Radical

Michelle Rhee

• Editore: Harper
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062204004
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Educational Policy

In Radical, Michelle Rhee, a fearless and pioneering advocate for education reform, draws on her own life story and delivers her plan for better American schools.

Rhee's goal is to ensure that laws, leaders, and policies are making students—not adults—our top priority, and she outlines concrete steps that will put us on a dramatically different course. Informing her critique are her extraordinary experiences in education: her years of teaching in inner-city Baltimore; her turbulent tenure as chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools; and her current role as CEO of the education nonprofit StudentsFirst. Rhee draws on dozens of compelling examples from schools she's worked in and studied, from students who've left behind unspeakable home lives and thrived in the classroom to teachers whose groundbreaking methods have produced unprecedented leaps in student achievement.

An incisive and intensely personal call-to-arms, Michelle Rhee's Radical is required reading for anyone who seeks a guide to not only the improvement of our schools, but also a brighter future for America's children.

Part I

The Journey

1

Roots in the Classroom

China stared at me, desperate for an answer. I was paralyzed. Excuses filled my mind as her bulging eyes bored into me.

“Please, Ms. Rhee,” she pleaded. “Please!”

We were in my car in front of the notorious Franklin Street housing project high-rises, one of the most dangerous places in all of Baltimore. Word on the street was that a dozen murders and scores of violent crimes had taken place in these towers in the past year. It was about 6:00 p.m., the sun was setting, and the situation at the towers was looking sketchier by the moment. I gazed up at the twenty-four-floor building with its grated and gated windows and walkways.

“Ms. Rhee, I can’t walk up there myself. There are drug dealers everywhere!” She wasn’t exaggerating. I could see the young men with baggy pants and hats on nearly every floor of the tower. “Ms. Rhee, I’m scared for real!”

My mind began racing with options, but mostly remorse. I often kept China after school with me to do her homework and help me prepare for the next day. Usually, though, I dropped her off at her mother’s house on Carey Street, which, though also dangerous, was filled with neighbors who knew me. “There’s that crazy Chinese lady. The one from up over at the school!” they’d say.

Today was different. China was staying with her dad, who lived in the towers; as I pulled up to the entrance, she was begging me to walk her up to her dad’s apartment. I didn’t respond. While I couldn’t imagine sending this tiny eight-year-old up into that building alone, I was terrified of walking into the building and back out again on my own. It was one of those moments that define a person. Half of me wanted to push her out of the car and peel out of the parking lot. The other wanted to grin widely, grab her hand with confidence, and head into the building.

The thought of fleeing was beginning to win out when a loud knock on my window startled the bejesus out of both of us. “HEEEEYYYYYY! Ms. Rhee! What’s up, China!” It was China’s cousin. “You come to see your daddy? I’ll get you up there!” he offered, having no idea what a bullet he was allowing me to dodge. “Great, appreciate it!” I said breezily, as I unrolled the window and flashed him a smile of gratitude.

The minute China got out of the car, I spun out of that parking lot so quickly I might have left tire marks. On my way home, visions of China’s frightened eyes kept flashing in front of me. “Good Lord,” I thought. “What kind of a world is this? I can’t believe this innocent little girl is in these daunting situations on a daily basis.”

It made my heart ache, and it made me evermore thankful for the idyllic situation from whence I came.

I GREW UP WITH certainty. I always knew what was expected of me, what I would do, and what would happen to me tomorrow.

The main priority in our family was education. It drove every conversation, admonition, and decision in our household. It loomed over my brothers and me like a smothering cloud.

We were expected not only to put 100 percent of our attention into school, but also to excel. To be number one. And nothing less was acceptable. In fact, anything less was considered a failure.

My first memory of school was not a pleasant one. My parents chose Little Meadows for me, a nursery school in Sylvania, Ohio, a small town northwest of Toledo, near the Michigan line. I remember walking by the staircase one day and overhearing two teachers talking about me. “I think she’s slow,” they hissed. “She never says anything!”

Actually, I was just painfully shy and quiet. But despite my outward appearances, I was sad and wounded just the same when I heard the teachers’ assessment of me. “What do they know?” I remember thinking. “They don’t know me!”

That feeling, the feeling of being an outsider, persisted throughout my life, mostly because my parents went out of their way to make us Korean. They spoke to us in Korean. My brothers and I went to Korean school every week. There were no Korean food groceries or restaurants in Toledo, so we drove to a suburb of Ann Arbor, Michigan, every week to buy cabbage, tofu, rice, and soy sauce.

My parents were dedicated to ensuring that we knew what being Korean and the Korean culture meant. They doggedly instilled in us the culture of the country they left in the 1960s, which my father described as “education crazy.” Both of my parents—Shang and Inza—grew up surrounded by educators.

I come from a family of teachers. Jung Sook Lee, my mother’s mother, taught kindergarten in Korea. Four of my aunts on my father’s side were teachers. Hae Woo Rhee, my father’s father, was a well-known educator in Seoul. He taught for fifty years, starting in primary school, during the Japanese occupation before 1945. He became a principal and served on Seoul’s board of education.

When my father was young, everyone knew his dad. Hae Woo Rhee was known as a strict but great teacher and a principal who ran a tight ship. Because his father drew such a hard line for his students, my father was expected to be the model child. The eldest son of the town’s most feared and respected educator must be the best, and best-behaved, student. My father fit that mold perfectly.

Growing up among educators, he had a healthy respect for the profession. But he chose to become a doctor. He was a teenager during the Korean War, a time of hardship but also a time when the United States became heroic in his mind for preserving his way of life. He began to consider traveling to the States.

To my dad, America represented hope and promise. Back then, all Koreans dreamed of moving to America because of the freedom and opportunity the country represented. “We all thought in America you’d walk out your door and see Natalie Wood and Sophia Loren strolling down the street. And that anyone could become a Ford or Rockefeller. Anyone could make it if you had the will and a big dream,” he’d tell us. My father wanted to be a part of that. Though he successfully lived up to the rigid expectations that his parents set for him, he aspired to something else for his kids. He wanted his children to grow up with the limitless possibilities of America.

MY PARENTS FELL IN love during college and dated while my father studied for his medical degree at Seoul National University. He graduated in 1965. Freshly minted Korean doctors dreamed of completing their postgraduate work in the United States and becoming licensed to practice there. In those days one airplane per week took off from Korea to the States. My dad landed an internship at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh and made plans to leave Korea in July. He asked Inza to marry him and hoped she would join him in America.

“Your halabujee [my mother’s father] wasn’t having that,” he told my brothers and me. “He wasn’t going to risk having his eldest daughter jilted in a foreign land. Either we would get married in Korea or we wouldn’t get married at all.”

Needless to say, they married in Korea. After the wedding in June, Shang flew off in July, and Inza joined him in Pittsburgh a month later. My father struggled with his new language and surroundings, but he succeeded well enough that the director of medical education commended him in a letter to the dean of his school in Seoul.

From Pittsburgh, my parents moved to Seattle, where my father started his residency at the University of Washington. My older brother, Erik, was born in Seattle. In 1967, the family of three moved to Ann Arbor so my father could complete his residency at the University of Michigan. I was born there on Christmas Day, 1969. Thus my middle name: Ann. My younger brother, Brian, came fifteen months later.

My dad made $400 a month, minus the requisite amount he had to send to his family back home. So it amounted to a pittance. My mom, unable to speak the language and knowing no one, was bored out of her mind. She spent her days walking the streets of Ann Arbor, stopping in front of the pizza parlor and soaking in the smells of cheese and garlic but unable to ever afford a slice. She would often wander into the A&P grocery store and just walk up and down the aisles. One day she fainted, tired from her pregnancy, and the shopkeeper forbade her from coming in again.

Desperate for cash, my father would drive to Toledo, fifty miles south, once or twice a month, to moonlight—supplement his salary by filling in for doctors at Mercy Hospital. That allowed him to establish a connection with Toledo and Mercy, which offered him his first real job, director of the rehab department, at $2,700 a month when he finished his fellowship. “I thought I was the richest man in the country,” he explained to my brothers and me.

OUR HOUSE SCREAMED “FOREIGN” from the moment you crossed the threshold. From the overpowering stench of kimchee (fermented cabbage) and ojinguh (dried squid) to the shoes neatly lined up outside the front door (you could never wear shoes in the house!) to the Asian screen that my mother had custom made for our front entrance, nothing in the Rhee house was normal or familiar to my American friends. You knew from the start that you were about to enter a different world. My friends marveled as they inspected the Korean artifacts that adorned the hallway, the smelly antique Chinese herb chest that was the centerpiece of our living room, and the brush paintings that my aunt had created.

“Weird!” they’d announce gleefully after thoroughly surveying the lay of the land.

But even more foreign than the odors and decor was the way my family operated, and specifically, my role in the family unit. We were living in America but trapped in the landscape and mind-set of South Korea circa 1950. That meant that the men ruled the roost and the women served them.

One memory that has stuck with me was when my little brother, Brian, who was not academically inclined, came home with a bad grade. My mother immediately grounded me. He was allowed to go out; I had to stay in.

“You’re his older sister,” my mother told me. “It is your responsibility to make sure that he is doing what he needs to do.” “Whaaaa?” I thought. That was crazy talk! In modern-day America that rationale made zero sense, but to my mother, it was perfectly logical.

Another particularly humiliating experience took place when a friend of mine and I were discussing what back then was dubbed “women’s lib.” We were talking about how wrong it was for men to think women were inferior. I made a comment about how I would tell any man off who tried to keep me down. Thwack! Before I could even get the words out of my mouth my mother had gone upside my head with the back of her hand. “Don’t be disrespectful!” she hissed.

It was actually kind of comical, and my friend couldn’t pick herself up off the floor from her laughing fit. My mother, however, was unfazed. She was sitting peacefully shucking bean sprouts for dinner one minute and smacking me the next because she didn’t like what I said. She returned to shucking without missing a bean.

That’s how I grew up.

My parents were very, very strict, especially my mother. My father was a successful doctor and very popular in the community. Everyone knew my dad. He was the liberal one of the two. But my mother ran the show. She was hard-core and strong willed. As my friends would say, “Mrs. Rhee is no joke.”

I was allowed out of the house only one night a week and I had to be in by eleven o’clock—no exceptions. I was not allowed to sleep over at friends’ houses.

When I complained, my mother would retort, “What good can come of a girl sleeping at somebody’s house other than her own?” We ate dinner together around the table every single night. Almost every night it was Korean food.

I had to wake up every morning and pack lunches for my brothers. I set the table and washed the dishes after every meal, cleaning up after my brothers.

“This is what girls do,” my mother would say whenever I complained about the unfairness.

The difference between the culture in our house and the one I lived in at school couldn’t have been starker.

WHEN I WAS GROWING up in and around Toledo, it was a working-class union town built on manufacturing. After World War II, jobs were plentiful in the Jeep plant and the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, and the city thrived. Toledo’s population reached its height of 383,818 right around when we moved there in 1971. In his practice, my father treated factory workers and plant managers. My friends were the sons and daughters of union members. I grew up with strong feelings of allegiance to unions and the working class.

In the second ...