The Bee Eater

Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District

Richard Whitmire

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118058053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

The inside story of a maverick reformer with a take-no-prisoners management style

Hailed by Oprah as a "warrior woman for our times, " reviled by teachers unions as the enemy, Michelle Rhee, outgoing chancellor of Washington DC public schools, has become the controversial face of school reform. She has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and is currently featured as a hero in the documentary "Waiting for Superman." This is the story of her journey from good-girl daughter of Korean immigrants to tough-minded political game-changer. When Rhee first arrived in Washington, she found a school district that had been so broken for so long, that everyone had long since given up. The book provides an inside view of the union battles, the school closings, and contentious community politics that have been the subject of intense public interest and debate? along with a rare look at Rhee's upbringing and life before DC.

• Rhee has been featured in the documentary "Waiting for Superman"
• Rhee's story points to a fresh way of addressing school improvement
• Addresses fundamental problems inour current education system, and the politics of leadership

The book includes an insert with photos from Rhee's personal and professional life, and an "exit" interview that sheds light on what she's learned and where the future might take her.

Chapter One

AN (ASIAN) AMERICAN LIFE

One thing many people want to know about Michelle Rhee is who raised this firebrand? The question is understandable. Among Korean immigrants, the appetite for controversial public encounters is nonexistent. Usually, first-generation children of Korean immigrants seek first-class college degrees and settle into quiet suburban lives as doctors and engineers. Yet here we have Michelle Rhee, whose plunge into running D.C. schools generated so much controversy that it landed her on the cover of Time and spawned a twelve-part, three-year television documentary on PBS. In the news, we would see dramatic images of a Korean American female facing down the opposition, usually very angry African Americans at least two or three heads taller and a hundred pounds heavier. And yet she never blinked. Again: who raised her?

MICHELLE’S ROOTS

One day in late spring 2010, Michelle’s parents, father Shang and mother Inza, sat side by side on a smallish sofa next to me at her Washington, D.C., home off 16th Street near the Rock Creek Park Tennis Center. They were midway through one of their many visits to Washington, D.C., from their Colorado retirement home to help care for their granddaughters, Starr and Olivia. What was odd to me was the dynamic between the two of them: Inza, everyone assured me, is the firebrand, the fierce one from whom Rhee inherited her obliviousness to political pain. Yet when I asked about family history, Inza smiled and deferred to Shang, a retired physician, to handle the initial response. Don’t be fooled, Michelle cautioned me afterward. Her mother merely was not 100 percent confident speaking in English, especially in an interview. She was nervous she would say the wrong thing. Usually, that’s not how they operate. Usually, Inza runs the show.

True enough, the parents agree. Even though Shang does most of the talking during interviews in English, Inza is the steely one, and says she gets it from her father, who “had fire.” She is one of six children born to a police officer who later ran a municipal entertainment center and an old-fashioned Korean mother who stayed at home to take care of the children. Inza married Shang and in 1965 they moved to the United States so that he could attend medical school at the University of Michigan, where Michelle was born on Christmas Day, 1969. Then they moved to Rossford, a suburb of Toledo, so that Shang could pursue his specialty of pain management. Inza became a Western-style entrepreneur and opened an upscale dress shop.

Inside their suburban home in Toledo, Inza exercised exacting Korean-style control. She wanted to raise Michelle the way she was raised. She famously sewed her daughter into her prom dress to erase even a suggestion of décolletage (and later used scissors to get her out), grounded Michelle when her distracted brother Brian faltered in school, because that meant she hadn’t helped him enough, and, according to a family friend, dropped Michelle off at Cornell with the parting words, “We didn’t bring you to Cornell to get an Ivy League education; we brought you here to find an Ivy League husband.”

“My mother was very strict,” Inza says. “She didn’t let me do anything but study. She didn’t let me go to the movies or anything. Just study.” Inza’s rule-making with Michelle, however, was an East-West cross—Korean tradition melded into a Western “out there” flair arising from her successful business career. It was a potent combination that triggered growing-up traumas for Michelle.

“It’s funny because none of my cousins who ended up growing up in Korea were raised that way because in Korea things were changing,” said Michelle, who has an older and a younger brother.¹ Her parents, she said, were in a “time warp. I was only allowed out in the evening one night a week and had to be back by 11 p.m. My brothers, however, could do whatever they wanted.” Today, Inza laughs at her daughter’s memories of the family’s double standards. “I’m a Korean mother,” she said. “Korean moms are always stricter on girls than boys.”

As for sewing up the front and back of Michelle’s prom dress while she was in it, Inza did it because it was too low-cut for her liking: “She could wear it or stay home.” Then Inza chuckles and adds, “She complained a lot when she was little.” Regardless, the childhood tensions appear to have abated and today both would agree with Michelle’s observation: “My mom was very strong-willed. I inherited a ton of the way I am from her.”

Shang, by contrast, has been the even-tempered intellectual of the family. He reads deeply about science and medicine and has a great sense of humor. Growing up, everyone loved Dr. Rhee, from Michelle’s friends to those who worked with him at the hospital. Although Shang and Inza may sound like the classic odd couple, it’s obvious they are close. He pursues his intellectual passions while she whirls away taking care of family business. “One time,” recalled Michelle, “my dad was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper with the television on. At the same time my mother was buzzing around the house doing fifty million things. Suddenly, she picks up a can of Rogaine and sprays it on his head. And he’s sitting there, not moving, while she sprays the Rogaine on him.”

For elementary school, Michelle attended a neighbor hood public school, Eagle Point Elementary—“the most vanilla public school you could ever imagine,” Michelle said. The family lived in a well-off neighborhood in Rossford, an otherwise working-class city. Today, a drive around Rossford could be included in a documentary about the radical decline of America’s manufacturing prowess. The skeletons of hulking factories surrounded by empty parking lots serve as brutal reminders of an economic base that isn’t returning. A small sliver of Rossford, however, borders the wide and lazy Maumee River just before it flows into the Maumee Bay of Lake Erie. That neighborhood, entered through stone portals that set it off from the rest of Rossford, is slung close the river. It’s the kind of leafy neighborhood, dotted with large, expensive homes where one would expect a successful physician to live with his family. When I visited the neighborhood, the only people seen on the winding streets were the lawn care workers. The Rhees lived at 261 Riverside Drive until the house burned down a few years ago, Inza and Shang narrowly escaping.

After sixth grade, Michelle followed the family tradition of spending a year in Korea, where she stayed with her aunt and cousin who was a year younger. Every day, she went to school with her cousin. In Ohio, Michelle was the only Korean in her class. In Korea, she was the odd one out again: her Korean vocabulary amounted to what she could absorb at the family dinner table. “It was a tough experience,” she said. “The school environment there is so different. There were seventy to seventy-five students per class. We all sat in these little rows and were seated according to height. Since I was taller, I sat in the back with another tall girl. Nobody spoke English, so I just sat there and tried to pick up what I could, but I really didn’t understand 90 percent of what was going on.”

Rhee’s parents and Michelle would agree that the year in Korea was formative. “One thing she learned was closeness of extended family members,” Shang said. “I think that was striking to her.” Inza agrees that her daughter returned a different person. “Until then, she knew how to read and write Korean, because we sent her to Korean school, but she didn’t really speak Korean that well. So she went to elementary school and she had to work really hard. She changed a lot.”

After Michelle returned, Shang and Inza ratcheted up the academic pressure by sending her to Maumee Valley Country Day School, an independent school in Toledo where she followed in the footsteps of her older brother, Erik. Maumee Valley was the only elite private school in Toledo. Set on seventy-five wooded acres broken up by playing fields and carefully designed academic buildings, all intended to meld into the woods, the 125-year-old school enrolls fewer than five hundred students for grades three through twelve. The tuition, $16,000 in 2010, is modest for this kind of independent school but by far the highest private school tuition in Toledo. The school enrolls many of the sons and daughters from the University of Toledo Medical Center, Bowling Green State University, and University of Toledo. The students are drawn from a city that since the 1990s has been slammed by the implosion of manufacturing. When Maumee Valley graduates go away to college, and all do, they rarely return to Toledo to take jobs and raise a family. “When I do alumni visits, I go up and down the East Coast, up and down the West Coast,” said head of school Gary Boehm.

At Maumee Valley, Rhee established herself not as an academic star but as the master organizer. “I was the person who ran everything,” she said. “I was not the queen bee or most popular student but I knew who was doing what with whom and I would coordinate everything. I was student council president and all that stuff. I was very well-rounded. I played sports and was the captain of a bunch of teams. I wasn’t necessarily the best player. I was more of a leader.”

Pete Chung hailed from another Korean American family in Rossford, just down the street. Together, the Rhees and Chungs accounted for the entire Korean American presence in the area. Pete and Michelle became close friends and what Pete, now a venture capitalist in San Francisco, recalls about Michelle is her unflappability and imperviousness to peer pressures. Pete admits to being the typical teenager—fretting about what people thought of him, trying to act cool. Michelle, by contrast, went her own way. At the end of seventh grade, Pete and Michelle, who were in the same grade together, won permission from the Chung parents to throw an end-of-school-year party. Enormous planning went into the party, especially the guest list. The party was a huge hit, but afterward the Maumee Valley students who didn’t get invited were upset and determined to take revenge. “I started getting nasty crank calls,” recalled Pete, who became really worried about the fallout and called Michelle to warn her of imminent consequences. Her response: “Ah, screw ’em.”

That independent streak extended into the high school years, when Michelle did things many other students would never do, such as carve out close personal relationships with faculty members. Traditional teenage rebelliousness—drinking, smoking, cursing—wasn’t a part of Michelle’s life. One of her closest friends is Gretchen Verner. In high school, the two of them would go to parties and leave five minutes later when it became clear drinking was the whole purpose of the party.

Twice, they violated their anti-drinking instincts. Neither time turned out well. The first time they decided they needed to vent their anger that much of the senior field hockey team couldn’t start the season opener because they had been caught drinking. Marshalling some kind of shaky teenage logic, they decided to seek revenge by drinking themselves. “I made her a rum and Coke,” Gretchen recalled. It didn’t go well. “Michelle turned bright red.” The second encounter with alcohol happened their senior year when Gretchen and Michelle learned they didn’t get into their first-choice colleges: Yale for Gretchen, Princeton for Michelle. Now was the time for a traditional high school protest response, they concluded: let’s drink. Problem was, at Michelle’s house all they found was a dusty old bottle of Kahlua. Her parents aren’t drinkers either. Regardless, they indulged. Again, it didn’t turn out well for Michelle and it didn’t take that much Kahlua to find out.

Today, Michelle laughs about those memories. “I learned early on that I don’t have the tolerance for alcohol,” she said. “Some Koreans don’t have the enzyme that digests alcohol, so it goes straight to you, even if you take just one sip.” As she pointed out, not drinking allows her to keep a demanding schedule that extends well into the night. As D.C. schools chancellor she didn’t even begin her treadmill workout until 10 p.m. As for smoking, that experiment didn’t last long either. Once, Michelle decided she needed to rebel against her mother, Gretchen recalled, so they bought a pack of cigarettes, drove to the mall where her mother’s store was located and smoked. That protest was also short lived.

THE WIDER WORLD

Michelle repeatedly befriended people unlike her. The first was Jewel Woods. Each year Maumee Valley reached into Toledo’s schools and plucked one or two promising minority students. Most of the African American students selected were middle-class blacks. Not Woods, who by his own description was pure street, raised by his grandmother after age eight because of his mother’s drug problems. Before applying to Maumee Valley County Day School, he had already dropped out of his public school in Toledo. But through friends Woods had heard about the scholarship openings at the private school and something—to this day he doesn’t know what, perhaps some previously concealed intellectual curiosity—prompted him to apply. His test scores were lousy and his entrance essay was poorly written. But something compelling about the ambition of his essay, “Why black students were never pushed to achieve,” and something attractive about his curiosity got him admitted.

Getting admitted, however, was not the same as surviving. “I was a fish out of water,” he said. “I had a Jheri curl and a broken front tooth.” With a small class, there was no hiding in the back. A poor student with a fear of public speaking and slight stutter, Woods was an unlikely candidate to be befriended by the hyper confident, socially adept Michelle Rhee. And yet he was. The friendship—which included a period of dating—even survived into the third year, when Woods returned to the private school a “militant,” the result of attending a summer program for young black achievers. Part of that summer session included a public speaking course, which prepared him to deliver a scorcher of a speech on the opening day of his junior year, a time when students are invited to speak about their summer. Woods delivered a “jaw-dropping” speech about race and class that nobody knew how to deal with; only Michelle remained his friend. “What makes Michelle unique is that for some unbeknownst reason, she’s always had the quality of being an old spirit in a young person’s body,” Woods said. “Michelle was always the person people took their problems to. She always had that quality where she was comfortable with diversity and felt willing to explore race and class.”

During his time at the school Woods occasionally accepted rides home from other students. But he never had them drop him off at his actual house, where he lived with his grandmother. It was too embarrassing. “I’d have them drop me off two or three blocks from my house and then I’d walk home. Michelle Rhee was the only person I ever brought to my house, and she didn’t blink.” To Rhee, seeing where Woods lived on the west side of Toledo was startling, a universe apart from where Michelle lived on Riverside Drive. “I had never seen anything like it,” she said. Today, Woods runs an Ohio-based nonprofit that focuses on men’s issues. He and Rhee have maintained their friendship over the years.

Rhee was friends with most of the other African Americans at Maumee Valley, too—something she attributes to being an outsider of sorts herself, the only Korean American student in her 1988 graduating class of fifty-one students. “I lived a very odd life,” she said. “I was very much in the mix with rich, white, established people. But I also had a wide range of friends.” That mix can be glimpsed in Rhee’s senior page, the full yearbook page private schools usually devote to eac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: An (Asian) American Life
• Chapter Two: The Transformation Begins
• Chapter Three: Going National
• Chapter Four: Welcome to the Nation’s Education Superfund Site
• Chapter Five: Closing Schools
• Chapter Six: Randi and Michelle
• Chapter Seven: New Hires, New Fires
• Chapter Eight: Up from the Foundations: The Challenge of High School Reform
• Chapter Nine: Rhee’s Critics Find a Winning Storyline
• Chapter Ten: The Mayor’s Race
• Chapter Eleven: Lessons Learned
• Chapter Twelve: What’s Next?
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index
• Supplemental Images
• Wiley End User License Agreement