Rose we continue this evening with designer Carolina Herrera and her musical collaborators tom hodge and javier peral. Everything is an inspiration and i went to the music because i think its a its so normal to be inspired by music. I think every designer is always listening to music and music transports you in a romance, in a dream, everything. Rose we conclude this evening with Mickey Edwards, author of the parties versus the people how to turn republicans and democrats into americans. The problem is not republicans. The problem is republicans and democrats, the white house and the congress. Its people on all sides who say you know, we have an ideology and were not going to ever reach a point where were going to compromise. Were going to fall on our swords. But we have a country to run, charlie. Weve got to make sure the troops get their supplies. Weve got to make sure we pay our bills. Weve got to make sure the water is pure, the bridges dont collapse. You know, theres a point you say i stood up for my principles, im going to fight for my principles. And then at the end because theres 300 million of us because were very diverse, you need to compromise and say how do we make government work for the country . Rose education, fashion and politics when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose Michelle Rhee is here. She is one of those widely known and perhaps most controversial figures in education. She served as chancellor of the d. C. Public School System from 2007 to 2010. Her sweeping reforms and hardnosed style have changed the National Debate over School Reform. She has written a new book about her vision for american education. Its called radical fighting to put students first. I am pleased to have Michelle Rhee back at this table. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Rose why did you call it radical . You know, when i started the job in d. C. I was i took over the lowest performing and dysfunctional School District in the entire nation. So i started making very rapid changes. I started closing down lowperforming schools, removing ineffective educators, i cut a Central Office bureaucracy in half. To me those seemed like really obvious moves to make. Rose right. What was interesting, though, is people started saying shes a lightning rod, shes radical, shes doing all these controversial things. And i thought, really. I just thought rose you thought it was just common sense . Yeah, exactly. Finally it came to me that if bringing common sense to a dysfunctional system makes me a radical than i am okay being radical. Rose youre happy to be a radical. Dedicated to the children of washington, d. C. Who deserve the best schools in the world. Thats right. Rose why do they deserve it more than anyone else . I think because they are the children in our Nations Capital and that says something to me. That says something to me and the rest of the world about how we value children and education when the children in the capital of america which is supposed to be the greatest country on earth are reading and doing math 80 of them are on grade level. Thats a travesty. Thats criminal. And so i with all of my heart believe that those kids deserve the best education in the entire world. Rose this is the last paragraph of the introduction called arms. My goal is to have created a movement that will remake American Public education so that every child can have the opportunity to learn and excel and join a work force that will help the United States compete and win in a global economy. It will not be easy or gentle. It will not be quick. It will require a struggle over power and money. My grandmother asked how hard can that be . Very. So tell me about the struggle that has to be fought. Well engaged. Look at where we are as a country. We are ranked 14th, 17th, and 25th out of all developed nations in reading, science and math respectively. Our 25th ranking in math puts us behind countries like hungary and slovakia, which is i mean this is just not who we are as a nation. And in order to rose not what made us great. No. And its not going to make us great in the future unless we fix it. And i think that, you know, if you look at America Today we have one of the lowest social mobility rates in the entire world. Meaning if you are a child born into poverty in this country, the chances you will ever escape poverty are not good. Which i think goes counter to everything we believe in as a country. So whats at stake is the lives of kids and the values of this nation which i think are of preeminent importance and its a struggle because there are a lot of people and a lot of forces that want to maintain the status quo, who do not want things to change and who are going to fight tooth and nail. Rose when people hear you say that, they think youre talking about teachers and Teachers Unions. I absolutely am not talking about teachers. In fact, i dont think that were going to be able to reform the Education System without teachers. Rose Teachers Unions . Teachers unions you know, people want to say to me all the time that the Teachers Unions are the major obstacle in this whole fight and they are the reason why things are as bad as they are. I just dont put the singular blame on Teachers Unions. The job of Teachers Unions is to maximize the pay and privileges and priorities of their members. And they are doing a phenomenal job of that. Rose do you think its their job to protect those that are not very good simply because theyre a member of the union and the union is pledged to protect the interest of their members regardless of their performance . Yeah. That is their purpose. The purpose of Teachers Unions is not to raise student achievement levels, it is to protect their members and thats exactly what theyre doing. We cant begrudge them that. Rose but does the union not want to see better teachers . Does the union not want to see teachers be rewarded for performance . You know, you would think that they would. Rose they say that they would. And they say often that they would. But, you know, when i was in d. C. And we put a a proposal on the table in front of them at one point to pay highly effective teachers basically double the amount of money that they were in the old system. Rose if you could do what . If we basically got rid of tenure and seniority. Rose so you said if we can get rid of tenure and seniority we will pay them twice as much. And this was a choice that all teachers could make whether they wanted to opt into the system or not. And the union was not in favor of it. And i continue to struggle to understand why they continue to oppose initiatives that want to pay the best teachers more money. Because in my opinion, there is no more important job in this nation than being a teacher. Rose bill gates was here recently and he talked about teacher performance. How should we measure it . Well, the Gates Foundation has done some amazing work on this front. Because for a long time people said, well, we cant possibly measure teacher performance, its an art not a science, et cetera. And what the Gates Foundation has found is that actually you can measure teacher performance. Rose by more than simply test scores of the students. Thats right. Student academic growth should be part of the equation based on their research but you should look at observations to classroom practice, you should look at interestingly, they found that how students rated their teachers correlated very highly to teacher overall performance. So kids really know whether or not theyre in the classroom of a highly effective teacher or not. But the reality is that we have known for a very long time that we could identify Great Teachers and identify not so Great Teachers. You walk into any School Building anywhere in this country today and you ask parents or kids or other teachers whos the best teacher in the school . Theyll tell you. Say whos not so good . Theyll tell you that person, too. So there is a way that we can identify where different teachers are in terms of their performance. We just have to have a commitment to doing so. Rose do School Boards need more power . Well, i would say no to that question because School Boards in my opinion rose the influence well, i think School Boards in this country have been very susceptible to the political process and so often times School Boards are some of the most dysfunctional bodies that exist, political bodies that exist in this country. And they certainly havent moved ] around. They filmed me in a meeting when i was firing a principal. Rose why would you do that . Now let me be clear. The persons name and nobody knew who that person was. All. Not, you know, quote unquote humiliating to the person. Rose so why did you do it . At the time i thought i want to be very clear that it is a new day in the washington, d. C. Public schools. That we are no longer going to allow the status quo to rule. But when i look back on Something Like that, i was incredibly naive about what message that sent. And so what i would say about that particular circumstance is should i have terminated that principal . Absolutely. He was ineffective, he was not doing good things rose should you have done in the front of a camera . No. Rose but im more interested in programs and ideas. Obviously you became polarizing to a degree. Yes. Rose but you could argue that the expression is you have to break an egg to make an omelet and therefore you had to break an egg. You had to come in and say, look we can do it differently. Yeah. Rose but what are the results . Because i always have a hard time and help me with this, i really dont know. Determining success in education. Because ill pick up the paper tomorrow and say Charter Schools arent as good as they thought they were. Right. Rose pick up the paper the next day and theyll say vouchers are terrific. Right. Rose then the next day youll have somebody come back who has a different political view and say no, no, no. And thats why the American People are so confused right now. Because they hear me say one thing, they hear somebody else say another thing. Rose they dont know how to measure. Thats right. And then they say whos right . I cant figure it out. Rose what works and doesnt work. So heres what i would say. About d. C. , we were only there for three and a half years so did we accomplish everything that we wanted to . Absolutely not. Did we make significant progress that outsize it had progress of the district has been making before . Yes. Thats unequivocal. And if you look at the achievement rates of the children, we moved from a situation where about a quarter of the kids were on grade level in mathematics and reading in the Elementary School to now over half. You only have half the kids, thats not acceptable. But when youre seeing that much progress i think we can say that we were doing something right. Ill give you another example. When we were there, we nut place a new teacher performance Evaluation System that got a lot of heat and people didnt like it, et cetera. There was a recent study that came out a few weeks ago that studied a number of urban districts across the country and what it concluded was that these cities were all retaining ineffective teachers at the same rate that they were retaining effective teachers. There was no differentiation. The one outlied liar was washington, d. C. And what they showed in washington, d. C. Is that we were retaining about 88 of our highly effective teachers and and only 40 of the ineffective teachers. And this to me says youre doing something right. And weve done something right. So i think when you take a look at the data, its clear that some progress was made. I think that, though, if you want an example of where has it worked . Where are all of the kids getting an excellent education . That has yet to happen. I think its possible, we can get there, but we dont a proof point at a district or city level yet. Rose whats your assessment of arne duncan . I think arne duncan and the president have done some incredibly bold and innovative things. I think the president has been very clear for his entire administration that he backs School Reform but he think its important. I never thought id see the day where a democratic president stood up in front of the nation and said we should recognize and reward Great Teachers and if youre not good we need to find you another job. I mean, the fact that he said that and started that dialogue i think gave people cover to have this conversation. I think race to the top was a brilliant idea. That initiative sparked more legislative action in a short period of time rose this is the places where they were doing interesting and innovative things. Thats right. So they basically put a pot of money aside 4. 3 billion and they said were going to give this money out to states who are pushing the envelope and doing aggressive reform. Rose no child left behind . You know, a lot of people say no child left behind the republicans dont like it, the democrats dont like it, the democrats dont like it. I will say that its far from a perfect law but what it did was it brought accountability to our system. Rose you say in america we see education as a social issue. Thats right. Rose and we ought to see it as a political issue as an economic issue. As an economic issue. Yeah. I heard the Prime Minister of singapore speak a number of years ago. We were actually at that conference and i dont know if you remember or not but it was fascinating to me. He said when we set our sights on growing our country to be an economic powerhouse we prioritized education, we built the best Education System that we could. Because we knew that that was going to ensure that we were successful. Rose turning out talented people. Thats right. Rose people who are competitive. Now if you look at that country theres sovereign wealth and theyre doing quite well. Because they made they tied education to the economy. I think exact opposite happens here. Rose yeah. In the last president ial election we heard maybe three lines about it. Rose in any debate. And the shocking thing is when we know that our problem in this country is jobs and the economy you cant not talk about education because the only way that were going to regain our position in the global marketplace is to have a skilled work force. Rose you can either see it as a spending issue or an investment issue. Thats right. And we 100 in this country do not see as an investment in our future. I think thats extraordinarily problematic. Rose but are we spending our dollars well, is the question. No. No. I saw a really interesting scatter plot about two years ago it was of all of the developed nations in the world and on one axis it was academic achievement levels and on the other it was per student expenditures. And we were in the quadrant that you dont want to be in. The you spend a lot of money and get low academic achievement results. We were alone if that quadrant with lux. Burg. I dont know what lech semibourg is doing. Rose so students first if your organization. You want to engage the debate and put out ideas. What else . These are the ideas and experiences. We want to motivate everyday people to understand that they can make a difference. Rose you want to start a Grassroots Movement that will have political effect . That will have influence on the debate that we are having today, the decisions that our politicians are making. One of the things that i did when i was writing radical is i traveled around the country and not only did i tell my own story about parents i met along the way, but i talked about our students first members. Everyday moms who were incredibly frustrated with the public schooling experience their kids were having. Didnt know what to do about it, got involved with students first started to organize their neighbors and push for better laws and policies for our kids and then had a victory. I think its empowering to read these stories about what we did in d. C. And what these parents are doing in other places to understand that individual people can make a difference, absolutely. Rose does Kevin Johnson believe the same things you do about Teachers Unions . You know, so rose your husband. This is my husband who is the mayor of sacramento. Rose former n. B. A. All star. Thats right. It was interesting. Is when i first met Kevin Johnson i was listening to him speak and he was talking about the fact that when he retired from the n. B. A. He decided to go back home to the neighborhood that he grew up in and start a Charter School and he said that he went into the school, it was one of the lowest performing schools in the city and said this is what im going to do, were going to make this school great again and the teachers clapped and he said a week later i came back and people were hissing and booing as i came in and i realized the Teachers Union had come in and told them this is terrible, youre going to lose your jobs. And the Teachers Union spent 7 50,000 to make sure he couldnt open the Charter School. And when he told that story and i listened to it i thought, wow, we have something in common. laughs radical fighting to put