Excellence in Public Service Award

The Excellence in Public Service Award, now in its 20th year, is an opportunity for the John Glenn School of Public Affairs to honor a person who demonstrates outstanding dedication to public service.

This year’s winner is Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system of Washington, D.C.
Past winners include former U.S. Representative John Kasich, former Office of Management and Budget Director Rob Portman, and Senators George Voinov­ich, Sherrod Brown and Thomas Carper.

Born in Michigan but raised in Toledo, Ohio, Rhee graduated from Maumee Valley Country Day School in 1988. She graduated from Cornell University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in government, and earned a Master of Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Rhee taught in Baltimore, Maryland, as a recruit of Teach For America for three years. In 1997, she founded the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization that works with needy school districts to recruit and train new teachers. In 10 years, the New Teacher Project has expanded to 40 programs in 20 states and recruited more than 10,000 teachers.
In  2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Rhee to replace superintendent of D.C. Public Schools Clifford Janey and to become the school system’s new chancellor.

Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality and the National Center for Alternative Certification.

The award reception is co-hosted by the Glenn fellows, who are Ohio State students studying and interning through the Glenn School’s Wash­ington Academic Internship Program. Each academic quarter, Ohio State students travel from Columbus to experience Washington. While there, they intern with a government agency or non-profit organization, attend a weekly seminar and write a research paper analyzing public policy.