In a time of multiple wars around the globe and a nuclear meltdown in Japan, you wouldn't expect to see so many front page stories about education policy fights -- but you do. In Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, New York... almost everywhere.
What's happening? And why does former Washington D.C. schools chief, Michelle Rhee, keep popping up in so many of these fights -- even when she's not a player in some of those states? The answer is that two decades of debates over improving public schools are coming to a head. It's time to take sides, so the scramble is on.
In one camp are most teachers, traditional liberals, the teachers unions and the politicians who win their support. To them, school accountability reforms have swerved in a dangerous and unfair direction -- singling out teachers. The real culprits, they say, are not ineffective teachers but the unsolved problems of race and poverty.
In the other camp are liberal reformers, conservatives, charter school operators, some young public school teachers and the politicians who win their support. This camp believes that schools can put a dent in the problems of race and poverty, but only with stiff accountability focused primarily on one target -- singling out teachers.
No wonder Rhee pops up in all these debates. Rhee's rapid-fire school reforms during her three-and-a-half years here focused mostly on teacher quality, the core issue in this current national clash, and the key reform she now pushes nationally through her new advocacy group, Students First.
In D.C., Rhee fired teachers she thought were bad. A few (very few) school chiefs have tried to do that, but not successfully. Rhee, by contrast, pushed 400 teachers out the door. When forced to lay off teachers she refused to dismiss them by last-hired, insisting, rather, that principals choose their lower performing teachers. Most school superintendents stick to last-hired, first-fired. Why ruffle feathers?
Rhee built a rigorous teacher evaluation system that brings master educators into the class to observe teachers at work. Most teacher evaluation systems are flabby and useless -- a perfect match for a traditional teacher compensation system that ignores effectiveness and instead rewards longevity and degrees earned.
Finally, Rhee pushed hard against paying teachers on that lockstep formula. Rather, teachers received bonuses based in part on improvements in student scores.
Add it all up, and you find that Rhee did all the things that governors in Florida, Idaho, New York, etc., are now pushing through legislatures. Obviously, the best way for opponents to blunt those reforms is to prove that Rhee is a fraud, failure or cheat. Preferably, all three.
Let's visit each category:
Cheat: This is the newest allegation, arising from a USA Today investigative piece in late March that revisited an older controversy about the high number of test score erasures at some D.C. schools.
Was that cheating? Education counter-reformer Diane Ravitch immediately concluded that was the case, warning the world to back away from test-heavy reforms. If Ravitch is right, and the erasures an inevitable consequence of Rhee applying too much pressure on principals and teachers to perform, then educators everywhere should be wary of relying on test-proven results demanded by Rhee and other reformers.
Frankly, I can't tell if the erasures were the result of cheating or aggressive test-taking strategies passed along by the teaching staff. But I can observe something far more important: Rhee's track record in D.C. is not based on the D.C. tests. Rather, she is measured by a far higher standard, the so-called "gold standard" of testing known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
That test, administered by federal experts, has never been comprised. Never even a whiff of controversy. And the NAEP shows that between 2007 and 2009 (when Rhee was chancellor) D.C. students made significant progress not seen in comparable urban districts.
Fraud: Here, the Rhee doubters cite test score data supposedly showing that her Teach for America "success story" in Baltimore was not a success after all. Problem is, their dated data can't isolate her students. And interviews with her fellow teachers and classroom aides, one of whom went on to become a school principal in Maryland, reveal that everyone at the school regarded her as a teaching star.
Failure: The NAEP scores cited above are hard to refute. Based on my book research, the situation in D.C. schools was truly terrible when Rhee arrived in 2007. On the federal comparisons of urban school districts, D.C. was tied for last place with Los Angeles. Plus, only about a third of the teachers had the right stuff to stage a recovery.
The best argument to be made for painting Rhee as a failure is that her reforms were so traumatic and unpopular they got former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty unelected and Rhee herself forced out as chancellor. True, but on actual school improvement measures, D.C. no longer scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
The prediction for the coming year: Until Rhee's opponents can effectively paint her as a cheat/fraud/failure, it is likely we will see more governors and Republican-controlled legislatures unleash Rhee-style reforms. Which means the education fights will become even more polarized, more bitter -- all because they focus on Rhee's issue, singling out teachers.
Richard Whitmire, former president of the National Education Writers Association, is author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On the Nation's Worst School District.
Michelle A. Rhee, Founder and CEO of StudentsFirst | StudentsFirst.org
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I'm not using these as excuses to defend bad teachers. They are out there, as in any profession. But a child is such a complex amalgam of biological, cognitive, emotional and socioeconomic factors that a standardized test cannot possibly show us how well they are achieving, let alone be used as a tool to gauge teaching quality. And here I am just talking about individual students. Consider that a high school teacher instructs 150 of these complicated humans every day, largely assigned to him at random. How to even begin to fairly weigh how good he is at his job based solely on 150 test scores would be a nightmare not only of logistics, but of sociology, psychology, etc etc etc. If we turn to this method, we need a system where every kid gets 30 asterisks so we can chart EVERY factor that might have affected that score. Test scores sheets will look like the DSM-IV.
Until then i will strive to make sure every child i meet on the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn or Newark New Jersey:
1) Makes it into college
2) Becomes a critical thinker
In that order.
1. Rhee has degrees in government and public policy.
2. She enrolled in Teach for America because she could not find a job with a government degree and did not have a teaching certificate.
3. She washed out of teaching after three years.
4. Before becoming "chancellor"—a very Reichstag ring to it, no?—of D.C. schools, she never had served in any administrative position in education.
In short, Rhee has no credentials to be in any position impacting American education. Like many of the recently elected, Tea Party-affiliated legislators—most of whom suffer from a similar lack of credentials for their jobs—Rhee has made a name for herself by being a contrarian.
"School reform" has become the euphemism for the privatization of American education. Rhee, Scott Walker, Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul, et al., want nothing more than to dismantle the American public school system.
What Rhee did accomplish is making herself wealthy and famous, exploiting unease about education for her own personal gain. Her hypocrisy is dangerous because we need to have a real discussion about education in this country, and she muddies the waters because of this mythology she has created about herself (with an assist from Mr. Whitmire). Now politicians who control policy are buying the myth: "The answer is easy: Test kids and fire teachers. Michelle Rhee did it, and look how famous (oops, I mean successful) she is." This is not helpful.
Mr. Whitmire, when over 50 PERCENT--FIFTY percent--of schools in your district have wrong-to-right erasure rates at over 3 STANDARD DEVIATIONS above the norm, then, yes, I think it's fair to say, the case for major fraud are pretty good. Maybe you don't understand statistics, Mr. Whitmire (would not be surprised, you seem not to understand education policy yet you write about it)--but these statistical wrong-to-right erasure rates were in no way caused by extra vigilant student work or other BS excuses offered by the Rher-hired investigator.
The REAL reason Rhee is at the center of controversy is that her reforms are disproved by actual peer reviewed research (many studies have been done that show merit pay doesn't work for example, or that standardization of curriculum doesn't serve students). It's not because the rest is against reform or for the status quo, it's because those in the education field who have actually done research or studied education know her efforts at privatization are not actually going to improve education for children (they will, however, generate power and profit for the adults involved like Rhee, the highest paid official in DC government).
It's obvious to me that a lot of the people who comment on articles at the HuffPost are simply ineffective teachers, afraid that, under a system like Rhee's, they would be summarily fired.
In my own case, I passed all required praxis test with near perfect scores and never received less than a 3.5 grade point average in either undergraduate or graduate school. So, on paper, I am not an incompetent teacher.
In terms of motivation, i go out of my way to be as knowledgeable as possible in terms of my own field as well as other fields. I use this knowledge to help broaden student understanding of complex topics. For example, when covering flower for algernon, a story about a man whose intelligence has been enhanced, I front load the reading with a discussion on the meaning of intelligence backed up with ideas as disparate as the educational theories of Howard Gardner to studies of animal intelligence to case studies involving victims of isolated brain damage. Clearly, my motivation is not the problem.
My problem is classroom management. I am improving, but I fear the first instinct of people like Rhee is to hire and discard teacher after teacher looking for a perfect one rather than taking gifted yet flawed teachers and helping them become great teachers.
I can tell your content knowledge is impeccable. The management will come, and quickly become second nature as you gain confidence. Managing an English class is different anyway, more difficult IMO, because it relies on much more open discussion, group work and creativity. Sometimes handing the floor over to kids is treacherous terrain.
Hang in there.
Third time trying to post-no reason this is not being posted unless it is Rhee site.
There's the bait-and-switch-- the $100,000 promise never materialized.
There's evaluation using flimsy measures: http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf
And there are arbitrary dismissals, like the ones these teachers suffered under Rhee:
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/dc/reinstated-dc-public-schools-teachers-speak-out-about-their-2008-firings-031011
Need more, or is that enough?
Tying your livelihood to test scores affected by literally hundreds of variables other than how well you do your job, giving you a poor evaluation if you don't teach according to one particular philosophy and way of doing things, and creating an environment that eschews real, genuine learning for intellectually-dull test preparation is not something that most teachers (or any thinking people for that matter) agree with. It's a recipe for disaster.
And that's just so sad. We have to use paint, not truth.
Vicious cycle of fleecing the public and giving a damn to student's education.
Another page from the Palin playbook, "How To Score Wealth and Fame Through Political Celebrity Without Really Trying," is to get your name on a book. In this case, the author of this Huff Post article happens to be the author of that book. It's close to the ghost-writing that Palin embraces, but not quite. Look for Rhee's own book soon. I suspect the title will include the word "children," although we know it's not really about them, is it?
The article was a fluff piece for Rhee.
There is no evidence that singling out teachers alone can solve the problem. But according to Rhee one can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
In hindsight, I'm not entirely sure why I read this appallingly brief attempt to dismiss Rhee's problems. Besides your obvious hero-worship/crush/whatever of Rhee (which is kind of creepy), it's clear that you're just trying to garner more attention to your new book.