The last word: Ms. Rhee sets up shop in Sacramento
By:
CSBA President Martha Fluor
Published: September 1, 2011
"Our mission is to build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education and pursue transformative reform, so that America has the best education system in the world.”
Those words constitute the mission statement of StudentsFirst, the organization that has, in the short time since it was created, garnered much attention—both in the press and the field of public education. The organization is led by Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington’s District of Columbia Public Schools. Ms. Rhee, who has located the headquarters of the organization in Sacramento, is arguably the best known (and possibly the most controversial) figure in public education today, pictured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek and featured prominently in the film “Waiting for Superman.”
There are probably few people in education who have not already formed an opinion about Ms. Rhee, and those opinions run the gamut from “hero” to “villain”—with a lot of ground covered in between those two extremes. But regardless of what one feels about Ms. Rhee as a person, she and her organization must be taken seriously. StudentsFirst is well funded, and has attracted an impressive array of talent—including a former senior spokesman for the Obama-Biden campaign, a former finance chief of staff to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and the former president of the Washington Teachers Union. In short, StudentsFirst is an organization that is going to be around for a while; Ms. Rhee herself has indicated in recent interviews that she plans to oversee its operations for five to seven years.
As the elected local leaders of our public schools, it is incumbent upon all of us as school board members to educate ourselves about the organization, what it stands for, and what its policy priorities are. The mission statement that appears above provides one glimpse into what it stands for. Another can be found in the following quote from the organization’s director of national policy, Eric Lerum:
“I approach this from a civil rights perspective, seeing the achievement gap as the greatest injustice of our time. For me, the only education reform is meaningful, aggressive education reform that reflects the urgency of the situation in our classrooms. We have to disrupt the interests behind the status quo—the status quo has no urgency. StudentsFirst aims to push, to innovate … to be unafraid of making students the priority. The achievement gap can be conquered—we can do this.”
I want to call your attention to one particular sentence in Mr. Lerum’s quotation: “We have to disrupt the interests behind the status quo—the status quo has no urgency.” That concept is vitally important because, my friends, it is likely if not certain that StudentsFirst sees school boards—perhaps a few of them, perhaps most of them, perhaps all of them—as the status quo. In fact, CSBA itself has been seen by some policy leaders in California as defenders of the status quo.
A recent quote from Ms. Rhee herself provides another clue as to what the direction of her organization might be: “You have teachers’ unions. You have testing companies. You have textbook manufacturers. You have lots of people who are benefitting every day from maintaining the status quo. If you go to any school board meeting anywhere across the country, the number of times that people mention children, or students, or student achievement is very, very few.”
And that is why it is more important than ever that we remember why we wanted to be school board members in the first place. It is more important than ever that we remember why our association was created 80 years ago, and what it stands for today. What we stand for today. We can—and will—certainly engage with StudentsFirst on many issues of importance to our schools and our kids. There will be debates; there will be arguments. But we cannot and must not allow our engagement to become a discussion about adults. We must stay focused on what we and our school districts and county offices of education are doing to improve the lives of children and close the achievement gaps. We must remember the key line from CSBA’s vision statement: that the futures of all children are driven by their aspirations, not bounded by their circumstances.
Martha Fluor is president of the California School Boards Association.