Not long after Michelle Rhee took over as head of the Washington, D.C., public schools a year ago, she announced a plan to shut down almost two dozen schools in D.C.'s decrepit, shrinking, public-education system. At a meeting at one school, parents began screaming at Rhee and throwing things.

Rhee says she doesn't mind getting yelled at. "I don't take things personally," she says. Indeed, she seems unflappable, a slender, pretty young woman with a straightforward, though not humorless, manner. A tireless single mother of two young girls, she taps away at two BlackBerrys (one for her close friends and staff, the other for the city and the public at large) from early morning until after midnight, answering every e-mail personally.

That is not to say that Rhee is relaxed. She says she wakes up every morning with a "knot in my stomach," and that she is "angry," though "angry in a good way." She is angry at a system of education that puts "the interests of adults" over the "interests of children," i.e., a system that values job protection for teachers over their effectiveness in the classroom. Rhee is trying to change that system. In a way that few realistic observers thought was possible, she has a chance to succeed, not just in Washington, but also around the country.

She is entering into a struggle with the local teachers union that will test whether an urban school district can weed out its weak teachers—a profound threat to politically powerful teachers unions nationwide.

Rhee [earlier in her career, started] an organization, The New Teacher Project, devoted to recruiting better teachers for hard-to-staff inner-city schools. She caught the attention of Joel Klein, who was trying to reform the New York City school system under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Klein, in late 2006, recommended Rhee to Adrian Fenty, the newly elected mayor of Washington, D.C., who staked his reputation on fixing D.C.'s chronically poor schools.

At first Rhee said she was not interested. "It's not a job you would want," she says. "You have your hands tied. You have to deal with school boards. It's all about politics. You can't get anything done. It's an impossible job."

Even measured by the low standard of inner-city schools, Washington's have long been among the worst. Rhee is the seventh person to run the D.C. schools in the past 10 years. Most of her predecessors were, according to Rhee, "smart and worked hard and wanted to do the right thing for kids," but "they didn't get a whole lot done." The reason, she says, is that they "caved in" to the city's educational establishment, whose talk of reform was just that.

Rhee showed she was serious by firing more than a hundred non-union central office workers, including administrators, and 36 principals (one out of four). She even fired the principal of the school where she chose to enroll her own daughters.

Rhee's toughest fight, by far, is coming up. She has proposed a new contract for the union that would undermine tenure, the teachers union holy of holies. The carrot is money. By tapping Mayor Fenty and private philanthropists, she is hoping to make D.C. teachers the best-paid in the country.

The union president, George Parker, has been willing to work with Rhee, but he has taken heat from some union members who accuse him of cozying up to the school chief. Privately, Rhee and Parker have had some shouting matches.

The union can play hard. When Rhee moved to reclassify some central-administration workers so they could be terminated without cause, the union began running 60-second radio ads attacking Rhee, playing "Back Stabbers" by the O'Jays as background music.

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Source: Newsweek 8.23.08