innovators can lift such barriers. In addition, merely by lending credibility and drawing attention to a given issue or initiatives, they can help proven models gather momentum.
  3. Rewards initiatives for exceptional performance: Access to reliable sources of funding is essential to the growth and sustainability of solutions that work. By tying decisions about funding and purchasing to performance, government can help ensure that solutions that work will sustain and grow their impact.
  4. Spreads successful approaches: Expanding the reach of a proven solution is often critical if the solution is to become truly transformative. Yet acquiring the recognition, support for spreading, or funding to scale a successful initiative is notoriously difficult. Government can play a crucial role in expanding the reach of solutions that work by seeking out what works and enabling solutions to spread.
  5. Produces knowledge to understand performance: Government already serves as a critical source of data and standards. Public innovators can play a critical role in ensuring that knowledge is produced, more clear standards are set, and data is easily accessible.
  6. Catalyzes public-private partnerships across sectors: Public leaders who leverage the many resources available across all sectors – and succeed in bringing various stakeholders to the table in order to advance effective solutions – can have an impact much greater than any solution focused solely on one institution or sector.

A public innovator must be able to work towards these principles in the face of tremendous obstacles, including but not limited to entrenched bureaucracy, partisanship, systems that are stuck in old, ineffective ways of approaching issues, term limits, and more.

You may be asking, why is it that I keep talking about government on this blog? It’s because I am convinced it is the only path to making systemic change on the many social issues we must address. As I noted in my remarks at the Social Enterprise Summit this year, it’s the better mousetrap, and we need to capitalize on it before the opportunity passes us by.

To build off that point, let’s turn back to Rhee. As chancellor of D.C. public schools, she has authority over 144 schools serving 46,000 students; her decisions immediately affect students and the city on a scale almost unheard of in the nonprofit sector. In addition, her approaches can have a spread effect because bold actions, for which she is well known,  attract media attention, and other superintendents can learn from and model their decisions after hers.

OK – so what has she done to improve the schools in our nation’s capital?

I saw Rhee speak earlier this year at the Gathering of Leaders, and I recall thinking that she is hitting the mark on the attributes of a public innovator. For starters, she has consistently sought the highest performing nonprofits in D.C. and partnered with them to bring their approaches to under-performing schools [(4) Scale successful approaches and (6) Catalyze public-private partnerships]. She is leading the charge on one of the most ambitious set of contracts ever for teacher unions to try to ensure that high-performing teachers are rewarded [(2) Foster a supportive policy environment and (3) Reward exceptional performance]. She has also been a huge proponent of charter schools [(1) Encourage social innovation], and she is a zealot about using and reporting on data [(5) Produce knowledge to understand performance].

Friedman points out in his op ed that, thanks to the changing nature of our economy, schools have the “doubly hard task” of “not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” – so someone in Rhee’s position needs to go beyond just getting students’ basic academic skills up to par. As Friedman notes, “We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.” Michelle Rhee understands that the status quo, when proven ineffective, needs to be shown the door, and that tough and unpopular decisions must be made in the face of inertia and adversity. She is a true public innovator.

Photo by The National Academy of Sciences via flickr

Share | Previous Post | Next Post

Tags: , , ,

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

8 Responses to “Michelle Rhee, Public Innovator”

  1. Richard Layman

    13. Nov, 2009

    I think you are enthralled by the reportage not the facts. If a public innovator does those 6 things, then there ought to be documentation on each factor. If you were to dig more deeply — beyond hagiography — you would find that on each of your 6 criteria, the DCPS effort is failing.

    Frankly, as a systems person, that is my biggest concern.

    1 Encourages social innovation — the DC effort is focused on individual teachers, firing allegedly bad ones and hiring good ones, not in fostering the development of strong systems and culture

    2 Fosters a supportive policy environment — if you challenge Rhee on 1 or other points, you lose your job. The people in the community who focus on policy and systems (i.e., the work of Henig and Stone, Alvarez, others) are ignored.
    3 Rewards initiatives for exceptional performance. If principals are direct about their need for resources they get fired.
    4 Spreads successful approaches. Other than the focus on hiring teachers, there are no successful approaches (i.e., what nearby Arlington County or Montgomery County school systems do to support excellence and achievement on the part of Title 1 schools/students)
    5 Produces knowledge to understand performance. Without a plan (did you see the reports from the GAO on the DCPS efforts) how can you understand performance or produce knowledge?
    6 Catalyzes public-private partnerships across sectors. Except for work with typical pro-charter type groups (Broad Foundation, etc.), Chancellor Rhee has not reached out to other sectors.

    That being said, I like your 6 criteria. I just need better examples.

    cf. a blog entry I've written on the same topic, http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2009/10/...

    Reply to this comment

  2. Brray Gravis

    13. Nov, 2009

    Sorry, Andrew, but you have just swallowed a load of manure. Not surprising, because she's an excellent speaker, but her only innovation is to remove any semblance of due process in education and to blame the teachers for everything.

    Which is all the more ironic, because when she was a teacher herself, for three long years, she wasn't so successful herself, despite all the lies on her resume.

    Rhee is opposed getting any input from anybody else, because she thinks she knows everything. She is excellent at demonizing people.

    Her only approach is to fire people without due process and then to make disparaging comments about the people afterwards, but then to refrain from giving any details that could be challenged, under the guise of personnel privacy rules. And, generally, those affected have no recourse.

    The data she crows about are generally close to worthless, but when the data shows that her mass firings of principals hasn't worked, she lies about the data.

    How long until she goes down in flames and the parents and teachers are left to re-build a system that she wrecked?

    Reply to this comment

  3. Robert

    13. Nov, 2009

    DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee is not an innovator of District public education. You are out of touch with the people of the District of Columbia, clearly clueless, and your opinion is framed without accurate information.

    Robert Vinson Brannum, Chairman
    Education Committee
    DC Federation of Civic Associations, Inc.
    1st Vice-President, Ward 5 Council on Education

    Reply to this comment

  4. Brray Gravis

    14. Nov, 2009

    Sorry, Andrew, but you have just swallowed a load of manure. Not surprising, because she's an excellent speaker, but her only innovation is to remove any semblance of due process in education and to blame the teachers for everything.

    Reply to this comment

  5. E favorite

    15. Nov, 2009

    Andrew, I fear that if you continue in this positive line of thought about Michelle Rhee, you will soon join the ranks of respected writers and media organizations that have made public corrections about inaccurate data supplied by Michelle Rhee. Specifically, they are John Merrow of PBS http://learningmatters.tv/blog/on-the-newshour/mi... , Jay Mathews of the Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2... and Michael Petrilli of Education Next and the Fordham Foundation http://educationnext.org/the-one-winner-in-todays...

    Please check the above links and also read the comments to see for yourself. These are verifiable facts, with links to official sources of public data. It has taken this kind of scrutiny to get accurate information because Rhee doesn’t hesitate to misrepresent publicly available information and then to repeat the misrepresentation. See also the GAO report, which among other things, notes that Rhee has not released a parent-teacher satisfaction survey. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09619.pdf page 33.

    [continued]

    Reply to this comment

  6. E Favorite

    15. Nov, 2009

    [Continued from earlier message:]

    Andrew — Best of all, go to the thatsrightnate blog and read his recent four part series satirizing Rhee. It is filled with facts and good commentary. http://thatsrightnate.com/2009/10/21/michelle-rhe... In part IV he drops the satire, because, as he says, “some things are quite difficult to joke about–the future of our children is one of them.”

    I hope you, as a serious writer and thinker, will check the facts and think carefully before continuing to support Michelle Rhee based on impressions from a speech she gave. To paraphrase thatsrightnate, some things are too serious to form an opinion about without knowing the facts – the future of our children is one of them.”

    Reply to this comment

  7. Tom

    16. Nov, 2009

    I'm a DCPS parent and I really do appreciate the effort, innovation, and change that we are seeing in the schools and classrooms. I have finally witnessed a teacher who was clearly either unqualified or who had decided no longer to care or try fired by DCPS. While both of my kids (unfortunately) had her for a year, at least another generation will NOT. I say let's do right for the kids and stop worrying first and foremost about the adults who are supposed to serve them well.

    Reply to this comment

  8. E Favorite

    17. Nov, 2009

    Hi, Tom – if you're talking about a teacher fired during Rhee's mid-year RIF, please know that some good teachers were fired then as well, including a 16 year veteran science teacher, beloved by students who was active in the union and known for being outspoken. One of the people RIF’d was even acclaimed, having been honored by Rhee in March, and then fired in October. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2009/10/honor...

    If you’re referring to teachers who were fired last June using the 90 plan which allows struggling teachers time to improve, that system has been in place for years. It has nothing to do with any of Rhee’s reforms. I just want to set the record straight. Ineffective teachers can be let go without using Rhee’s divisive tactics. School reform is not just about firing people, but under Rhee, it often seems that way.

    Also please keep in mind that the claims she makes of improving test scores have all happened with that same cadre of so called “bad teachers” that she inherited when she came to DC in 2007. She only started firing people in June of ’09, when all the current scores were already in.

    Reply to this comment

Leave a Reply