Michelle Rhee

About Michelle Rhee

Michelle A. Rhee (Korean: 이양희) is the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system, and the founder of The New Teacher Project. Her parents immigrated to the United States from South Korea in the 1960s. She was raised in the Toledo, Ohio metropolitan region, graduating from Maumee Valley Country Day School in 1988. Rhee graduated from Cornell University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in government and from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University with a master's degree in public policy.

Rhee taught in Baltimore, Maryland as a recruit of Teach for America for three years before founding The New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization which works with needy school districts to recruit and train new teachers. She founded the program in 1997, and it has since expanded to forty programs in twenty states, recruiting more than 10,000 teachers. On 2007-06-12, Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty announced that he had chosen her to replace superintendent of D.C. public schools Clifford Janey and become the schools' new chancellor. Washington has had a New Teacher Project presence through DC Teaching Fellows for several years before Rhee's appointment. Rhee initially rebuffed Fenty's offer, but relented when promised wide latitude and significant authority in decision-making as well as strong mayoral support for her proposed initiatives.

Rhee has additionally served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality,[10] National Center for Alternative Certification, and Project REACH.[citation needed] She was a special guest of First Lady Laura Bush at President George W. Bush's 2008 State of the Union address.[11]