Six things we’d like to hear from Michelle Rhee

For more than a month the education world waited to see where Michelle Rhee, the firebrand former chancellor of the long-suffering D.C. Public Schools system, would hang out her next shingle.

Now we know: Rhee announced in mid-December that she had founded a non-profit, StudentsFirst, that would serve as “a powerful ambassador for children, catalyst for reform, forum for families and educators, and an organized collective voice.”

And this week, Rhee charted the course ahead by announcing a policy agenda that includes evidence-based evaluations of teachers, elimination of tenure, merit pay for educators, school choice and “responsibly” designed pension and benefits plans.

That’s a pretty significant slate of goals, but if anyone can do it, it’s Rhee — the outspoken superwoman of “Waiting for Superman” fame who once said that when it comes to education reform, “cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-building are way overrated.”

Whether or not you agree with her objectives — and her rhetoric — you’ve got to admit that it’s Rhee’s penchant for saying things of that sort that have landed her face on the cover of Newsweek and landed her butt on the couch next to Oprah. When it comes to education reform, no one owns a megaphone quite so big as Rhee’s.

“Something that’s different about Michelle that isn’t in this space right now is her ability to get attention from people that normally wouldn’t be paying attention to education,” Joe Williams, president of Democrats for Education Reform, told the Christian Science Monitor. “I think she’s going to have the ability to really set the agenda.”

We concur. And while she’s got the nation’s ear, here are six things we hope to see Rhee add to her agenda.

1) No more “seat time.”
An October “manifesto” that carries Rhee’s signature, along with more than a dozen other high-profile educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors, calls for the elimination of “arcane rules such as ‘seat time,’ which requires a student to spend a specific amount of time in a classroom with a teacher rather than taking advantage of online lessons and other programs.” We couldn’t agree more. Millions of students are stuck in schools where the number of minutes spent behind a desk are as important to the graduation equation as demonstrating competency of core educational standards. These seat time requirements are a terrible disservice to students who wish to take advantage of online learning opportunities, and are an ever greater disservice to students for whom online learning is the only route to a high school diploma. Among these students are those who we collectively call “dropouts” but might be better thought of as “pushouts” — those for whom life circumstances (new parenthood, a sick family member or school-based violence, for example) have conspired to make traditional routes to a diploma impossible. Accredited and accountable online learning, which is flexible and often asynchronous, can help keep these students out of the ranks of those who will forever be reduced to higher rates of unemployment, lower wages and greater reliance on the nation’s overburdened social safety net. But it only works if we let go of the arcane idea that students have to spend a certain number of minutes behind a desk in order to learn.

2) Education is for everyone.
Every state in the nation subsidizes the cost of resident tuition at public universities and colleges for anyone — of any age. We do this because we know that education is an investment that pays off great dividends to our society, no matter if the student is 16 or 64. So why in the world do most states stop funding high school education for their students after the age of 21 or 22? If a high school dropout has the gumption to return to school when they’re 23 — or 82, for that matter — why would we limit their options? Each year, our nation creates more than a million new dropouts. One way to reduce that number is to keep more students in school in the first place — and that’s what we should be striving to do. Another way to reduce the dropout rate, increasingly popular among reformers, is to recover some of the millions of students that have already dropped out. But funding restrictions create an all-too-small window of opportunity with which to let these individuals come back into the fold. We need to open the window by eliminating the age requirements that limit the funding of high school educations.  

3) Make students count  
When it comes to per-pupil funding, it all seems simple enough: Choose a day to conduct a “census” of public school students, then divvy up the money based on how many kids are at each school. More than a dozen states use just one “count day” (or a small number of consecutive dates, early in the year) to determine per-pupil funding. But in reality, that’s a tremendous disservice to their students — particularly those who have dropped out and want to drop back in. When funding formulas dictate that schools receive either no funding, or substantially reduced funding, for students who enroll after count day, there is a tremendous negative incentive for schools and districts to engage in dropout recovery programs.

4) Data is a tool, not an answer
For far too long, the U.S. school system was a place where inconvenient data was conveniently ignored. Today, data is a key factor in determining how schools are funded, what programs they can offer, who they can employ and even if they are permitted to remain open. That’s an over-correction that is stifling innovation and causing educators to lose focus of what is most important. When you create incentives or disincentives based only on numbers, people will, more often than not, make decisions based only on those numbers — and the students who we are supposed to be helping stop mattering as much as the numbers we are chasing. For instance: Recent studies show that the number of “dropout factories” has fallen precipitously in recent years — but the percentage of dropouts really hasn’t changed much at all. So while we’ve made progress on righting some embarrassing data (often by closing schools and shifting at-risk students around to “alternative” programs) we haven’t really made much of a dent in the actual problem. No school or program should be permitted to exist in defiance of data that shows it to be an abject failure, but particularly when it comes to dealing with new innovations intended to help at-risk students, we need to be realistic about our objectives. Hiding the problem doesn’t solve the problem — it just makes it harder for students who have been lost in the shuffle to be found again.

5) Students must be safe to learn — and free to finish
Here’s our public education system, at a glance:
• 5,000 annual instances of rape or other types of sexual battery
• 12,000 annual incidents of physical attacks or fights involving weapons
• 806,000 annual fights or physical attacks
• 23,000 annual robberies
Not very flattering, is it? Our nation’s students don’t think so, either. Nearly one million of them will stay home from school for at least one day this month because they do not feel safe. And among those are thousands upon thousands who will ultimately decide that the safest course of action is to just stay away from school altogether. This is a national disgrace, and it needs to be aggressively addressed. But since we haven’t yet figured out how to keep drugs, gangs, weapons and bullying off campus, we need to find ways to serve those students who drop out because they are simply too afraid to go to school. These students absolutely deserve whatever resources and support we can offer to help them complete their educations. One solution: Give students who dropout the immediate opportunity to enroll in a full-time online program that will allow them to continue working toward their diploma and to stay engaged in their education so that, when and if they feel safe enough to return, they haven’t fallen behind.

6) We need to stop beating each other up.
This is something we said that we hoped to hear from President Obama, a few months back, but it would be equally valuable coming from the mouth of someone who is known as much for her truculent style as her devotion to reform. Rhee says she’s learned a lot from her heated battles with teachers and unions, so it would be great to hear her invite everyone to the table to talk about how we collectively — as educators, parents and teachers — can help solve the problems facing our nation’s education system. It’s not efficient or sufficient to simply ignore those people with whom we disagree — we must influence them. And the best way to begin is to acknowledge, loud and clear, that the vast majority of people in this game are playing for the same goal: To give our nation’s students the best education possible. Unfortunately, in an effort to advance our own solutions to the problem, we sometimes beat up on those who see things in a different light. It’s absolutely appropriate to criticize people and systems that are failing our students. But criticism is one thing; contempt is another. We should all recognize that, in this democracy, we’re all part of the problem and we all have a role in the solution.

Gregg Rosann and Rebekah Richards are president and chief academic officer, respectively, of The American Academy which partners with schools across the country to provide education opportunities for high school dropouts. For more information about The American Academy and its services, visit www.schoolasaservice.com