now sci academy s test results are among the best in the city even though the school itself is a bunch of trailers. there s plan in my mind to have a permanent build being u if you walk into a building and complain about the facilities their focus is probably not on the right things. how did sci academy do it? teachers have to perform because the principal can fire at will. yeah, yeah. we have at-will contracts at the school. sharon williams also has a charter school. she, too, fires teachers. i call it freeing up a person s school. the law also allows parents to fire a school. if they don t like this school, they can send their kid to another. sharon has to work hard because she worries about losing her charter. yes, every day, sir. good morning class of 2013. good morning. that competition drives schools to try different things like this morning ritual at sci academy. who are you? a scholar.
school spending has tripled over the past 40 years. we now spend much more than other countries but what do we get? fancier schools, more assistant principals but student learning, no improvement. look at it. there is the line. for 40 years. scores have been flat. much more money, no improvement. this is awful. but there is some good news. around america, some very cool things are starting to happen. but school is boring. no, it s not! yes, it is. i know. i went to school. grade school was boring. so was high school. so was princeton. except for the party parts. but fourth great? you have to learn reading and writing.
kids were on grade level there was something odd about how the teachers were ranked. when i looked at the performance evaluation of how the adults doing. how good are the teachers doing. right. i found that 95% of the adults were being rated as doing great job. so how can you have a system where all the workers are thinking we re doing great job, you know, a great job for our kids whabld we re producing for them is 8% success? she visited schools and saw empty classrooms. i walk into this one school. i go into the first classroom. five kids in the classroom. second classroom. nine kids. third classroom, three kids, seven kids. i m thinking, what s going on. i finally get to the seth or seventh classroom and i ask the teacher, where are all the kids. and she said, well, it s friday. i thought, really? i just couldn t believe that was the answer. i said, is that all? and she said no. i thought, great, she s going to
they were making a conscious decision to wake up early, come to school because they knew they were going to get something out of it and leave after that because they weren t going to get something of value. and this teacher gets paid no more than other teachers. that s right. if we were doing seniority-based layoffs, he would get laid off first. she decided to pay those who did good more and fire other teachers. that did not go over very well. a few weeks into this i was visited by my then general counsel and he comes into my office and said, you ve got to stop firing people. i said why? if people are not doing the jobs that they re supposed to be doing, we need to move them out. he said, well, welcome to d.c. public schools where we never fire anyone. but you did fire a lot of people. eventually we did. rhee found a 90-day loophole that let her close some schools and fire some of the teachers.
you can do it! oprah thinks this woman can fix it. thank you, michelle. i m rooting for you. michelle is michelle reid. michelle reid an acting chancellor. five years ago the mayor picked her to manage the d.c. schools. you had never run a school system before. i had never run a school before and that why people thought that adrian was nuts. a 37-year-old girl from toledo, ohio. and a people said what? who? people said he has lost his mind. her friends said she had lost hers. i have two kids, two daughters, 9 and 12. and they i put them in the d.c. public schools. the schools were a disaster. test results among the worst in america. the chancellor quickly learned although only 8% of d.c. s kids were on grade level there was something odd about how the teachers were ranked. when i looked at the per are