How Michelle Rhee Misled Education Reform
A memoir illustrates what's wrong with her brand of school reform
The other day I picked up a copy of The Adventures of Augie March. I hadn’t remembered that Saul Bellow, writing in the early 1950s, when he was not yet forty, about Chicago in the 1920s, had been in full sympathy with the urban poor, as he definitely was not later in his career. There is a hilarious bit in the early pages in which Grandma Lausch, the March family’s boarder and a master at avoiding bills, including the rent she owes the Marches, expertly intimidates Lubin, the neighborhood welfare caseworker who comes for regular home visits wearing an ill-fitting suit: “He had a harassed patience with her of ‘deliver me from such clients,’ though he tried to appear master of the situation.”
Today’s education-reform movement has something of the venerable dynamic of American social improvement about it. We no longer have caseworkers who inspect poor people’s apartments in person, but we definitely have members of the same ethnic group as the very poor, doing better but not all that much better than their clients, charged with the often exasperating job of performing the functions of betterment: the mainly black teachers at all-black, all-poor public schools, for example. Another category of character in the drama, often just offstage, comprises the well-meaning patricians who designed the system—social work and settlement houses a century ago, charter schools and accountability regimes today—who feel some mixture of moral outrage about “conditions,” swelling pride in the selflessness of their intentions, and frustration over being so often unappreciated by the objects of their largesse.
Like all significant causes, education reform bears the mark of its time. These days we trust markets and mistrust institutions, especially of the state, so education reform