MICHELLE RHEE

Education Activist Michelle Rhee was born on December 25, 1969 in Ann Arbor Michigan. She is the second of three children to South Korean immigrants. Rhee has a bachelor’s degree in government from Cornell University and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. After serving in the Teach For America program Rhee spent three years working as a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School in Baltimore Maryland. In 1997 she founded The New Teacher Project (TNTP) to bring more excellent teachers to classrooms across the country. Under her leadership TNTP became a leading organization in understanding and developing innovative solutions to the challenges of new teacher hiring. From 2007 to 2010 Rhee was Chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools, emphasizing top-down accountability and stressed what she deemed to be the importance of performing well on standardized testing. In her first year as chancellor, Rhee closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals and cut staff by 15 percent. Rhee stated it was necessary because only 12 percent of the District's eighth graders were proficient in reading, and only 8 percent in math. In 2010 Rhee founded StudentsFirst, a grassroots movement that seeks to mobilize parents, teachers, students, and administrators throughout the country in an effort to bring about meaningful results in education reform at both the local and national level. Rhee lives in Sacramento, California with her husband, Kevin Johnson, who served from 2008 until 2016 as Mayor. Previously, she was married to and had two children with Kevin Huffman whom she met during her time at Teach for America. Rhee published her first book, Radical: Fighting to Put Students First, in February 2013.

"You have to be the person who's out in front. You have to know where you're going. You have to understand this is the best route to take."