John Merrow is still trying to get to the bottom of the DC cheating scandal.
During his investigation, he discovered that Michelle Rhee hired a data coach who lives in California to advise her at $85 an hour or $1500 a day when he visited DC. This data expert reported to Rhee’s assessment director.
Merrow heard from confidential sources that the data expert had written a four-page memo expressing his concerns about possible cheating. Merrow spent months trying to track down the memo. He knows that it exists but no one will let him see it. Rhee’s former assessment director won’t answer Merrow’s many calls.
What is in the memo? No one will say and Merrow can’t get his hands on it. But he makes the reasonable assumption that if the memo said “don’t worry, all is well,” the memo would be promptly released. It seems reasonable that someone has something to hide.
Note that Rhee is represented in this matter by a prominent criminal attorney in Washington, D.C.
Why?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I thought it was odd that she was represented by a white-collar crimes attorney.
This goes all the way to the top…USDOE and Arne….fascinating to read and extremely disturbing. This kids were were props for her reputation. Rhee IS responsible.
Here beginneth our tale of FOIA frustration. Starting in early May of 2012, we submitted FOIAs to DCPS, the DC Inspector General, the Mayor and the US Department of Education. DCPS told us the document did not exist. The DC Inspector General told us he had it but wouldn’t release it, a decision echoed by the US Department of Education’s IG. The Mayor supported DCPS. I have copies of 46 communications on my desk as I write this, but there may have been more.
So now someone has to sue to get that memo. John Merrow said he personally did not have the resources to do so, but I would think Frontline or PBS or someone interested in finding out the truth could sue.
I am concerned why no one has requested an investigation of the “mouth taping” incident(s) that MS Rhee seems to think is so funny and frivilous that she laughs about it with the media. Apparently the statute of limitations in Washington DC has not expired yet..but close to it.
( I researched it)
I’d like to see that persued. Seriously.
She was teaching at Harlem Park ES in Baltimore City, MD, (performing her Baltimore Miracle), when she taped her students’ mouths shut. This would have been between August 1992 and June 1994.
Excuse my typo…..**pursued**
Keep providing the truth. This is fascinating, enlightening, possibly damaging, and possibly freeing to true educators who support a student’s right to learn and not be a number.
Maybe, just maybe the tide is turning! God, (and I don’t believe in that concept) I hope so!!
But she is a reformer! Arne, Bill, Elii, and even The President will shield her.
The truth is not in play.
If the media stays with this story, we will know the truth.
The main word in your statement is “if”. We need to do our best to make sure that the “if” becomes a surety and not a question.
I think this puts John Merrow’s FRONTLINE piece in a more positive light. The key was not in revealing everything all at once but in opening the car of worms that the Rheephormer in Chief has tried to keep sealed. For someone who speaks constantly about hard data she has insuperable difficulties in providing the simplest documented facts, such as proof that during her brief stint as a teacher she took her students from the 13th percentile to the 90th, or that she didn’t incentivize widespread cheating in DCPS during her tenure as chancellor.
The ancient Greeks called it hubris. Charterites/privatizers and EBs everywhere: Google it. You may find yourself looking in a mirror.
Quit channeling the ancient Greeks, we know they were all old white men-ha ha!!
Speaking of which: consider how unoriginal Rhee and many of the charterites/privatizers are, as if they were simply channeling some of the most predictably doomed-to-fail schemes and behaviors documented in [how old fashioned!] scrolls and books from the last two thousand plus years.
Imagine her response to an unscripted question that should be a softball: “Do you think the unexamined life is worth living?” I can just see that trademark smirk light up her face as she says “I don’t regret anything! And by the way, that wasn’t one of the questions you submitted to me in advance. I mean, what sort of idiot asks questions like that? You think I would permit a standardized test to contain something as inane as that?! Now if you were talking about whether a pineapple should examine a hare, or a hare a pineapple, now we’re talking about data-driven teaching and learning!”
Socrates would have made mincemeat of her—if he had decided to fritter away his precious time. Although perhaps one might say he preferred taking poison rather than put up with the edubullies of his day….
Just sayin’.
🙂
This might be the break we’ve all been hoping for.
I hope so!!
I’ve met Dr Sanford a few times and found him to be earnest and intelligent. It would seem to me that he would be hard pressed to not tell what he knows. Are there any others ways he can share his knowledge without violating his contract with DCPS?
According to Upton Sinclair “”It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Do you understand now??
It is called whistle blowing. He has a choice- his conscience or his career.
DCPS could release the letter. I can’t wrap my head around the notion that DC’s IG and ED’s IG had access to the memo and opted not to look to deep into the matter. I wonder why?
I am glad to see John Merrow continuing this story.Our country needs brave investigative reporters to tell the truth to the American public. Democracy, is not democracy without freedom of the press, and America is not America without public education. Why aren’t more individuals with influence and recognition following this story and speaking up? Have all the reporters of this world sold out to the financial powerful?
As much open and stealth support as Rhee has from the Overclass, she needs to worry about one constant in news coverage: the reliable tendency for the media to be “at your feet or at your throat.”
If, at a certain point, the media antennae catches a whiff that Rhee is damaged goods (or “bads,” to more precise) then we might be surprised how quickly she can fall.
The so-called education reform she is a poster child for, however, will be a tougher beast to slay.
I can’t for the life of me understand John Merrow. More and more we’re finding out what he’s uncovered, yet almost NONE of it was on his show. His show was nearly an hour of sycophantic sucking up and letting her and her biographer control the narrative. Now, off camera we’re learning more and more of the truth. I guess good on him for continuing to pursue matters, but why oh why couldn’t he have presented any of this on air where hundreds of thousands more people would have heard it, rather than the handful of us in the choir who read it online?
I have been wondering also. I don’t get why he didn’t include any of this. I wish Merrow would answer.
Ditto Dienne and Linda.
The suck up was bold type, 24 font, above the fold and the retraction is buried, 10 pt font, page 20.
(Anyone else remember newspapers?)
😉
I also wonder. Perhaps we should look at PBS’s founders and make some inferences. I also wonder why when they didn’t examine IMPACT and the case of the DC teacher who was fired who ended up in Fairfax County, VA. I agree with Dienne. If this had been broadcasted, then perhaps the story would have gained traction. Now, perhaps we can interest some Congressional reps who have oversight over DC and maybe they’ll get involved. I’m thinking of the fraud and money angle that this testing and bonus bucks fiasco has presented.
The Daily Howler continues to look into the DC cheating scandal and Rhee and what the NAEP scores actually say.
Good read.
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/01/peddling-rhee-what-naep-scores-actually.html
Again I say…..Why wasn’t any of this revealed on the show??? To me that show was a “coverup”!! We got no mention of her taping a student’s mouth shut, but we were given a history of her. There was 10-15 minutes of teacher bashing for a show that ran for 55 minutes. Are other major media outlets also asking for this memo??
PBS did us a great disservice running this program. Merrow in my eyes is only trying to cover his tracks so it won’t appear he wrote a puff piece. This is the 2nd big piece of information he wrote about since the airing that was not reported in the piece. Very suspicious!!!!
Rhees puppetmasters have a lot on the line with her and “Students and Teachers Last.” Is it any wonder they would hide something like that? It is plain as day there was test cheating and her answer is that she is not there anymore. That is no answer.
We have been told by many reporters in private that if they write those stories they will never work as a reporter again. One of these reporters who told us that was recently fired for doing a story on a major corporation dumping hazardous waste into a waterway. What they warned us about just happened. The corruption we have on schools is enormous. Just the fraud of the $27 billion school bond construction fund equals more than 1/2 of that amount. This is a result of paying 2-3 time the going rate for construction. People will kill for this kind of money. Think about it like this “How would you like the toilet paper contract for 1 million people a day? Could you have a good time with the profits from that? There is more in the K-12 general fund in the U.S. than at the DOD. K-12 is over $700 billion and DOD is about $642 billion. Think about it as they do “New Profit Centers.”
And to think, schools in Ohio are waiting to find out their punishment, for not including the obvious failure of students who never or almost never attended school, not even on test or make-up test days. That is the question no one in Ohio is asking: Why are schools being held accountable for the scores of students who never show up? Isn’t that like blaming a dentist for the cavities of patients who never come in for check-ups?
Maybe John would like to do a story on the teachers in Ohio who may or may not have cheated on a state test, (the state couldn’t prove it), but whose names are on the same online database as rapists. There was a time (2005-2009) when some administrators in Ohio considered it a feather in their cap to have ‘caught’ a teacher cheating, therefore, the false list. Some teachers are on the list, not for cheating, but for “Having poor judgment”. Really? Give me a break.
This is a stunning scandal. I was bothered by Rhee from the beginning, but this shows it was all a house of cards. In defense of Merrow, some of this stuff only really came out very close to airdate. He seems like a dog with a bone at this point. I weep for the kids, the real victims of this scam.
This is Pulitzer Prize material, and SOMEONE out there is going to be brave enough to do this story (someone independent, healthy, w/no family to support and lots of chutzpah). Have faith–it WILL happen.