Always the right time to do the right thing. I just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. We know that we are only about halfway to completely eliminate hunger, and we have a lot of work to do. Walmart committed 2 billion to fighting hunger in the u. S. As we work together, we can stamp hunger out. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Tavis Michelle Rhee has been called a warrior. She took over the struggling washington, d. C. School system and challenge teachers on accountability, close school she deemed were redundant, and she is now president of an Advocacy Group called studentsfirst and has written a book, michelle radical. There is it always fascinates me, i am interested in back story. I am curious as to how your upbringing, how relationship with her parents, how your educational journey impacts the Michelle Rhee that we know. Part of the reason i wanted to write the book, to tell people about my upbringing. Folks have told me i come from teachers. My grandmother and grandfather and four of my hands, i have always been surrounded my entire life surrounded by teachers. I have a tremendous respect for work teachers can do. The power they can have. My parents were extraordinarily focused on education. It was the topic of every dinner conversation. Are you number one, are you and if not, how, you could do better. The focus was doing your best and making sure you are going to get the best education possible. That interest, the extreme interest on the part of your parents, was that because of the fact they were teachers, or because of the culture that you grew up in or combination of both . I think it was a combination of both. I think that my parents immigrated to this country from korea. They 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 you would succeed in life so that was the driving orce behind my parents upbringing and how they brought us up. Tavis how has that impacted the way you parikh your daughters . Parents your daughters . I tried to have more balance than my parents did. My parents were extraordinarily hard core. My brothers did not do well, they would punish me. My brothers came back with a not so good craig, i would get grounded which i thought was totally whack when i was a teenager, how does this make any sense . I try to have more balance. It is interesting. I try to set High Expectations for my children. I am not a type your mom tiger mom. My daughter came home with not a good grade on a math test. I was giving her problems and a few weeks later and she said, i got the second highest grade in math in my class and i said that is good. She said all that drilling that you did, that was worth it. I think that is what i want to teach my kids is that you may not do well necessarily up front and in order to be the best you have got to work hard. Tavis i am laughing inside thinking whether or not your parents would have said to come only the secondbest grade . They probably would have. Tavis you mentioned earlier that you come from a family of teachers. There are a number of things in your critics have to say. How do you respond that she me come from a family of teachers but she spent three years in the classroom but went off to harvard, and that qualifies you to talk to the rest of us . That is a good point and the reason why when i was the chancellor in d. C. , now that i am doing my work at studentsfirst, were not going to be successful at education reform unless teachers are engaged and involved. I do not pretend to have all the answers. Were constantly engaging teachers in these conversations because unless they are part of the reform movement, were not going to be successful. Tavis is there any credence to the argument that your approach might be different, the response to your approach might be different if you have spent more time in the classroom, to learn what these other teachers who have been there 10, 15, 20 years know, or is that a red herring . You can have Different Levels of experience. As long as youre listening to teachers and engaging with them and understanding what their challenges are. When we put together our teacher evaluation system, this is a hot topic. We held hundreds of focus groups with teachers to understand what they thought was wrong with the current system, what they wanted to see happening. There were lots of different opinions. Even if i had taught for 20 years i would not have had one opinion. You have to have multiple opinions about things and the second point is that i am the mother. I am a parent. I view this education reform debate and these policies from the viewpoint of having two little girls and knowing what i want for them and what i want for them is no different from any other mom i have met across the country. We want our kids to have the best possible education. They have to have a great teacher in their classroom every single day and options for high quality schools and we have to know that our taxpayer dollars are going to things that will have the most benefit for kids. Tavis i want to talk about how equal, high an quality education for every child. I wantteacher to do that to looe way youd be constructed there is somewhere in the conversation, you will break that down in the book and will come to that in a second. The title is radical fighting to put students first. When this book came across my desk i thought it was a fascinating title. Why is it we have to fight to put students first . I am not being naive in asking this question but you think in the Education System what matters most would be the students, and we seem to talk about everything, charter schools, private schools, money, about this, about that. How is it we have gone to a point where we are fighting to put students first . That is a great question and it is what i try to talk about in my book, but we have gotten to this place where if you listen to education policy reform debates and discussions in this country, the vast majority of them are about adult issues. What is good for the district what about the jobs, this, that, and the other thing and very little of the conversation is about the kids. I think if we focus more on the children we end up with wildly different policies and laws in place than we do right now. I will give you a quick example. I talked in this book about the about a hot topic that causes a lot of consternation which is vouchers. The idea that for lowincome kids who would be trapped in Failing Schools, should they have the opportunity to take a voucher, a publicly funded voucher and attend a private school and people go nuts when you talk about this issue. When you hear them, the people who are against vouchers, they say youre taking money away from the schools that need it the most, you are only helping some of the kids, there is another feeling school that needs to get better, to look ate way youd be etc. And i start from the prospect of saying you are a parent, and your house was zoned to a Failing School and you have the opportunity to participate in a program that will allow you to take money and send your kid to a great private school, would you do it . Theres not a person anywhere that i have met who said i would not keep my kid i would keep my kid in the filling school because it is better for the system. Every parent says that. We should be thinking about that for everyones children. Tavis were on the way to finland. Finland has figured out a way to do this without having public and private and better or worse. Everybody gets access to an equal, highquality education. We will come to finland in a moment but if i were one of those parents in the auditorium were you were lecturing and talking about this issue and you ask me that question, my response would be this. What i want is not School Choice. I want choice schools. All the schools ought to be choice. Why should my kid have to make a choice between the school and that school . Why have we not found a way to make all schools choice as opposed to having School Choice. You have to get a voucher or this. I saw the movie waiting for superman. And it broke my heart. I literally cried when i watched that movie to see these kids futures depend on a bouncing ball in a machine to see if there lottery number came up. If they could get one of the few seats. That is not a way to educate the country. You got to be lucky to have your number, in a Lottery Machine to have a good seat in a good classroom. Were on our way to finland. Why School Choice as opposed to making all schools choice . That is the goal. Tavis i am not sure that is the goal. I can debate you on that. With the money that is made of education, i am not a cynic here. But i am skeptical about this argument that the goal in this country really is to make all schools choice. I am not sure believe that. It is my goal. My goal is to make sure that every parent is in a situation where they can send their kid to the Neighborhood Public School and they can now that theyre great to get the great education because that is what most people want. Most people do not want to put their kids on the bus for an hour and half. Most people when given the choice, want to send their kid to the Neighborhood Public Schools and know they will get what they need and that is the dynamic we should create. However, that is far from the dynamic we have right now, right . The question we have to ask ourselves, given the inequity that exists in the system right now, given the fact that poor and minority kids are disproportionately trapped in Failing Schools that have been failing for decades, well were trying to fix the system, what happens with those kids and families . What i would argue is that you cannot create a situation where you are forcing those families to remain in those Failing Schools while you were fixing them in the hopes of Something Different will happen because again, i would never put my child in that situation but i cannot ask any mother to say, just hold on and set it up for five more years while we fix this and hopefully, we will. I can i give you any guarantees. Your kid may not know how to read but that is what we need to do for the system. That is not the way that most parents are going to want to deal with the situation of their kids today. Tavis a posco to finland. You do a pretty wonderful deconstruction of what is happening in finland and how we compare to finland and what we can do to replicate. Finland is a country that i think is interesting to look at. I and 20 or 30 years ago, finland was not doing nearly as well as is as it is doing now. The winter when face of reform that looks pretty similar to what our country is doing now. Because they have come so far it is different from what the u. S. Is doing also lots of people say, we should do what finland is doing but they are in a different place in their growth. We have to look at what they did when they were not doing so well and how they got out of that and the three things they did was they had a heavy focus on teachers and teacher quality. They knew that was the most important in School Factor that could deal with. The second thing is they had very clear and rigorous curriculum. Standardized curriculum that everyone was focused on and all kids were expected to learn. The third was they had a very strong accountability system. They had a centralized body that would go out to the schools and look at the quality of the schools and rate them. That was the first three things they did. That catapulted the country from being not so good to actually where it is now which is very good and now when you look at what finland is able to do, theyre trying to go from good to great so there tweaking around the edges and that sort of thing. And i think it is a lesson, i believe, in what is possible. If a country puts its entire focus on making sure the Education System improves, then that is the kind of progress you can see. Tavis your book is teacher centric. To your point, the first thing on your list about what the finnish people did was to look at the teachers it wanted. Again back to your critics. Your critics would take the example in ct that teachers in finland are treated with respect. Doctors and lawyers, nobel laureates. The people of finland have such a high regard for how they treat their teachers, one would argue that in this country we do the opposite trade we demonized teachers and make movies, that demonize teachers and demonize teachers unions. How do you respond to people saying a great example but why dont we treat teachers that way . I do not think that movies like waiting for superman demonize teachers. Tavis i said it is not that all these kids can all learn. Some of these teachers can teach and i believe that. There is a part where they made a mockery of teachers who were sent to the discipline hearing. That part was pretty crazy. That is the reality. In new york it showed the room rubber room, we pay teachers who we think are not good enough to be in the classroom but we pay them every day and that should be brought to light because it is not a good use of taxpayer dollars but the bottom line is right. We have to respect and honor teachers for the incredibly heroic work they do every day and i think in our society we have a totally whack perspective on what teachers do in their value to our country. I was having a conversation with my husband the other day. Hes to be a very used to be a professional basketball player and we were watching a game and i said, it is so crazy to me that these men get paid 12 million a year for dribbling a basketball around and adding very little value to society in my opinion. We should be paying the best teachers in our country 12 million year because we know what theyre doing, they know the power they have to move society along and the fact that they are the best teachers are paid as little as they are says something about how we value. Tavis i agree. We do not value teachers enough. The question for the American People is what comes first, the chicken or the egg . We could make the argument that we should pay teachers 12 million if the students were performing like lebron james. . There are teachers who are performing like lebron james. If you look at the data they are taking kids to come into their classroom, operating three or four grade levels below where theyre supposed to be, and in one period they are better. Tavis it is hard to make their case to pay teachers that kind of money if we do not see the results. It is hard to make that case when we have protections and different laws and policies. In Southern California last year there was a legislator who tried to introduce a bill that would make it easy to remove teachers from the system that were sexual predators. That is low hanging fruit. It should be a given but it did not pass out of the Committee Much less go to a vote. The teachers unions wanted to protect the job. When your average taxpayer you are a average taxpayer, there are some people who are not performing well and we cannot remove sexual predators, that is a problem. We have to do is put laws and policies in place that are going to respect and honor the best teachers, make sure that for those were not performing well, we can quickly get them better, or we find them a different profession. But we have to create an environment where we now we know the policies anwill lead to a good teacher in a classroom every single day. Tavis i think there are many fellow citizens to think that this is intractable because they do not see what agency they have in solving the problem. Somebody told me once, if Benjamin Franklin came back the only thing he would recognize is our Education System because it has not changed in a while. Even the Public Education is taxpayer funded, the taxpayers do not know what agency they have to fix it. Youre doing what youre doing and we can argue about who was right and wrong. What agency to people have . That is a great question. This is to give road map to the everyday mom or dad who is educated frustrated by the Education System. They often think it is hopeless. I call the school in a one returns my calls. This is the political black hole and we cannot fix it. There are things that everyday people can do. We have laws and policies in place that are created and protected by elected officials. And these elected officials, usually they vote for something in the committee. Their constituents are not paying attention to evoke their having. Nobody knows that. If were able to shine a light on that and say, your state assemblymen voted against a lot to take sexual predators out of the classroom, what do you think about that . The vast majority would say that is a travesty. We should say, hold that person accountable for that vote and know when youre going to the ballot box or call that person before the vote happens and let them know if they do not vote for kids who arent not going to get the vote next time. There is a way to change and shift this dynamic but it is not going to happen unless everyday people are getting active for getting informed, understand what is happening right now in their community, in their state legislatures and voicing their opinion. Tavis we had gavin newsom last week. His book argues one of the things we have to fix is a way to digitize, and i am thinking of him. If these Committee Hearings that were not aware of everyday were available online, if all public stuff where available it would be easier to track when that happened. A reason to push them out there. How do you assess where you are in your work right now, and not just a says, but what is success when youre in the sea of drama . I have been in the field for more than 20 years now. It is somewhat disturbing to me sometimes when i look at things. When i got into this as a College Graduate and went to teach in baltimore, i thought, i am going to change the world, i want to improve the lives of kids in america through having great Public Education and the reality is in the last 20 years, not a whole lot has happened. If you are a poor kid of color who is growing up in an inner city in this country, the likelihood is that you attend a feeling school and because of that, you will not be able to graduate from high school, go on to college at the rates that we would want and expect. The u. S. Has fallen toward the bottom on social mobility internationally which means if youre a kid who was born into poverty, the likelihood that you will ever escape poverty are slim to none. That to me is the saddest reality imaginable. It goes against every ideal that we have as americans. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, if you work hard and do the right thing, you can live the american dream. What success looks like, it is a world in which you can look at the achievement scores, the academic scores of any school anywhere in this country and it would not be able to look at the score and determined what the was. L make coomake up that should be the goal. Every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in public schools. Tavis the book is called radical fighting to put students first, written by Michelle Rhee. Good to see. That is our show. Good night from los angeles, thanks for watching. As always, keep the faith. For more information on todays show, visit tavis smiley at pbs. Org. Tavis hi, im tavis smiley. Join me next time for a conversation with of goode hidden biases people. That is next time. We will see you then. There is a saying that dr. King had that said there is always the right time to do the right thing. I just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. We know that we are only about halfway to completely eliminate hunger, and we have a lot of work to do. Walmart committed 2 billion to fighting hunger in the u. S. As we work together, we can stamp hunger out. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Be more. Pbs