How Not to Reform Education

The Great Dictator

Michelle Rhee's demise in Washington was, I think, deserved. To my mind, she was always an illustration of Aesop's fable of the frogs who asked Zeus to send them a king. Because she acted decisively and harshly, she was popular with the public. Teacher-bashing plays well in current politics, as Chris Christie and Scott Walker have demonstrated. And teachers have no one but themselves to blame that this is so. But that does not make any approach that is hostile to teachers right.

Rhee had a grand time grandstanding to the media. Nobody wanted to notice, for a while, that she was acting capriciously. It really all just amounted to Rhee firing people she personally disliked. Everything was up to the “judgement of the chancellor”--that is, Rhee. Challenged, she made unsubstantiated, defamatory McCarthy-like blanket accusations against teachers she fired. She hinted that those fired were child molesters, no less.

Her methods did improve performance on most measures. Most dictatorships do—for a few years. But I doubt her achievement would have been sustainable. For a while, raw fear can make everyone work harder in hopes of waiting out the firestorm. But fear is a brittle motivator. The moment there is the slightest opportunity instead to subvert the system, or to escape it, the dictatorial approach becomes disastrous; and such a moment always comes. Strong and efficient institutions are built instead on a shared sense of purpose, shared ideals, and a sense of fairness.

This is also an important lesson to understand for discipline within a classroom. Harsh and arbitrary measures may look good for a day or a month, but are self-defeating.

Rhee was and is the worst possible enemy of any true educational reform. Why? Because education reform is desperately needed, and McCarthyites like Rhee are instead likely to give it a bad name. Just as McCarthy almost single-handedly discredited the claim that there were Communists in the US State Department.

Yet there were.

The best approach to improving education, and teaching, is the simplest one. It is also the most democratic. Require a free market in education. Each family can then decide for themselves who is and is not a good teacher or a good school.