Michelle Rhee

Michelle Ann Rhee (born December 25, 1969) is an American educator and advocate for education reform. She was Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit organization that works on education reform.

She began her career by teaching as a Teach for America corps member for three years in an inner city school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project.

Early life and education Rhee was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second of three children of South Korean immigrants Shang Rhee, a physician, and Inza Rhee, a clothing store owner.

In her second and third years of teaching, Rhee team taught a combined class of the same students with another teacher. Rhee responded that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones listed on her résumé could be explained by the fact that her principal at the time informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved. Kopp recruited Rhee serve as CEO while Kopp was the president of the not-for-profit's board of directors. The project primarily serves New York, Chicago, Miami, and Philadelphia. and according to Rhee, only 8 percent of eighth graders were performing at grade level in mathematics.

In 2008 she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed "student achievement" with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained. Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment. In 2012, District of Columbia's inspector general conducted an investigation at Noyes Education Campus, and based on that investigation, it concluded "investigators found no evidence to corroborate these allegations", and that there was "no evidence of criminal activity or widespread cheating on the DC CAS exams".

In 2013 the U.S. Department of Education released the results of their investigation finding that there was no evidence of widespread cheating in the D.C. public schools. The investigation focused on a single school out of the dozens of schools where high rates of test erasures were reported. The investigation also excluded Rhee's first year. Only one incident of cheating that may have affected funding was found.

School choice and school vouchers Rhee was originally neutral on school vouchers, issuing a 2008 statement that she had not "taken a formal position on vouchers" and that she disagreed "with the notion that vouchers are the remedy for repairing the city’s school system."

After D.C. schools

On December 6, 2010, Rhee went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to announce that she had declined all job offers resulting from her high-profile work as D.C. Chancellor and would be focusing on a new advocacy organization she had formed called StudentsFirst.

In 2013, Rhee wrote Radical: Fighting to Put Students First.

In August 2014, Rhee became a board member of the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. She also replaced Jim Scheible as chairman of St. Hope Public Schools, a charter school chain run by her husband, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, and subsequently announced that she would be stepping down as CEO of StudentsFirst. On March 29, 2016, StudentsFirst announced some of its state chapters would merge with 50CAN, a nonprofit education advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

On November 19, 2016, Rhee met with President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President–elect Mike Pence, sparking speculation that she was in consideration for Secretary of Education; Rhee later tweeted that she was not interested in pursuing the position.

Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality, and the Chattanooga Christian School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In March 2010, Rhee became engaged to Kevin Johnson, 55th mayor of Sacramento, California, and former NBA player.