If you want to enliven a parent-teachers evening in Washington, DC, raise the subject of Michelle Rhee, the city’s former schools chancellor. Most education officials toil in obscurity. Rhee is a national celebrity. Some see her as an unflinching champion of US education reform and a bold opponent of the powerful teachers’ unions. Others revile her as a mouthpiece of billionaire philanthropists and advocate of school privatisation. People tend to have strong views about Rhee.
In 2008, when Rhee was in the midst of overhauling Washington’s classrooms, she was pictured on the cover of Time magazine holding a new broom – “How to Fix America’s Schools”, it said. Anyone who failed to grasp the symbolism was disabused two years later by Waiting for “Superman”, an award-winning documentary by Davis Guggenheim that depicted the rise of the US charter school movement – union-free, publicly-funded schools that select students by lottery. Many are also privately-funded. Rhee, who promoted the spread of charter schools in DC, was one of the movie’s stars. In one scene she offers to fire a public school principal on camera. She goes ahead and sacks the unfortunate woman. No shrinking violet is Rhee.
I await her arrival in some trepidation. We are meeting at DC Coast, a well-heeled modern American restaurant in downtown Washington that was one of Rhee’s haunts before she moved to Sacramento, where her husband, Kevin Johnson, the former basketball star, is mayor. She also has a home in Nashville where her two children live with her former husband, Kevin Huffman, who is education commissioner of Tennessee – the same role Rhee played in DC. She spends much of her life flying between the two cities.
I have taken a table upstairs away from the clamour of the main dining area. Rhee, who is 43, turns up precisely on time. Dressed in a smart blue and cream business suit, she shakes my hand briskly and sits down. I apologise for plonking my smartphone under her nose and mutter something banal about how the iPhone’s audio now rivals the best tape recorders. “Samsung seems to be holding its own as well,” she replies.
Rhee, who was raised in Toledo, Ohio, by first generation Korean parents, is fluent in the language and clearly proud of her heritage. As a child she was sent to Korea for a year, where she says she learnt the virtue of hard work. “They were tough with the children but it didn’t affect their self-esteem,” she says. “Coming from America I was used to being told everything I did was great. Korea was a shock to my system.” Lately, Korean-Americans have flourished in the US almost as much as South Korea has on the world stage. I suggest that Rhee must be the most famous Korean-American around. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she says looking a little flustered. “There’s, um, comedian Margaret Cho,” she says. “Then there’s that guy who heads Dartmouth College, what’s his name?” Jim Yong Kim, now president of the World Bank? “Yes, that’s the one.”