Radical by Michelle Rhee

recruitment season and gearing up for our summer training programs, I got a call that changed the trajectory of The New Teacher Project: Vicki Bernstein, with the New York City Department of Education, was on the line.
    â€œWe need three hundred teachers for the start of school,” she said. “Can you help?”
    The assignment was nuts. The New York system was gargantuan: the largest in the nation. It included more than a million students, in 1,700 schools, with nearly 75,000 teachers. In the other programs that we’d run, we were hiring 100 teachers on average, and we had nine months to run our entire process. Vicki wanted 300 teachers, and we had three weeks to recruit them before the training program.
    â€œWe have never recruited this many people before in ideal circumstances, much less three weeks,” Tracy said. “ And if we screw up, we screw up with the biggest and highest-profile school district in the nation. No way!”
    â€œWho is going to run the thing?” Charity asked. “We’re already all working beyond capacity. This is a major undertaking, and we’ll need an entire team to pull it off!”
    There was no shortage of good reasons not to take the project on. But I knew we had to do it. For all of the risks, there was tremendous upside. A foot in the door with the New York City public schools would create opportunities nationwide.
    â€œWe are taking it,” I said. “We can pull this off.”
    The first order of business was assembling our recruitment materials. After another marathon late-night session we landed on another gem: a grainy black-and-white picture of an adorable young Latina child. Above her the caption read: “Four out of five 4th graders in the city’s most challenged schools can’t read and write at grade level.” At the bottom of the page: “Are you willing to do something about it?”
    We loved it.
    The New York City department hated it. The powers that be felt the message was too negative. They wanted something more positive.
    I argued that facts are facts. We didn’t make that statistic up. Moreover, a message that says, “Hey, everything in the school system is great—come be a cog in the wheel!” is not very compelling. Tell people they can make a difference, and they will come.
    Karla Oakley, the woman I’d hired to run the contract, took our argument to Harold Levy, the new chancellor. He was a bit of a maverick. He green-lighted the idea. The response to the pitch was immediate. New York Times editors were so intrigued by the ad that they assigned a reporter to cover our campaign. The article ran with a picture of the ad.
    Within days we had thousands of applications.
    R UNNING T HE N EW T EACHER P ROJECT made me realize that we could make a real difference. Quickly, we were working with most of the large urban school districts across the country and hiring thousands of teachers a year. We partnered with the Chicago Public Schools, Miami–Dade County Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified, and many others. Our experience base was growing exponentially.
    And so was my rage.
    Our job was to work with the school district bureaucracies. They were our clients. And it was uncanny how they simply couldn’t manage to do what a competent organization should do. In fact, they did the opposite of what must be done to recruit and hire the best teachers. It was maddening.
    When we began our work, we figured that there simply weren’t enough people out there who wanted to teach, so we had to inspire people to do something they hadn’t thought of doing before. I quickly learned that we could get huge numbers of very qualified people to apply for teaching jobs.
    Attracting candidates wasn’t the problem. But we found that the school districts couldn’t hire them—or wouldn’t hire them. They had set up systems and processes that made it impossible for them to hire the best