Michelle Rhee Quotes

You wouldn't tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child's birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?

We're not trying to be the only route into teaching. We do put enormous energy into understanding what differentiates the most successful teachers.

Teaching is hard. It takes a lot of skill. Not everyone who tries can do it well. We need to admit that and act accordingly. We should reward and respect great teachers by paying them more, and we should stop rewarding seniority over effectiveness.

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.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

The single most important thing in a child's performance is the quality of the teacher. Making sure a child spends the maximum amount of time with inspirational teachers is the most important thing.

Our teachers deserve better feedback.

There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.

The most important thing about a child's education is to have a great teacher in front of the classroom and a lot of choice and accountability with parents.

The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

I think higher ed in the U.S. is fairly healthy, and by global standards it dominates, and it makes people more productive. But a lot of our K-12 is a disaster. And the single most important reform would just be to fire the worst ten or 15 percent of teachers in the lot, and we would have massive improvements.

Study after study affirms what I saw in the classroom every day as superintendent of Denver Public Schools: Nothing makes a bigger difference for student learning than great teaching.

If you improve a teacher's self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher's overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

We should be firing bad teachers.

We are fortunate to have some of the greatest and best teachers in the world, but we want to make sure that those few that try to sneak through the system are caught in advance.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'

To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

Teaching is the profession that makes all other professions possible and yet we do not treat teachers as professionals.

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

The simple facts are these: We need higher standards in our schools, and we need to hold teachers accountable for the outcomes in their classrooms.