This article asks the obvious question:
Why does Atlanta’s disgraced superintendent Beverly Hall face serious jail time for the cheating that happened on her watch–which she ignored or encouraged by demanding higher test scores–while Michelle Rhee continues to fly from state to state, urging legislatures to follow the DC model?
The article says that Rhee emerged–so far–unscathed because she has friends in high places.
As for the DC model, let us not forget that John Merrow documented that the DC schools are in worse shape now than they were in 2007:
He wrote to the Education Writers Association, introducing his post about the leaked memo:
“I am also reporting that, after five years of Rhee/Henderson, the DC schools are worse off by almost every conceivable measure: graduation rates, truancy, enrollment, test scores, black-white gap and teacher and principal turnover.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And it provides the answer: Rhee, like the banks in the US, is too big to fail… that is, her future and the future of the President are inextricably linked… IF SHE fails, the whole theory of data driven decisions based on standardized tests is called to question… if the banks fail, the whole notion of America’s creditworthiness fails…
Wgersen, agreed. Rhee is the face of Ed reform. If she fails, the whole charade is unmasked
well said!https://gravatar.com/site/signup/
One is a keynGOP edreform scammer; the other is a convenient scapegoat used to bash public education.
Follow the money.
Or as the old Steve Miller song goes, “Go on, take the money and run…..”
several parts of the piece jump off the page at me:
<blockquote.Jenny Abramson, one of Rhee's StudentsFirst transition team, worked for the Washington Post before and after her stint with Rhee. And a spokesperson for the chancellor's office noted that they were in daily contact with the Post during Rhee's tenure.
It is a THOROUGH review of the interconnections. I would be busy blogging it were I not occupied with other things, including a piece going live in about an hour on a subject of great importance.
sorry for formatting problems. Did not properly close first block quote.
Is it not up to the public to demand that justice is served?
I sent an email to Arne asking for an investigation…here is the response from the USDOE…catch the title and they have an entire unit for this? Sounds like a damage control unit. What a waste of money.
Thank you for your e-mail to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. We appreciate hearing from you.
Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate office for review and further handling.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Sincerely,
Edgar Mayes
Director of Correspondence and
Communications Control Unit
Office of the Secretary
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202
Racism and cronyism as regards Rhee’s free pass on cheating. All the damage done our nation from the mortgage crisis with greedy banks cheating the American people and all we can do is arrest a teacher. Sick.
These two ladies blogged on this issue a year ago.
March 22, 2012
D.C. Cheating Scandal: A Conspiracy of Silence
By M. Catharine Evans and Ann Kane
It took nine years for rumors of cheating on test scores by school personnel in Atlanta to percolate and trigger a devastating nine-month investigation by their governor. Will it take nine or more years for D.C. schoolchildren to get the same kind of justice?
Investigators in Atlanta reported ‘”a culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence” had existed during Superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall’s reign. It took 60 agents with subpoena power to break through Hall’s firewall and eventually determine that 178 teachers and principals of 44 schools cheated on the 2009 test “either by giving inappropriate help to students or altering answer sheets.”‘
Presently, teachers and others implicated in the illegal activity are under “a criminal investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard. Howard is looking into felony indictments against the educators for altering state documents, lying to investigators and stealing government funds.” Though Hall was “not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena[,]” she still ended up losing her position and has become a pariah in the education community.
Educators reaping financial rewards — i.e., increased teacher pay based on test scores — by altering test answers can’t be good for the students. Yet tying teacher pay to achievement data can have the same effect as that of asking a cat to ignore that mouse in the corner. The temptation to go after the mouse will be too strong.
In comparison, the D.C. cheating probe has three separate agencies “investigating” its questionable test scoring during the reign of Chancellor Michelle Rhee from 2008-2010, but the effort on the part of officials is nothing like Atlanta.
No 800-page reports (see Atlanta’s) have been issued by anyone in D.C. involved in the case, even after the D.C. inspector general, the Department of Education’s inspector general, and now the consulting firm of Alvarez and Marsal have all gotten in on the act.
The Team
As a change agent extraordinaire, Rhee rode into D.C. in 2007 promising to earn the trust of the school district through a hard-line emphasis on accountability and personal responsibility. Within months she lowered the boom. Chancellor Rhee, answering only to newly elected mayor Adrian Fenty, fired principals and teachers; closed schools; and implemented a controversial, data-driven teacher evaluation program.
After fifteen months in D.C., the woman who called herself the “decider,” not a “negotiator,” declared, “if there’s one thing I have learned…it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”
To ensure a seamless transition with minimal interference, Rhee’s team included Kaya Henderson, a vice president at the non-profit The New Teachers Project (TNTP), which Rhee founded in 1997. Henderson acted as Rhee’s second-in-command in D.C., then took over after her boss’s resignation in 2010.
University of Chicago grad Jacqueline Greer, who also worked at TNTP, became Rhee’s executive assistant during the transition, while Jenny Abramson, a 30-year-old advertising executive at theWashington Post and friend of fellow Stanford grad Chelsea Clinton, led Rhee’s tight-knit group of “education specialists.” A spokesperson for the chancellor’s office noted that they were in daily contact with the Washington Post during Rhee’s tenure. Abramson returned to the Post during 2010.
Although DCPS is just one of many school systems being investigated for standardized test cheating, Rhee’s superstar status and high profile as CEO of the billion-dollar StudentsFirst non-profit make the stakes much higher if evidence of wrongdoing materializes.
The former D.C. schools chief will have a hard time shifting blame to nonexistent collaborators if investigators find that cheating occurred not only under her watch, but under her successor and protégé Kaya Henderson’s as well.
Just last week, in a separate inquiry, Hosanna Mahaley’s D.C. Office of State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) hired an outside firm, Alvarez and Marsal, to examine 2011 test results in 35 flagged public and public charter classrooms. In a not-so-odd twist of fate, Alvarez and Marsal is the same firm hired by Rhee to conduct a forensic audit of DCPS’s muddled finances back in 2007.
The company’s website describes itself as “a global professional service specializing in turnaround and interim management.” Nowhere does it purport to possess expertise in educational testing anomalies.
OSSE’s hiring of A&M comes on the heels of increased press coverage by both the alternative and mainstream media regarding an ongoing federal investigation of alleged widespread cheating.
The Race Card
Bill Turque of the Washington Post interviewed Henderson in early March 2012 about the investigations. (Henderson, in an April 1, 2011 letter to DCPS staff just days after USA Today published a detailed account of the allegations, requested the D.C. inspector general to look into the matter.) When asked by Turque if either the local IG or Duncan’s DOE IG, who joined the investigation in July 2011, had been in touch with her, a defensive Henderson responded:
BT: Do you see the Ed Department Inspector General’s or the D.C. IG’s tracks? Is there any evidence that they are around, doing an investigation?
KH: I don’t know because there is a firewall. And if I did know, you’d accuse me of, not you but…
BT: They haven’t talked to you?
KH: No one from the IG’s office has contacted me personally.
Henderson then expressed the same sentiment of her predecessor Rhee who had stated in an earlier interview that cheating accusations “were an insult” to hard-working minority children:
Henderson: And the subtext, frankly, is that there are a lot of people who do not believe that kids in DCPS, or in Atlanta, or Baltimore or any other place where they look like me could make significant gains. We’re not putting that on the table as squarely as we’re putting some other stuff on the table. So I just feel like we’ve got to tell the truth and shame the devil, right?
Coincidentally, Beverly Hall’s response to the preliminary investigation in Atlanta echoed Rhee and Henderson, projecting blame onto those who believe that poor, disadvantaged children could not excel in reading and math.
The issue is not a question of whether low income students can learn; the issue is whether the Rhee administration created a culture of cheating.
Unfortunately for Hall in Atlanta, where charges of racism didn’t work, two grand jury subpoenas were issued last September for records dating to the late 1990s, when she had taken over the failing urban district. Will the race card help D.C.?
The Inspectors General and Private Consulting Firms
In July 2011, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Department of Education would join the District’s IG Charles Willoughby to look into the cheating allegations. Willoughby’s spokesperson, Charles Burke, told the Post reporter at the time that he did “not know how long it [DOE] had been playing a role or whether its help had been requested by the District.” A cursory search of the internet pulls up no information on exactly who from the DOE has actually been assigned the case.
Seven months later, things heated up when a February 26, 2012 New York Times article questioned Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s appearance with Michelle Rhee at a January education conference given the DOE’s pending involvement with the case.
When asked by the Times about the apparent conflict of interest, Mr. Duncan’s spokesperson called the columnist “irresponsible … to presume guilt before we have all the facts.”
Richard L. Hyde, who led the Atlanta investigation, disagreed:
I’m shocked that the secretary of education would be fraternizing with someone who could potentially be the target of the investigation.
But the same Times article fails to mention that the DOE’s inspector general, Kathleen Tighe, also heads the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board overseeing Stimulus fund distribution. How can the IG of the DOE be a watchdog over $100 billion in Stimulus funds designated for that same institution? Another conflict of interest to add to the growing list?
The stakes are high for Ms. Rhee, who has secured a place in the national spotlight as an education reformer par excellence. Her relentless pursuit of a data-driven, pay-for-performance educational model led to a rapid rise in test scores over a three-year period. Rhee rewarded schools, principals, and teachers with bonuses in addition to receiving federal and private funds for the improved scores.
It wasn’t until over half of D.C. schools were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of wrong-to-right erasure rates that an outside firm — Caveon Consulting Services LLC, a test security firm — was called in to investigate in 2009.
Caveon, the same firm hired by disgraced Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall, “did not find any evidence of cheating at any of the schools.” The president of Caveon admitted later that the investigations were limited but that the company did what it was asked to do by D.C. officials.
In 2011, Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal investigators criticized Caveon in the 800-page report, noting that “many schools for which there was strong statistical evidence of cheating were not flagged by Caveon.”
With three ongoing investigations, Michelle Rhee’s troubles are far from behind her. After the USA Today published its extensive report in March 2011, over 3,700 parents and teachers petitioned the Department of Education and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct an in-depth analysis of the test scores from 2008 through 2010. They also requested that Rhee and others be questioned under oath about their possible involvement in the high number of wrong-to-right erasures.
The petition presumably led to the DOE’s July 2011 announcement of their intention to join the probe ensuring a thorough and comprehensive investigation. Secretary Duncan, who said he was “stunned” by the widespread cheating uncovered in Atlanta last summer, also suggested that this “was not an isolated individual or two, this was clearly systemic, this was clearly a part of the culture in Atlanta. That simply can’t happen, that is absolutely inexcusable.”
However, Secretary Duncan’s shock over the educational culture of corruption under Beverly Hall has not motivated him to aggressively pursue the truth surrounding the same possible corruption in play under Rhee. When asked recently about the federal probe, Mr. Duncan’s spokesman Justin Hamilton echoed the cover-up language of former Atlanta officials, stating that “our inspector general is investigating the cheating issue in DC public schools and we should let the findings speak for themselves.”
Sitting side by side at the January 19, 2012 Data Quality Campaign conference in D.C., Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan argued that education personnel can use student data, including test scores, to rate teachers. Despite the looming D.C. cheating scandals, both are still on message, pushing the importance of quantifying the progress of individual students. Rhee summed it up at the conference:
The data can be an absolute game changer[.] … If you have the data, and you can invest and engage children and their families in this data, it can change a culture quickly.
The desire to change a culture quickly and deliberately is the personality type of a dictator, and unless taxpayers want an education system with a top-down “do as I tell you” approach, there’s no place in our children’s classrooms for this kind of leader.
According to a 2009 Atlantic profile, Rhee’s fanatical devotion to numbers began early on when she was a Teach for America recruit:
What makes a good teacher? And how do you recognize one? For Rhee and her fellow reformers, the answer is data. Lots of data. There may be many unquantifiables in teacher quality, but most of the traits that matter to reformers can be put into numbers.
It’s an attitude born of Rhee’s experience in Teach for America…”TFA is a machine,” says Jennifer Kirmes, who taught for the program in Washington and now works in its Chicago office. “Everything is done with data and analysis.”
Rhee’s promise of transparency, accountability, and merit-based compensation in 2007 rings hollow as she continues to elude the press when it comes to speaking about her area of expertise — test data as it relates to teacher performance and subsequent charges of cheating under her watch.
Friends in High Places
A year after the USA Today exposé, Rhee, the media darling, is still riding high. Appearing on cable news shows, PBS, and network television; crisscrossing the country, speaking to varied audiences; pushing legislation; and heading up StudentsFirst, the advocacy group she founded, Rhee appears unstoppable. If her public image remains mostly untarnished, it may be due to nothing less than friends like Arne Duncan and former White House operatives.
In late summer 2011, after a USA Today reporter made a number of attempts to get Ms. Rhee on the record about the cheating scandal, Rhee’s StudentsFirst PR representative, SKDKnickerbocker’s Anita Dunn (also President Obama’s former communications director), advised the D.C. chancellor’s office to “just stop answering his [Jack Gillum’s] e-mails.”
Hari Sevugan, Rhee’s VP of Communications at StudentsFirst, served as former national press secretary for the DNC and before that worked as senior spokesman for President Obama’s 2008 campaign. Along with Dunn, he covered for Rhee, saying reporters “were provided unprecedented time and access to report their story.” Answering for D.C. officials last fall, Sevugan suggested that they were running out of patience with reporters’ attempts to get a statement from Rhee.
And the public is running out of patience with Arne, Michelle, Kaya and others…
Watch and see who goes down with this DC debacle. Arne will keep playing hoops with the President, Michelle will keep Oprah enthralled, and Kaya will do jail time. If it wasn’t so cliched, racist and quintessentially American, it would be funny.
I find it quite interesting that no mention was made in the article of Merrow’s exceptional work on the topic. The glaring omission raises questions about the goal of the piece. All the fingers permitted to remain point at the Obama administration, certainly not guiltless in all this, and the connections to Obama are deeper than I realized but are par for the course in the revolving door of federal DC politics. Reading the comments one finds that readers of the American Thinker really aren’t good thinkers at all, having little grasp of the facts of the case itself. Somehow, Rhee becomes a liberal union supporter, an extreme makeover if ever there was one. The cheating is willfully misunderstood as simple greed and laziness, the narrative used to attack the teachers in Atlanta, defending the reformers agenda by trying to keep it hidden in plain sight. In the end though, the article was useful in describing the echo chamber of reform that Obama is operating in.
When something similar happened before (with the White House involved) the press and the justice system came to our aid. Let’s hope those institutions are working for the people this time.
After revisiting the American Thinker site, it’s blatantly obvious that no one there has a clue as to what’s actually going on in this country. They’re hung up on communists and progressives and their takeover of America, even though they have no clue as to what communism etc is. The entire site is one big political screed devoid of any fact that gets close to refuting things cherry picked to buttress the tin foil hat fantasies fear mongering about a straw man made real. It is good for a laugh and to understand just how detached from reality some can become.
Forgot to conclude with the observation that they truly believe that Rhee is a progressive democrat socialist who likes to hob knob with the clueless on the right to further the governments takeover of education. LOL
Nice catch CitizensArrest.
I wondered as well why Diane cited this article in the American Thinker. As you point out, when you read the comments, there are not many “thinkers” represented. But I suppose that’s to be expected because the American Thinker showcases some really conservative –– and often bizarre –– writers and points of view. M. Catherine Evans and Ann Kane are prime examples.
I welcome their criticism of Michelle Rhee, but Evans and Kane write that “Barack Obama, Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp were spearheading the takeover of America’s public and private schools and transforming them into a centralized structure for the sole purpose of serving the government.” Say what?
Despite the hedge-fund and Wall Street cash that flows to Rhee and Kopp and their organizations, and despite their endorsements of charters and vouchers, Evans and Kane write that “charters and vouchers as solutions to bad schools and bad teachers—is a red herring.” School reform is really a giant Leftist, Marxist, Communist plot….you know sort of like fluoride. These ladies have issues….lots of them….serious ones.
You can get a taste of their nuttiness by examining what they write:
http://www.potterwilliamsreport.com/tags/263/michelle-rhee.aspx
They’re tied tangentially to the real world, but are more grounded in right-wing conservative ideology with gravity boots made of conspiracy theory.
To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, accountability is for the little people. Circle the wagons!
No! I refuse to give up on this story–people have been brought down before, and for much less than what this woman has done. We will find a way…
I’m with you.
There is only one simple thing left to comment on:
The fact that Rhee has not been properly investigated by the right authorities is probably among the top 5 scandals of the last 10 years in the United States. The president (I refuse to capitalize that title) and arne duncan (won’t capitalize his name either) should be ashamed. They are accomplices all the way.
All of them are guilty of crimes against children’s humanity.
Um, because Dr. Hall is black?
Here’s what I just sent to my delegation:
“I do not believe the USDOE has done a thorough investigation of testing improprieties that took place n the DC public schools during Dr. Rhee’s superintendency. Michelle Rhee has, consequently, misrepresented the results of her leadership while undercutting the diligent efforts made by teachers across the country. I am not at all confident that Arne Duncan WANTS to get to the bottom of this and am afraid that there is no “Sonny Perdue” in Washington DC who will look into this whole debacle. I am sending this message to all NH legislators and have already written to Bernie Sanders who is on the Education Sub-Committee in the Senate. The entire high stakes testing regimen is undercutting quality public education and needs to be stopped.”
It took maybe five minutes… My delegates are not on the education committees… it might be good for you to write a generic letter that your followers can paste into a message to send to their Senators and congresspersons… It would be especially good to get it to legislators who are on committees who oversee either education or DC… Just a thought…
See below. I sent a request directly to Arne And I got this generic response. Check out the title and department. They have a UNIT just for spin or “communication”. Why doesn’t his great work speak for itself?
Thank you for your e-mail to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. We appreciate hearing from you.
Your message has been forwarded to the appropriate office for review and further handling.
Thank you again for contacting us.
Sincerely,
Edgar Mayes
Director of Correspondence and
Communications Control Unit
Office of the Secretary
U.S. Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202
You would think that Rep. Darrell Issa and others on the congressional DC committee would be all over this. You would think. Sadly, that’s not the case.
I tried looking up his address in Arlington, VA. (Nothing like send mail directly or hand-delivering it.) Unlike some jurisdiction’s real estate database, you need to know the address. Good old VA.
actually that is not true. It is just that you cannot get there through the real estate assessments data base. It is possible through the Clerk of the Court system, but as I recall when we set up the system some individuals were allowed to keep from the online index their residences as a matter of security – I know that is true in Fairfax County. But the information is available as a matter of record in the office of Clerk of the Circuit Court – that is, if the property is owned directly in his name. It may not be.
I did the original design of the CLerk of the COurt system some 20+ years ago, and Real Estate Assessments was another county agency for whose computer work I had responsibility in my capacity as a supervisory systems analyst. In the interim everything has been migrated off mainframes, and thus here are some design differences.
Arne has a public email account at Dept of Ed, but a staffer reads it and responds on his behalf. But usually things do get to him.
Thanks for the response and heads up. Much appreciated.
I know. I got a generic reply from Ed somebody from the Communications Control Unit…get that….they have an entire UNIT to control communications. Sounds like the ministry of misinformation or the masters of spin. What a joke.