Until winning this right, Rhee maintained what she felt was a largely inefficient pool of office personnel, many of whom had become complacent and less productive due to an assurance of job security. After being granted legal authority to fire district employees, Rhee canned nearly one hundred clerical workers (Risen 2008). Still, she waited until legal authority had been granted by the city's elected officials before even attempting to make this type of personnel change, which shows that while Rhee is certainly drastic and controversial, she is also working within the confines of her job and how it is defined by the people of Washington, D.C. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, seeing the very creation of the position of school chancellor as an affront to -- if not an outright circumvention of -- the democratic process (Kristula-Green 2009). Rhee's power as chancellor comes at the expense of the power of the school board, from whom control of the schools was taken away by the city's newly elected mayor in 2007, also the year Rhee was hired. This was seen as a consolidation of power that made the running of the schools less directly responsive to the people. Again, however, it was an elected representative (i.e. The mayor) making a decision within the parameters of his job that led to this change.

Rhee's legal standing in her negotiation with the teacher's union, and the legality of her proposals in these negotiations, have also been issues that she has handled little short of brilliantly. She is fully empowered by the mayor and the city council of Washington, D.C. To negotiate with the various unions that serve the school district, and in fact almost appears to be the sole face of "management" in many negotiations. She also knows the laws of Washington, D.C. very well, and has used them to limit the degree to which seniority can be used as a means of assuring job security...

This has allowed her to propose a pay scheme whereby teachers are evaluated and potentially fired, or given substantial bonuses for improvements in student performance. Such a payment scheme might not even be legal n many school districts, but because of Rhee's careful reading of the law she determined before moving ahead that such a payment plan would be legal. This did not win her the support of the teachers' union on this issue, and many others also protest a merit-based pay scheme for teachers, but the fact is seniority is already limited by D.C. law (Dillon 2008:Haynes 2008).
The appointment of a single person rather than a board heavily influenced by special interests and union groups to run the school district has been touted, by some of Rhee's detractors as well as her supporters, as one of the reasons that reform was able to take place so extensively in the Washington, D.C. school district. The singularity of Rhee's position definitely contributes to the efficacy of her reform efforts, but in truth its the legal authority with which she has been endowed that makes her so effective.