I have an absolutely unshakable faith in kids, grounded in the fact that I worked for three years in one of the worst public schools in Baltimore, with kids most people would write off because of their backgrounds. But, when I set high expectations, at the end of the day, these kids went from scoring at the bottom on standardized tests, to scoring at the top, despite their unfortunate circumstances.

Michelle Rhee

We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.

Michelle Rhee

skills sight kids

We need to do everything we can to ensure every single child has an effective teacher every day, which means we need to identify who are the most highly effective teachers, and we should recognize and reward them for the incredible professionals that they are.

Michelle Rhee

teacher mean children

That should be the goal, is that every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in our public schools.

Michelle Rhee

goal kids school

If you grew up in a lower-income community, or less well-off, the belief is that the way to change that circumstance is through education.

Michelle Rhee

community belief circumstances

Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job.

Michelle Rhee

creativity jobs children

I think that one thing that people are missing is that we are never going to be able to fix this country's [American] economy in the long run until we fix our public education system.

Michelle Rhee

running country thinking

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving - and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it's not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it's irresponsible not to know.

Michelle Rhee

money leadership education

The reality in Washington D.C. is if you live in Tenleytown versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. It’s the biggest social injustice imaginable. What we are allowing to happen in this day and age, we are still allowing the color of a child’s skin and the Zip code they live in to dictate their educational outcome, and therefore their life outcome. We are robbing them every single day of their futures. And everybody in this country should be infuriated by that.

Michelle Rhee

educational country children

I think for what success looks like for me, it is a world in which you can look at the achievement scores, the academic scores, of any school anywhere in this country [the USA], and you wouldn't be able to look at the score and determine what the racial makeup or the socioeconomic makeup of that school is simply because of the academic achievement levels.

Michelle Rhee

makeup country school

My parents were extraordinarily focused on education. It was the topic of every dinner conversation, is are you number one, are you getting all As, if not, why not. You need to do better. So my entire orientation and focus growing up was around doing your best and making sure that you were going to get the best education possible.

Michelle Rhee

growing-up focus numbers

We are always going to put the best interests of kids above the rights, privileges and priorities of adults.

Michelle Rhee

priorities rights kids

We need to identify the least effective or ineffective teachers and for those people we need to either quickly accelerate their practice or move them out of the profession. That's what I believe and quite frankly I have never met anybody at least to my face who said they disagree with that notion.

Michelle Rhee

teacher believe moving

An education reformer is as important in America as the first lady.

Michelle Rhee

important america firsts

I believe that the teachers unions are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They were designed to be professional organizations that protect the rights and privileges and pay of their members. The problem is that we don't have an organized national interest group with the same heft as the teachers union that's advocating on behalf of children.

Michelle Rhee

teacher believe children

We are in tough economic times right now, and the first thing we have to do is look at how we're spending the dollars that we have, and at what kind of return on investment we're getting. Because I think it will show that spending more money without fixing the fundamental flaws in the system won't produce anything different in terms of results. In DC, we were spending a whole lot of money on things that had no positive impact on students' achievement levels.

Michelle Rhee

tough-economic-times impact thinking

We all have to have more rigorous expectations of our kids in America.

Michelle Rhee

expectations kids america

Poverty is so significant that we can't expect to overcome the impacts of poverty in schools.

Michelle Rhee

poverty overcoming school

My grandfather was a teacher, my grandmother on my mom's side, four of my aunts, my sister-in-law, my best friend. So I've always, my entire life, been surrounded by teachers, and because of that I've had a tremendous respect for what teachers can do, the power that they can have.

Michelle Rhee

grandmother mom teacher

My parents came from an environment where everyone knew that the way to be successful was to get a great education, and that was going to be your ticket in life. If you could succeed in education then you would succeed in life, so that was sort of the driving force behind my parents' upbringing, and therefore kind of how they brought me up.

Michelle Rhee

parent successful way

You may not do well, necessarily, up front, and in order to be the best, you've got to work hard.

Michelle Rhee

hard-work may order