another crazy Democrat supports takes on the teachers' union

Here's Matthew Bishop in School Reform News on Michelle Rhee...

Turning around America’s public schools is one of the litany of promises every ambitious politician makes en route to Washington, DC. But on Capitol Hill itself, the woman charged with turning around the worst urban schools in America carries herself less like a politician than a pugilist.

After just one year in the newly created office of “chancellor” of District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), Michelle Rhee has fired and replaced almost 50 principals--including the one at her own child’s school--along with dismissing 93 members of the central office staff. Of the 144 schools she took command of last year, 21 are already history. That number is expected to grow.

Needless to say, Rhee’s reign of terror has left many former employees gnashing their teeth. At 37, Rhee, a Korean-American, has been accused of racism, sexism, and ageism by the principals' union....

Rhee then went on to detail why what she called “the four Cs”--cooperation, collaboration, consensus-building, and compromise--are overrated. An example is her unwillingness to compromise with the Washington Teachers Union (WTU).

“When you are talking about a contract or a collective-bargaining agreement that has provisions in it that I do not believe are in the best interests of children, then I refuse to sign my name,” Rhee said. “This is me being absolutely unwilling to compromise when it comes to the rights and futures of our kids.”

At the center of her struggle with WTU is a groundbreaking effort to change how Washington pays its teachers. Favoring a performance-based compensation package of salary and bonuses over the existing one, Rhee has devised a two-tiered plan under which teachers could opt to earn up to $131,000 annually--in many cases more than twice as much as they currently earn. First, though, they would be required to relinquish tenure and prove themselves during a one-year probationary period. Rhee has dubbed this option the “green tier.”

Alternatively, current teachers could choose the more traditional “red tier,” which wouldn’t offer the same increases in compensation but would include current tenure protections. New hires would not have this option, so eventually tenure protections would be phased out. Irrespective of their chosen tier, the chancellor says, all DCPS teachers would receive a minimum raise of 28 percent.

If implemented, the new contract would be the first of its kind nationwide, and Rhee already has made clear her willingness to bypass WTU to get what she wants. At stake are two of the primary mechanisms by which she believes DCPS’s abysmal performance can be reversed--empowering principals to fire ineffective teachers and attracting better teachers by increasing compensation....

The clever title of the WSJ editorial on this: Rhee-forming D.C. Schools", excerpted here...

Guess who recently said the following: "Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unions, but it has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults."

A right-wing blogger? No, those are the words of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools, who is speaking truth to teacher-union power to shake up one of the nation's worst education systems....

She dismisses as "complete crap" the argument that students can't learn because of disadvantaged backgrounds.

It's about time. Washington is the lowest-performing school district in the nation. Only 12% of D.C. eighth graders are proficient readers, 8% in math. A mere 60% of high schoolers finish in four years with a diploma. The problem can't be money; Washington's per-pupil spending is the third-highest in the nation, at $13,000 a head.