Michelle Rhee

Michelle Rhee grew up outside Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of South Korean immigrant parents — her father a physician, her mother the owner of a clothing store. A PBS documentary she saw as a Cornell senior pushed her toward Teach for America, and in 1992 the program placed her at Harlem Park Elementary, one of Baltimore's lowest-performing schools, for a three-year stint she later said proved test scores could move fast if a teacher pushed hard enough, a claim scrutinized during her Senate confirmation but never fully resolved. She went on to Harvard's Kennedy School for a public-policy degree, then in 1997 founded The New Teacher Project, which spent a decade placing 23,000 career-changing teachers into hard-to-staff urban schools.

Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Rhee schools chancellor in 2007, giving her direct control over a district the city had just stripped from its elected school board, and she used it aggressively: firing 241 teachers, placing hundreds more on notice, and pushing through a 2010 contract that traded weakened tenure protections for raises up to 20 percent and bonuses tied to student performance. She reported gains across reading and math scores and a graduation rate climbing to 72 percent by 2009, framed the whole effort as proof that adult job protections, not poverty or funding, were the real obstacle to fixing urban schools, and became the most nationally visible face of the education-reform movement of her era, profiled in the documentary Waiting for Superman and invited to a Bush State of the Union as a special guest.

The same aggression that made Rhee famous also made her approval ratings collapse — from 59 percent in 2008 to 43 percent by 2010, with support among Black DC residents falling from 50 to 28 percent — and when the mayor who hired her lost his 2010 reelection bid partly over her tenure, she resigned within weeks. A wave of suspiciously high test-answer erasures surfaced under her watch, and critics including the historian Diane Ravitch alleged the score gains rested on outright cheating and teaching to bad tests; a 2012 DC inspector general review and a 2013 federal investigation both found no evidence of the alleged fraud, but neither fully settled what her numbers actually measured. She had also fired the principal at the high-performing school her own children attended, without public explanation.

Rhee founded StudentsFirst in December 2010, announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show with a stated goal of a million members and a billion dollars, aimed at ending teacher tenure nationwide; she stepped down as its CEO by 2014, and the organization folded into another advocacy group two years later without hitting either target. She has since sat on corporate boards, chaired her husband Kevin Johnson's charter school network in Sacramento, and stayed visible in reform circles without holding a post with the direct authority she had in DC. The scores from her chancellorship are still cited by supporters as proof reform works and by critics as proof it can be gamed, an argument never fully closed either way.

Michelle Rhee's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The New Teacher Project company
  Placed 23,000 career-changing teachers in hard-to-staff schools over a decade 1997
• 2010 DC teachers' contract other
  Traded weakened tenure for merit pay tied to student performance 2010
• StudentsFirst company
  National advocacy group aimed at ending teacher tenure 2010

• December 25, 1969 aged 0 Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan
• 1992 aged ~23 Begins teaching in Baltimore through Teach for America
• 1997 aged ~28 Founds The New Teacher Project
• 2007 aged ~38 Appointed DC Public Schools chancellor by Mayor Adrian Fenty
• October 2010 aged 40 Resigns as chancellor after Fenty loses reelection
• December 6, 2010 aged 40 Founds StudentsFirst, announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show
• 2013 aged ~44 Federal investigation finds no evidence of widespread test-cheating fraud
• 2014 aged ~45 Steps down as StudentsFirst CEO

• Wendy Kopp b. 1967
  Founder of Teach for America, which places college graduates as teachers in underserved schools. brought her into teaching
• Diane Ravitch b. 1938
  Historian of education and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education who shaped national education policy debates. ideological critic
• E. D. Hirsch Jr. b. 1928
  Literary scholar whose Core Knowledge curriculum emphasized cultural literacy and shared knowledge. contested education reform with
• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. announced StudentsFirst on her show