Michelle Rhee- Radical: Fighting To Put Students First (Harper)

The cliché is to judge a person by the company they keep. In the case of Michelle Rhee the saying may need a shift to judge a person by the enemies she makes. Rhee is either a heroic education reformer or an evil villain controlled by big corporations and out to get teachers and break unions depending on whom you ask.

In the book Radical: Fighting to Put Students First Rhee chronicles her path from being a short term teacher in the rough and tumble inner city Baltimore school district to the evolutionary process that moved her from teacher recruitment, to education policy and on to education reformer. Along that craggy path she has won friends and fans and stepped on some powerful toes in teachers unions.

While the problems with the U.S. education system are multitude and systemic, Rhee clings to the seemingly pie in the sky notion that every student deserves a first class education. While many decry the “lack of funding” or alleged cuts in funding, on average we spend thousands and thousands of dollars on every student in the public school systems. Rhee identifies many of the roadblocks that prevent the delivery of a first class education as being systemic issues that have built up over time and the difficulty of trying to eliminate those roadblocks as interest groups ranging from administrators to unions and even politicians cling to their turf and strangle reform.

While at times in the book and in real life Rhee can come off as a shameless self-promoter, she has also been successful in offering substantive solutions to try to reform what is all too often a lackluster education system that delivers a sub-par product. While her detractors are legion in the teachers unions, it is safe to conclude that unlike the unions Rhee truly has made a noble attempt to put students first.