**Episode Outline** **00:01** - Welcome & Introductions **01:27** - Growing Up as a Child of Korean Immigrants **04:10** - The Academic Pressure Paradox **06:18** - Service Over Status: Her Father's Influence **08:16** - Discovering Teaching Through Teach for America **08:48** - First Year Teaching: Complete Disaster **12:01** - The Transformation: Team Teaching & Looping **12:25** - The 13th Percentile to Grade Level Miracle **15:16** - Why the System Fails Kids Who Need It Most **18:56** - The Power of Teacher-Student Continuity **21:43** - Context Matters: Structure vs. Freedom **23:13** - Becoming DC Schools Chancellor **25:00** - Taking Over the Nation's Worst School District **27:28** - The Political Cost of Education Reform **29:08** - Why Successful Reforms Don't Spread **32:48** - From Curmudgeon to Optimist: Entering Venture Capital **37:07** - Building an Apprenticeship Platform **41:34** - The Perfect Storm for Education Innovation **42:04** - VR, ESAs, and AI: The Future Convergence **45:05** - Meeting Young Founders Who Will Change the World **46:05** - Final Thoughts on the Future of Education **Welcome & Introductions** **Isaac:** Welcome back to the OpenEd podcast. I am Isaac Morehouse and I am here with my favorite co-host, Matt Bowman. Matt, how are you? **Matt:** Hey Isaac, doing great. Great to be with you today. **Isaac:** If you're listening and not watching on video, Matt has the world's biggest grin on his face, even bigger than the usual Matt Bowman grin, because today we are joined by an education legend. Michelle Rhee is here with us and we're going to get into her story. Michelle, welcome to the OpenEd Podcast. **Michelle:** Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. **Isaac:** Absolutely. For those listening who aren't familiar, Michelle has an extensive history in and around education. She cut her teeth with Teach for America, became the CEO of the New Teacher Project for many years, was the chancellor of the Washington DC public schools, founded Students First, and now she is with a venture capital firm, which seems like an interesting and unexpected turn. Michelle, I want to start by going way back to your own education experience growing up as a kid. What kind of education did you have and how did those early years set the stage for how you view education and what happened later in your career? **Growing Up as a Child of Korean Immigrants** **Michelle:** I am the child of Korean immigrants, so it will be unsurprising to anyone that education was the number one priority in our household. My parents moved to this country because they wanted to live the American dream, but from a cultural perspective, it was very much like the way you succeed in life is you get a great education. That was always the focus in our household. We were always expected to do extraordinarily well in school. When we didn't, we heard about it. I went to a public school through sixth grade and then transitioned to a private school in Toledo, Ohio and really got a first-rate education. I was incredibly well prepared for the rigors of college. People make the joke all the time that when you're Asian and you come home with a B, the parents will say "You're not a B's-ian, you're an A-sian." That was exactly the mindset of my parents. When I came home with an A, they were like, "Why is this not an A plus?" That sort of vibe. **The Academic Pressure Paradox** **Isaac:** It's so interesting. First, as a Michigander, I'm sorry that you grew up in Ohio, but I'm sure we can move past that. What always strikes me is that I grew up with some people like that and some on the opposite end of the spectrum. And it doesn't always translate the way you would think into later life success. People who had a ton of academic focus almost always go to college and do well in college. But when you look 10 years after college at what happens with people's careers, that really heavy academic or grade focus in the early years doesn't always map that well. Some people who struggled in school and didn't do well end up thriving later. I'm curious what you think of that because there's clearly something you took from your parents being so focused on that rigor, but knowing enough about you and your interest in education reform, is there an over-focus? Is there a problem there or are there things that are missed with that focus on academic grades? **Michelle:** It's interesting because growing up, I'm not an intellectual. I did well in school, but I didn't do extraordinarily well. It was never really good enough for my mom. She always used to say, "Well, why can't you be like this Korean kid over here or that one over there?" I grew up in that kind of environment. What's interesting is that some of those kids flamed out really early or aren't particularly doing well now. I think one of the differentiators for me is the fact that my dad was very different from most traditional Korean men of his generation and age. **Service Over Status: Her Father's Influence** **Michelle:** He is very service oriented. He was a physician, but my parents met because my mother was a social worker, my dad was a physician, and they went and volunteered in some poor Korean village for the summer. He really instilled that sense of civic responsibility in us. When I said I was going to join Teach for America, my mother was like, "You're not going to go teach. We didn't send you to an Ivy League college to go teach public school in Baltimore." She was adamantly opposed to it. My dad, after hearing everything was like, "She's gonna go, she's gonna do this, this is a good thing to do." I think because I had that balance, I grew up with a lot of experiences volunteering, just seeing how other people live their lives. It gave me a different sense of perspective and that social justice gene that my dad had was always a part of the equation for me. **Isaac:** I had probably my best experiences in my youth on summer humanitarian trips to various countries, places that were very impoverished. The perspective shift and the understanding and the questions that it forces you to ask about how the world works, getting outside of your own little experience, were absolutely second to none. **Discovering Teaching Through Teach for America** **Isaac:** I'm curious, when you came out of college or maybe it was in college, at what point did you know "I want to teach"? What sparked the interest in teaching? Did you always know that or did you stumble into it? **Michelle:** For my entire life, I have always liked kids more than adults. When I was young, I would babysit, volunteer in classrooms, work at summer camps, that sort of thing. But at the same time, I knew that teaching was not perceived by society to be the kind of occupation that you were supposed to go into if you were a high achiever. So I never really thought about teaching as a career. But when I was in college, I learned about Teach for America and I thought, "Okay, well, this makes sense for me because it's just a short stint, but it's something that I know I could be good at and would want to do." So that was the gateway in for me. But once I had that experience in Teach for America, I knew I was going to be in it for the long haul. **First Year Teaching: Complete Disaster** **Isaac:** Can you tell me what that was like? You come out, you join Teach For America, you went to the Baltimore schools. I'm guessing that this was not an easy thing to step into. When you first hit the ground running there, was it overwhelming? Give me your take, because I have to imagine there were moments where you were like, "What am I doing? Can I make it through?" **Michelle:** I had one of the toughest first year teaching experiences probably in my core year. I was assigned to a third grade classroom at one of the worst performing elementary schools in Baltimore, Harlem Park Elementary School. Actually, I started in second grade and then went to third. There were four sections of second graders and they were tracked by both academics and behavior. I was assigned to track four. So I had 36 kids in my classroom and they were the lowest performing kids academically and the worst behaviorally. They freaking ate me for lunch. Some of the lowest moments of my life were in that classroom. I remember one time I got so frustrated with the kids, I was like, "Do you want me to just leave and go teach some rich kids somewhere?" And this kid looked at me and said, "If you want to, what are you talking about lady?" There were a couple of parents who were so savvy they pulled their kids out of my classroom. It was that bad. It was just utter chaos. Every day was just a struggle. **The Transformation: Team Teaching & Looping** **Michelle:** But a few things really changed the trajectory of how that year went. The summer between my first and second year, I was like, "I am not gonna let eight-year-olds run me out of town. This is ridiculous." So I spent the entire summer planning. I was going to professional development sessions. A colleague of mine and I decided that we were gonna bring all of our kids from both sections into one classroom together and team teach. We did that my second and third year. We had this group of basically 60 kids that we team taught and we looped with them. So we took them through their second and third grade year. And it was wildly different. So much so that by the time I left, some of those same parents were like, "Where are you going? We got some other kids that you need to be here to teach our younger kids." So it really was a 180 degree turn from what I was doing my first year, which was a disaster, to what I left with. **Matt:** I have a quick question just on the looping. I love the idea of teachers staying with a group of kids multi-year. Was that a district standard or did you ask for that? How did that policy happen? **Michelle:** That was just this random brainchild that my co-teacher, Michelle Jacobs, and I had. We had this idea that if all 60 of the kids could get reading from her and math led by me, the kids were gonna end up doing better, because she was much stronger in teaching reading and I was stronger in teaching math. We asked our principal, Linda Carver, this phenomenal woman, and she was like, "What do you wanna do?" We were like, "We're gonna jam all the kids into one classroom and we're gonna have this rotational model." And she was like, "Okay." She was open to innovation and she was bought into what we were doing. The reason why I think looping is so good is because that second year, that's when we saw massive acceleration. We didn't have to spend the first month of school learning each other and all this stuff. Those kids knew exactly what the program looked like. **The 13th Percentile to Grade Level Miracle** **Isaac:** How did you do that transformation? **Michelle:** That experience, my second and third year, we took a group of kids who were performing on average at the 13th percentile on nationally recognized standardized tests. By the end of that second year with us, the majority were on grade level. And it was crazy. We kept the kids after school. We gave them two hours of homework a night, because for us, when you go home, it's not like our students were going to soccer practice and piano lessons. They were just going to go home and sit on the stoop all afternoon. We thought, "Well, do something constructive. We got a lot of ground to catch up on here academically." We got them really invested in their academics and doing well. It took a minute. At first, parents were like, "This is too much. What are you doing? You're asking for too much." But as time went on, they saw the progress that their kids were making. They saw how proud the kids were of what they were accomplishing. By the end, they were fully in it as well. **Why the System Fails Kids Who Need It Most** **Michelle:** Through that experience, what I realized was that the environment these kids were growing up in didn't change - their healthcare, the food they were eating, who their parents were. None of that changed. What changed were the adults who were in front of them every single day in the classroom and what we were doing with that time. So it really convinced me that the public education system was not working for the kids who needed it to work the most. I juxtaposed that to my experience in private school, where some kids who were absolute jokers, didn't work hard, weren't particularly bright, would go on to college and be successful because they inherit their father's company or what have you. I was looking at my students every day who had such tremendous promise and aptitude. They were knocking it out of the park. But I knew that their life chances and their life outcomes were not really going to be driven by the American ideals of "if you work hard and do the right thing, then you can live the American dream." I actually knew that wasn't the case for a lot of my kids. That really bugged the crap out of me. I wanted to do something that was going to fix that. **The Power of Teacher-Student Continuity** **Isaac:** It's funny you mentioned staying with students. I have never actually had this thought before, but it just occurred to me: if you're a fan of sports at the pro level or even at the college level, you might hear someone say, "Well, one of the reasons this quarterback has really struggled is he's had a new coach every year for the last three years in a row." Can you imagine trying to start over learning a new offense? You're thinking kids have new teachers every single year. That inability to get that longer term relationship is just such an interesting observation. **Michelle:** I don't think looping is something that has ever really gained a ton of popularity, but people who have done it, both on the family side and on the teacher side, they swear by it. They're like, "Yes, this is the way to go." **Matt:** Isaac, you might not know, I was in an experimental K-12 program in a public school. I had the same teacher K-12, and she loved it. She said it was the best thing for kids, for families, but the district organization and other teachers didn't want to do it. They didn't want to learn multi-age curriculum. So it only lasted four or five years, but I was there for three of those years. It was super fun. I didn't realize it was such a unique thing until I realized nobody's doing that. **Context Matters: Structure vs. Freedom** **Isaac:** The other thought I had - you were talking about the kids, one of the reasons that they were successful is you demanded more of them, they had more homework, more structure. It's interesting because Matt and I talk about often that a lot of kids today have too much structured time, too much homework, their whole day is full between sports and homework. Where I live now, it's this rat race. Everybody's trying to do the next best thing. It's like, "Hey, back off a little bit. Give your kids room to breathe, to be kids." But in this case, when the rest of their life is totally unstructured and chaotic, more structure and more homework and more academic demands were actually what they needed. It's a good reminder that it's not just one way or the other. **Michelle:** That's right. I think the context matters. I just finished reading *The Anxious Generation*. Afterwards, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I've ruined my kids with all this stuff." But it really does make me think about the stark differences between when we were growing up, where we'd come home from school, nobody was there, we'd go out and do whatever in the woods... **Isaac:** Yeah, you ride your bikes around as long as you're home at dark. **Michelle:** But you got bullied, you watched your little brother get beat up, all those things. That's Jonathan Haidt's point in all this - you have to live through some of that stuff. That's what builds resilience and character and grit. I think when we are structuring things way too much with some of our kids, when that structure is not there, they're like, "Oh my God, what do I do?" And they have anxiety about it. That's a problem. **Becoming DC Schools Chancellor** **Isaac:** So you did Teach for America, then 10 years at the New Teacher Project. Then you became the chancellor of Washington DC public schools. So now finally you get to do all the things you want to do and put everything in place and reform everything. Super easy, right? **Michelle:** Super easy, yeah, that's right. So I'd run the New Teacher Project for 10 years. During those 10 years, we worked with most of the large urban school districts in the nation. My staff and I were always so frustrated. We're like, "Why isn't the superintendent doing this? Why isn't the head of HR doing that?" We saw the promise and potential of what could be if only the district was doing what they should have been doing, in our mind. So when I had the opportunity to take the job, the overarching driving factor for me was, "You got to put your money where your mouth is. You're going to be this consultant type person who's just telling people what to do versus actually doing it yourself." **Taking Over the Nation's Worst School District** **Michelle:** It was really the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to be in a mayoral control structure with the most supportive, unbelievable mayor you possibly could have in Adrian Fenty. He was so bought into what needed to happen and was unapologetic about just going for it. Not having to deal with the school board, being in this position where we were a city state, so there weren't state regulations that were gonna stymie what we wanted to do. Really it was like the perfect storm of a situation. So in a quick nutshell, we took the district - when we took over in 2007, it was the lowest performing school district in the nation. It was the only school district that was on high risk status with the US Department of Education, mostly for the misuse of federal funds. Eight percent of the kids were on grade level in mathematics in the eighth grade at the time. The good thing for me was the bar was the floor. There was only one way to go - up. But we went from that situation to, by the time we left, DC Public Schools was leading the nation in gains on the NAEP exam. There was no one silver bullet. There was a lot of work that went into it and a great team that helped to drive that. But some of the main components of what we did were: we put in place a new evaluation system. That evaluation system was distinguished by the fact that a large portion of how teachers were going to be evaluated was based on growth and student achievement. Then we put in place a compensation system that rewarded the most effective teachers. **Isaac:** Did you get a lot of pushback for that? **Michelle:** Oh my gosh, that was a hard fought battle. There were a lot of battles in terms of closing schools and other things, but the teachers union contract was the toughest. But we were able to get through it largely because of the leadership of a guy by the name of George Parker, who was the teachers union president at the time. He was super unusual for a teacher's union leader. He understood what we were trying to do. He was aligned in terms of student achievement needing to be at the top of the priority list. He ended up, like Adrian, both of them ended up not getting re-elected for another term after we implemented all of this. Without his leadership, we would not have been able to put that contract in place. **Matt:** What was that year span? **Michelle:** I was there for about three and a half years, 2007 to the end of 2010. After that, my successor, Kaia Henderson, who was fantastic because she was there with me during the whole first three and a half years, stayed for another five years after that as chancellor. That consistency - you can't underestimate it. Just like teachers having to learn a new teacher, superintendents is the same way. You bring in a new superintendent, they want to throw away all the old plans and create their new strategic plan. Kaia didn't have to do all that because she had been there with me from the get-go. So she was able to just keep going. She did a lot of things way better than I did. Some of those things that we weren't able to do in the first term, she was able to execute in the second term. That consistent hard-nosed driving to the outcomes for that long was what allowed DC to maintain the momentum. That momentum continued through the pandemic. **Why Successful Reforms Don't Spread** **Isaac:** Did lots of other districts start to emulate what you were doing? I mean, to go from the bottom to the top in a three-year span, I'm sure that was a wake-up call to a lot of people. Did some of those reforms start to take off in other districts across the country? **Michelle:** Not really. It's funny because people who aren't in education sometimes see the data and they're like, "Well, why didn't everybody just do those things?" Because it was hard. My boss didn't get reelected and neither did George Parker. The reality is that the only reason we were able to do what we did in DC was because of the mayoral control and specifically because of the kind of mayor that Adrian Fenty was. That's a hard thing in and of itself to replicate. But for other elected officials who were thinking about making education their top priority, it was tough because Adrian was sort of the cautionary tale of "this is what happens if you take this hard stance and do this aggressively." There were some folks who were like, "Well, we want to do what DC did. We just want to do it nicer." Some people called it "DC light." **Isaac:** So here's the pitch: "If conditions are perfect, you'll have three years of absolute hell and then you'll lose your job. Go sign up!" **Michelle:** Here we go. Well, who wouldn't want to do that, right? **Matt:** I need to insert here because we share this in our book - both political parties want bad test scores. Both benefit. The right advocates for bad test scores in a subtle way to justify privatization and choice. The left has always advocated for bad test scores so they could demand more funding for schools. So it's interesting that your success was not replicated and was actually feared. **Michelle:** I wouldn't say that good things didn't happen. What they did in New Orleans, what my ex-husband did in the state of Tennessee, a deputy of mine, Carrie Wright, has since taken over the state of Mississippi and she did amazing things there. So there are some bright spots here and there. But in terms of the whole model of what we utilized, that was never duplicated and I get why not. **From Curmudgeon to Optimist: Entering Venture Capital** **Michelle:** But all of that made me super cynical. I got to the point where I was like, "You know what, we know what we need to do in public education in this country and we're just refusing to do it. So it's never gonna change." That was my mindset for a good while. Then I came into this world that I'm in now in venture capital. And I have regained my optimism that I lost. So that's one of the main things I love about my current job - I can once again be like, "Okay, we can do this, let's go." **Isaac:** Tell me what made venture capital the thing that took you out of education and why did you go that direction? And then what made you start to get interested again and start to look at the education space again and have a little bit more of that optimism? Was it just a little bit of time away that you needed or has something shifted in the world? **Michelle:** I completely left education in about 2018 because I was so fed up. Also, I was like, "I am probably more harmful to the dynamic right now than I am helpful because people would evoke my name and say things like 'people like Michelle Rhee want to evaluate teachers solely on the basis of test scores,'" which was not true, but it didn't matter. It was an effective scare tactic. So I was like, "Let me just remove myself from this situation." **Building an Apprenticeship Platform** **Michelle:** Then in 2020, a colleague of mine from the education space had successfully co-founded a tech startup and had a successful exit from that. She called me one day, Jimena Hartzok, wonderful woman, and she said, "Hey, I have this idea for this new company." It was an apprenticeship platform. The notion was we need to bring the apprenticeship model into the modern day. She had implemented one herself at her prior tech company and she was like, "I want to build a software platform that helps companies start and manage apprenticeship programs." And I was like, "That sounds so great. Good luck, girl. Let me know how I can help." She's like, "No, I want you to start this with me." And I'm like, "I don't know anything about the startup world." She's like, "No, no, we can do this." My husband said to me, "I think you got one more big thing in you, babe." So I entered the startup world and we built Build Within. It was a tremendous learning experience for me. I left there after about three years and thought I was going to take a little bit of a hiatus. And then Roland called me. So Roland Fryer and I have been friends since 2007 when he was a 27-year-old who had just become the youngest ever black tenured professor at Harvard. I was this young gun chancellor and we worked on a project together in DC public schools around paying kids to do well in school, which by the way was successful. We'd known each other ever since then. He calls me and he's like, "Hey, you should join us at EO Ventures. We just raised this hundred million dollar fund and you should run a fund within the fund that is focused on education investments." I was like, "No, thank you. I'm out of education. I love being out. I never want to get back in." He's like, "Fine, do something to do with workforce development." He's like, "Whatever you want, just come on board." Which I thought was kind of crazy, but it's on brand for him. Then I talked to Bill Helman, the other founder of EO Ventures. Bill spent 35 years at Greylock, 15 of those as managing director. So he's a legend in the venture capital space. When I went to my first meeting with him, I was like, "Sir, I do not understand why you want me for this job. I have never invested before. I don't know anything about investing. Surely you can find somebody who's more qualified than me." He looked at me and he said, "You know, there's some stuff you're going to have to learn. But you can do it. You're smart. You'll figure it out. It's not that much. Really? This is a business about picking people and you know how to do that." I just thought it was so wild for me that this titan of the industry could think that an old woman like me could learn something new and be good at it. I love Roland from before. I was super intrigued. So I was like, "All right, I'll try. I'll do this half time for you guys." And now I'm like 80 hours a week deep in venture capital. **The Perfect Storm for Education Innovation** **Isaac:** What has turned your optimism around? **Michelle:** I think what has turned my optimism around is just like every day I meet with founders who feel like they are going to change the world through what they're building. Sometimes I'm like, "I love the founder, don't love the idea" or "I love the idea, don't love the founder." But every now and again, I'll meet someone who I'm like, "Holy crap, you're going to be able to do this. You are going to be able to change the game with what you're building." That's what has sparked my enthusiasm back up again because some of these folks are tremendous people. They have ideas that are phenomenal. They need the capital to execute and we are down for that journey with them. **Isaac:** It's amazing what being exposed to little pockets of people who are doing amazing things can do to completely change your mindset. **VR, ESAs, and AI: The Future Convergence** **Isaac:** Are we at a point where there actually is an opportunity for some really big changes across the board in education? Do you feel that? Is this really something big or are there innovations around the edges, but we're not talking transformation? **Michelle:** I'm going to tell a quick little story first. I have been really interested and focused on AR and VR in education since I came on board at the firm. I had an early conversation with Bill where he was like, "Michelle, people have been telling me that VR is right around the corner for 30 years. Guess what? It was never around the corner. If every time I got on an airplane, I saw one or two people with the goggles, then I would think maybe something was happening. But I don't see it." That made sense to me. But then I continued to look into this, and I read this news story about the top draft pick in the NFL, this kid who had learned to become good with through virtual reality. So I started talking to people in the field and somebody said to me, "You should really just start asking people you know who have kids, what do they know about VR?" It was fascinating because every single parent said back to me either "Yes, they have a headset" or "They don't have one, but they're bugging the crap out of me for one." The data came back and it's like 30% of kids have a headset, 50% have used one, and only 20% have no clue what it is. I think there are several things right now that might very well come together and create the perfect storm of a significant change in the equation. I think the AR, VR piece is fascinating and that could be one. I think ESAs - Educational Savings Accounts and the fact that more and more states are adopting them and more families are utilizing them. And then obviously AI. Because of those three factors, putting a lot of pressure and bringing innovation in a different way to the equation, I think we very well could set us down a wildly different path over the next few years. **Meeting Young Founders Who Will Change the World** **Isaac:** I never would have thought that 15 states in a single year could all do ESAs. Even just parents that I talk to at my kids' little league or whatever, before COVID, maybe one out of 20 would say something like they're thinking about something different for school. Now it's literally like three out of five are like, "We're thinking about a hybrid school or we're thinking about..." There's just this willingness and this desire for something different from the consumer side that I haven't seen before. **Michelle:** Like yesterday, just yesterday, I met with two founders. They sent me the deck. I think it was like a cold outreach or something. I looked at their deck and they have their pictures. I think they must have been from their senior prom from high school. I'm not joking. I looked at the deck and I'm like, "These are 12-year-olds. You can't give millions of dollars to a 12-year-old." But we decided to meet with them just to hear what they had to say. And it was impressive. I was like, "Holy crap." I can tell because I sit in a lot of meetings, and after 20 minutes, you kind of get the notion. But I sat in this meeting with them and I was like, "This is impressive stuff." They had it all thought out. They had a really clear thesis, the plan. I was just blown away. So it's those kinds of experiences, to your point Isaac, that make this job so fun and fulfilling. **Final Thoughts on the Future of Education** **Isaac:** So I'm gonna bring us home with a final question. Since COVID, something accelerated. Consumer preference shifted in a massive way. Now you add technological advances, AI and things. Even just video conferencing - in 2020, a lot of people didn't even know that you could video conference with 50 people at once. It feels like we're at a point where even the stodgiest public school systems are kind of being forced to change because they're losing enrollments. Do you feel that? Is this really something big or will there be some innovation around the edges? **Michelle:** I think we're at an incredibly important time. There's this huge opportunity to build things that could significantly move the ball forward for our kids and the quality of education that they're getting. That's part of the reason why Equal Opportunity Ventures exists - so that we can make sure that we support ideas and founders and bring those things to fruition and seed massive economic mobility for the populations that we're focused on. If you're building in this space, hit me up. **Isaac:** I love it. Michelle, this has been amazing. I feel like we could just listen to your stories endlessly. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the podcast. **Michelle:** Absolutely. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. **Matt:** Thanks, Michelle. ‍