Michelle Rhee - Teaching

Teaching

Inspired by a PBS special that she saw when she was a senior in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America, went through their five week summer training program, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. She was assigned to Harlem Park Elementary School, one of the lowest-performing schools. She had difficulty controlling her classroom the first year. She said the stress gave her hives. In a speech at the Columbia Heights Education Campus in Washington DC, Rhee said that she once put small pieces of masking tape on the children's mouths so they would be quiet on the way to the lunchroom and that, after removing the tape, skin came off their lips, they were bleeding and she had "thirty-five kids who were crying". Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, "I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town". She said she took courses over the summer and received her teachers' certification, then returned to teach at Harlem Park. Rhee's first year test scores showed a precipitous drop in her class: Average math percentile dropped from 64% to 17%. Average reading percentile dropped from 37% to 21%.

In her second and third years of teaching, Rhee team taught a combined class of the same students with another teacher. She told The New York Times that those students had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile. Earlier she had said on her resume that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile. In 2010, a retired math teacher unearthed test score data on Rhee's Baltimore school which indicated that her students' scores went up during the 2nd and 3rd years, but that the percentile gains were less than half what Rhee had stated. In Math her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually. In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually. Rhee responded that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones she listed on her resume were because her principal at the time had informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.