Hooks Book Events is pleased to announce a program featuring Michelle Rhee with the Washington Board of Trade. See a recent interview with her in the New York Times.
Michelle Rhee is the founder and CEO of StudentsFirst, a political advocacy organization for education reform. She served as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools from 2007 to 2010. She is also the founder of The New Teacher Project and a former Teach For America corps member. She divides her time between California—with her husband, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento—and Nashville, Tennessee, with her daughters, Starr and Olivia.
About Radical: Fighting to Put Students First
The United States is known as a world leader in innovation, boasting brilliant thinkers and trendsetting companies, but that status is at grave risk. American children are well outside the top-ten international student rankings in reading, science, and math; those rankings—not to mention the nation’s position of leadership on everything from the economy to the military to issues of moral authority—will continue to plummet unless we take dramatic action. Michelle Rhee, a driving force behind American education reform, is ready to make a change.
In Radical, this fearless and pioneering advocate draws on her own life story and delivers her plan for better American schools. Rhee’s goal is to ensure that laws, leaders, and policies are making students—not adults—our top priority, and she outlines concrete steps that will put us on a dramatically different course. Informing her critique are her extraordinary experiences in education: her years of teaching in inner-city Baltimore; her turbulent tenure as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools; and her current role as an education activist. Rhee draws on dozens of compelling examples—from schools she’s worked in and studied; from students who’ve left behind unspeakable home lives and thrived in the classroom; from teachers whose groundbreaking methods have produced unprecÂÂÂÂÂÂedented leaps in student achievement. The book chronicles Rhee’s awakening to the potential of every child blessed with a great teacher, her rage at realizing that adults with special interests are blocking badly needed change, and her recognition that it will take a grassroots movement to break through the barriers to outstanding public schools.
An incisive and intensely personal call to arms, Michelle Rhee’s Radical is required reading for anyone who seeks a guide not only to the improvement of our schools but also to a brighter future for America’s children.
Registration details available soon. For more information, visit our calendar.