St. Hope taps Michelle Rhee as board chair, removes superintendent
Published: Friday, Aug. 1, 2014 - 8:01 pm
St. Hope Public Schools has named Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Washington, D.C., schools chief and charter schools advocate, as its new board chairwoman and removed Jim Scheible as its superintendent.
St. Hope leaders plan to launch a national search for Scheible’s replacement and have tapped Rhee protégé Enoch Woodhouse as interim leader. The flurry of moves in the last two weeks give Rhee a powerful new role in the charter school system founded by her husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.
After leaving Washington, Rhee in 2010 created a well-financed advocacy group, StudentsFirst, which has taken aim at teachers unions in state and local politics. Rhee has focused on overhauling programs that serve disadvantaged children, but her efforts to change layoff policies and teacher evaluations have drawn scorn from educators at traditional schools.
Rhee previously served on the St. Hope board in 2006 and 2007.
Johnson launched St. Hope as an after-school program in Oak Park in the late 1980s. The St. Hope program evolved into the charter school system that expects to enroll about 1,800 students this fall, according to Scheible.
Woodhouse, a veteran of Rhee’s StudentsFirst organization, said the change will enable the superintendent’s job to be more manageable. He served as vice president of operations at StudentsFirst, oversaw strategic planning and, most recently, became a national advocate.
He also worked at Washington, D.C., public schools. His biography shows that he led the system’s public information programs. He said he resigned from the St. Hope governing board to take the interim job, and he will move from Philadelphia to Sacramento to run the district for one year.
“For the past few years … a single superintendent was sitting at the top managing across five school (principals) and an office staff,” Woodhouse said. “We’re turning one role into three. We’ll have a chief academic officer. I will more directly manage the operating side of the house.”
St. Hope moved Scheible to the position of chief advancement officer, overseeing revenue generation and growth.
StudentsFirst is active in 18 states. Woodhouse said the group seeks to pass laws and policies in those states that “in our view make sense for kids ... support best teachers and ... expand quality charters.”
Among them, he said, are mayoral control of schools and tying budget allocations to student outcomes. He said it makes sense for Rhee to return to the governing board.
“Michelle has been board chair before and investigated significant time in St. Hope,” he said. “For me, this has nothing has to do with StudentsFirst, except that we’re ideologically aligned and weSt. Hope taps Michelle Rhee as board chair, removes superintendent - Our Region - The Sacramento Bee: