Michelle Rhee Quote and Analysis

This comes from Michelle Rhee, so-called master reformer of the DC public schools. She acts as chancellor, and has caused a stir, mainly for her firings and school closings. This is from an interview with the ever-so-polite Charlie Rose.

"When you are basing the effectiveness of teachers on lots of softer* things...whether the kids feel good, whether the classroom is happy, whether we're creative...but if the kids can't read, that's not acceptable. You might have a happy classroom. It's not the classroom we're going to have in this district."

*Note:Emphasis added.

I immediately find this appauling for a few reasons. First, what kind of attitude will a child have throughout their education and indeed their adult life, if their happiness, comfort, safety, creativity, etc...are not ensured during the developmental parts of their schooling? If people link learning with a disregard for happiness, comfort, safety, and creativity, we will see a continued decline in lifelong learners and critical, analytical inquirers. Who the hell can learn when these things are absent? It's almost as if Rhee infers that we should flip Maslow's heirarchy1 on it's head. Absurd.

Furthermore, I think Rhee needs to evaluate the goals of education in the first place. By this I don't mean schooling, but education in its purest form. William Bennett, Reagan's Secretary of Education, attempted to ask this, although he came well short of getting a meaningful answer expunged from a world of economics and politics. It could be that Rhee's thinking is even more shallow than Bennett's, which is downright scary.

It is clear that Rhee sees nothing more for 'her' students in DC, many of them poor, and non-white, than acquiring jobs that require basic skills. To allow them the opportunity to be creative, for example, cuts their chance of getting a really crappy office job. Those who waste their lives being happy and creative really should have focused on those basic skills, and they could continue a life devoid of creativity, happiness, comfort, safety, etc...which they learned to love during their 12 years - if they last that long - in Rhee's DC schools.

It is just absolutely unbelievable that Rhee is praised for spewing such venom. She has denied the right of these children, becuase they're poor and non-white, to become self-aware, metacognitive, and self-motivated. She seems to believe that her story, as a child of Korean immigrants, can and should be the story of every child in the DC district. The old, 'I did it, and you should be able to also.'

What she fails to see is that there is a purpose to education that goes beyond hireability and marketability. In my opinion, the underpinnings of education are the very things Rhee wishes to deny our children - the opportunity to be happy, creative, and safe.

1 Abraham Maslow (1954) attempted to synthesize a large body of research related to human motivation. Prior to Maslow, researchers generally focused separately on such factors as biology, achievement, or power to explain what energizes, directs, and sustains human behavior. Maslow posited a hierarchy of human needs based on two groupings: deficiency needs and growth needs. Within the deficiency needs, each lower need must be met before moving to the next higher level. Once each of these needs has been satisfied, if at some future time a deficiency is detected, the individual will act to remove the deficiency.

-from Citation: Huitt, W. (2004). Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved [date] from, http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/regsys/maslow.html.