Blood-Stained Badges In The Dirt

Michelle Rhee is a hated woman. She went into a system almost paralyzed under the weight of politics and pressures and stirred the genesis of a revolution.

I have no doubt that she made a lot of mistakes. Outwardly, she has all the warmth and compassion of a Transformer. In her and Adrian Fenty's amazing Wall Street Journal "Education Manifesto," Rhee admits she should have done a better job at communicating her goals, her hopes, her intentions, to the parties most invested and at risk under her fiefdom. Rhee might have failed to win them over no matter what, but she should have tried harder regardless.

What is already clear, however, and what cannot be reasonably denied, is that Michelle Rhee has forever changed the educational landscape in what has long been the worst educational district in this country. She is a modern-day Pale Rider or the Wyatt Earp of Tombstone, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ol’ Clint one day directs a movie about her.

Rhee (1) is brilliant; (2) was convicted about her responsibilities; and (3) was willing to put her career on the line. She walked into the saloon, a big ol’ 10-gallon hat shading her face, a steady hand on the butt of her trusty six-shooter, and politely told the drunkards she was the new sheriff in town.

Before she showed up, the numbers were in all ways horrifying. The numbers indicated the educational equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape of bandits, marauders, and hopeless helpless innocents hiding in their homes and eating scraps the mice left behind.

Today, the numbers are still horrifying. But noticeably and indubitably less horrifying than they used to be. It went from the Black Knight without arms and legs and bleeding to death to a Black Knight with one arm, more confidently asserting that “I’m getting bettah.” And Rhee is the catalyst for those improvements.

Michelle Rhee is an old school classic hero of the sort the 21st Century doesn’t accept and might not even want. She chose a thankless career.

Three years later, she is (temporarily) unemployed. Go to any story about Rhee on educationweek.com, and you will most certainly find dozens of teachers across the country – good, dedicated, intelligent people – writing about her as if she might well be the Antichrist. They question her motives. They question her “success.”

And good for them. She deserves scrutiny and skepticism. But in a decade, the educational history books will point to this moment and her role in it and say, “Rhee’s tenure in D.C. was the tipping point of what would become largest educational reform movement in over a century.”

Part II:

Take everything I just wrote about Michelle Rhee and education, and you can replace her with Barack Obama, and you can replace education with health care.

Thirty years from now, the way our government and our corporations handle health care will be drastically different from what it is today. It will be almost nothing like the plans Obama’s legislation intends for it to become.

Barack Obama was elected captain of the Titanic. When it comes to health care in this country, we’ve been aiming straight at an iceberg for 50 years. Almost every sane person in this idiotic country admits that the system is powerfully flawed and getting worse. A dude finally comes along and turns the steering wheel, and everyone screams at him.

They say the plan is flawed. Fine, and true.

But what they hate about Obama is that his solution isn’t their solution. Nevermind that they never had a solution until he forced them to make some shit up on the fly.

Thirty years from now, when health care in this country is drastically and measurably better than it is today – more affordable, no longer the responsibility of employers, and probably less tolerant of high-cost end-of-life treatments – we will look back at Obama’s health care law as the catalyst. They will say, “He got a lot of things wrong, but damn if he didn’t force the evolution to begin when no one else had the guts. And if he didn’t take that first step, we never get to where we are today.”

In reality, heroes don’t get everything right. In reality, heroes rarely get medals or adulation until after they’ve been martyred or marginalized. Real heroes are willing to risk more than the rest of us to achieve what everyone says they want but no one has the balls to do. Neither of these people did it alone, but they were the cornerstones of the effort, and their sense of conviction is what pulled many to their cause.

I don’t have to admire every detail of Rhee’s education reform to exalt her courage to spearhead it in the first place. I don’t like half of Obama’s health care legislation, but I absolutely glorify his risking a career’s worth of political capital to force change.

Rhee and Obama are currently facing the fate of heroes. They are being castigated, stoned, and despised by the very people they aim to help.

Such is the cost of heroism in the real world.

Maybe She's Born With It... Maybe It's Maybelline!

Born Secular - Jenny Lewis + the Watson Twins (mp3)
When Your Mind's Made Up - Glen Hansard + Marketa Irglova (mp3)

At a school I know, the following occurred.

Two administrators stood backstage as the school recognized the top 25% of the graduating GPAs. These nerds were being inducted into a Phi Beta Kappa/Cum Laude kind of organization, a group that does nothing, that exists solely to recognize good GPAs. Sadly, it's the one way some of these kids get recognized for what they do well and what they contribute to the school culture. Kind of like earning a letter just for sitting the bench and keeping stats for varsity baseball.

One administrator, arguably the second most-influential person at this particular school, leaned over to my friend and said, "I don't applaud for something a kid's born with."

Then, as the nerds were walking off the stage with their pieces of paper, acknowledging their good grades, this administrator said the following to them: "Congratulations on your genes, ladies and gentlemen!"

This story was relayed to me because, obviously, I was one of those nerds in high school who made Cum Laude and was never even good enough to sit the bench for an athletic team.

Apparently, how much work and time and effort I put into becoming academically successful was irrelevant, because I was born with my intelligence. Apparently, neither Shaquille O'Neal nor Adrian Peterson were born with athletic gifts or, as they say, "natural talent."

Any nerd would be understandably haunted by this story. The jock administrator just gave our entire geeky way of life a philosophical wedgie (or if you prefer, a swirlie), proclaiming that good grades don't deserve recognition like good tackles or good dunks or good golf shots. And this man, this fan of "genetic" intelligence, is the man who hires teachers and shapes the culture of the school where he works in vast ways.

Then I read the following excerpt from a NYT Book Blog about DRiVE by Daniel H. Pink:

For example, in the chapter titled “Mastery,” Pink presents the research conducted by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford. One of her theories is that there are (once again) two kinds of people when it comes to intelligence. There are those with an “entity theory” of human intelligence, viewing it as “a finite supply that we cannot increase.” Then there are those who subscribe to an “incremental theory,” believing that intelligence is something you continuously build and shape over time. Pink breaks it down nicely: “In one view, intelligence is something you demonstrate; in the other, it’s something you develop.” It’s a useful frame. Is life a stage on which you constantly must perform, or prove, your intelligence to others? Or is it a library, where you gain knowledge and skills from what surrounds you. How you answer such questions, Pink argues, determines how you will react to setbacks, and how serious you are at mastering a set of skills. It might also influence how you react to books like “Drive.” Do you consider the arguments dispassionately, looking for ideas you can use? Or do you bristle at the suggestion that you need to make some changes? (I've been bristling. Now I feel bad about that bristling, and so am bristling about that.)

Reading this didn't cool my anger, but it's given me a way to diagnose his myopia, to see intelligence the way this administrator sees it. To this guy, intelligence is demonstrated, not developed.

You'll have to forgive the snootery here, but this was clearly a guy who attended a shitty high school, the kind of guy whose workload in high school consisted of work that could be done on a school bus or while Mom was getting dinner ready. I know this because intelligence never felt remotely inherited for me. I worked my ass off for it. I obsessed for it. I fought like hell and competed with gritted or grinding teeth to push my way into the top 20% of my graduating class even though I'd been told in seventh grade that I'd done so poorly on the entrance exam that I was one of the last two boys admitted to the school.

I'm not asking for you to be impressed; I'm only asking that you don't tell me I was innately born with it. My ability to see through brick walls? My prehensile tail? My 14" penis? Yes, I was born with all those. But my intelligence? No, motherf*#ker, I P90X'd the hell out of my feeble brains as a lad, and I just can't think of many things more personally insulting to me than to suggest otherwise.

My oldest daughter is friends with a brilliant Indian girl at her school. Twice now Avery has said to me, "She's so smart. Everything's easy for her," and both times I stopped everything to lovingly correct her. Her Indian friend is smart because her parents expect her to master academics like Southern parents expect their kids to master a sport. She trains. She works. She reads. For every hour that my studious and modestly intellectually curious daughter puts into her school work, her Indian friend puts in two, three, four hours. It doesn't come easy. Nothing comes easy. Allowing Avery to say or believe it does insults the Indian girl and insults my daughter.

If someone believed intelligence cannot be nurtured, cared for, built up, why would that person work in education?

I'm just grateful it didn't happen to me, at my school.

Whew.

Dirty Dogs Bark First

My Song - Brandi Carlisle (mp3)
Working in a Coal Mine - Lee Dorsey (mp3)

New leaders should be wary of those most eager to catch their eye or bend their ear.

I wrote this on a scrap piece of paper, in a left-handed scrawl, and bent to slip it under the door of our recently-hired pastor's office. But I didn't do it. It felt too sneaky and snaky, too cowardly. But that's the rub, no? If you go in person and offer this kind of advice to a new leader, aren't you precisely the kind of person about whom said leader should be suspicious? Perhaps that is fine. Perhaps that proves your point. But perhaps the new leader chooses to eye you and only you suspiciously, leaving himself or herself all the more vulnerable to the real Slytherins.

Surely you've witnessed this yourself, either in your workplace or in some other organization or group to which you belong? New leaders, clueless to the details and specifics of their new environments, must rely on the information and experience of those around them, to ease them into the culture and expectations of a place, to acclimate them to their new environment and show them the ropes. And who are the very first people most eager to serve such a role? People with agendas. People hoping to move up that glorious corporate (or social) totem pole of power and influence.

Perhaps studies have been done. Perhaps there's a specific percentage. I don't know. But some very large fraction of those most eager and excited to grab audience with a new leader are in it because they're Lookin' Out for Numero Uno, like a legion of Grima Wormtongues hissing into the ear of King Theoden.


It happens in churches, in schools, and definitely in companies. It happens anywhere power is bestowed upon those unfamiliar with a group or a community and their environment. And in those transitional moments, those who have been marginalized -- often for good reason -- begin slinking back into the light from the corners and crevices where they'd been hiding and biding their time, anxiously waiting for regime change, for a new opportunity to squeeze into higher realms, to regain a foothold of influence.

To be sure, some who seek audience and attention from a new leader have unselfish motives. But if I had any single advice for a new leader, it would be this: the faster someone is at your door, the more suspect their motives.

The last time such a transition happened at my workplace, I was so far down on the pecking order that it didn't matter. But it was still interesting to see various people jockeying for position, nipping at one another for pecking order rights. The next time a change at the top occurs, presuming I'm still around, I'm going to be caught up in this game. I might not actively participate. I might not be one of the first squeaky wheels to enter the new boss' doorway. But not doing it is still a way of playing the game by a different strategy. As Rush so wisely puts it, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

What little I've seen of life at the top o' the heap offers little to envy. It seems lonely. Even those with whom you are closest and most intimate in the work place are ultimately answerable to you. Which has to eventually create some friction, some awkwardness. But when you're at the top, you hardly have time to make friends outside of work, to have a life outside of work, because that level of responsibility requires grotesque amounts of your time.

By happenstance, I became something of a trusted friend and confidante to my former pastor. We would go out for beer once a month or so, and we would talk about anything and everything, but often it was his chance to safely express frustrations with our church. The people who drove him craziest. The rules or expectations that bothered him. The theological discussions that, had certain parishioners heard him, would have sent him packing in a New York minute.

In a perfect world, a leader has someone they can trust without having to worry about power plays or greed. In a perfect world, a leader finds people whose focus is on the greater good and not on himself or herself. And, in reality, most good leaders find these people. Most good leaders can sniff out the snakes and weasels, at least more often than not. In fact, most good leaders know that snakes and weasels both can serve very important functions inside a thriving and healthy backyard setting so long as they're kept in check and in their proper places.

But in those first few months and years, when a new leader is going through the ropes, it's tough to watch the snakes and weasels come back out to play, because you never know who will move up, only that a change of power at top inevitably creates ripples down the line.

"My Song" is off Brandi Carlisle's second album, The Story. She has a new one, Give Up the Ghost, that just came out if you're interested. This is my second posted version of "Working in a Coalmine," but this one's the original '60s hit.