Michelle Rhee argues that the PISA scores prove that America is failing its kids. She believes that the way to get higher test scores for all is higher standards, more tests, more rigor. She also promotes charters, vouchers, merit pay, and evaluation of teachers based on student test scores.
Rhee has a close personal association with the Common Core standards. David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was the treasurer of the original StudentsFirst board; other members included Jason Zimba, who wrote the Common Core math standards. The only other member of Rhee’s board worked for Coleman’s organization, Student Achievement Partners.
Rhee’s StudentsFirstNY group packed meetings in New York City to endorse Common Core testing and support the Regents’ agenda of rapid implementation of Common Core.
Only Common Core, Rhee argues, can lift our students’ performance on international tests.
Apparently she never read Tom Loveless’s article in which he demonstrated that the biggest test score differences are within states, not between states. Loveless concluded that Common Core would have little or no impact on student achievement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s a shame she cannot find two other people to insulate her from you in a debate.
Nothing like bravery from a distance….
Rhee has learned how to LIE very well.
People that go through life with rose-colored glasses and ear muffs see what they want and hear what they want.
Yes, assuming the lack of a standards is an important factor in academic performance. And since the common core is all about critical thinking, an assumption is not a given, so proceeding on a wrong assumption would be a fool’s errand, as surely they must know.
According to the PISA website, 6,111 fifteen year olds from 161 high schools somewhere in the US participated in the PISA survey. Given that the survey was administered to 510,000 students in many countries, the US sample represents 1% of the participants. 510,000 students out of an estimated 28,000,000 fifteen year olds across the globe (again, from their site) is less than 2% of the total population. It is dangerous to generalize from a small sample to a large sample. It is wrong to say US students stagnate on the PISA. All that could be accurately said is that this relatively small sample of US students performed about as well as a relatively small sample of US students three years ago. Even if the sample is an exact replication of our sociological profile, it is not compelling evidence that all US students are not achieving as well as their counterparts across the globe.
Rhee is a four-letter word. And she evidently has not read Diane’s last two books.
Dr. Ravitch,
Does she ever respond to your comments and positions in speeches or interviews?
I figure at this point she is just perpetuating her own fame. And she doesn’t have another script. Yet. She knows her script won’t hold up to Diane, so she’s not going to show up for that.
I wonder. . .is a new script in the works? Because Rhee jumped the shark long ago.
I love it! “Rhee is a four letter word”
What is with that woman? She is unattractive, just plain mean, has an inflated sense of self, is narcissistic, and fits perfectly with David Colemanish philosophy of not giving a sh@@ what people think.
Do we want clones of her? Because that is where we are headed. I wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley- yikes!
I wouldn’t believe anything out of Michelle Rhee’s mouth, including “Hello, my name is Michelle Rhee”. Apparently the moneymen and women behind her continue to give her some measure of clout.
Her arguments are so tired and hashed out I can’t even look at them anymore.But for the hell of it, let’s play the parsing game.
“The rankings, compiled by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, ought to be a wakeup call. The United States made no improvement from previous years, while other countries leapfrogged us by dramatically improving their students’ proficiency levels.
We simply can’t afford to remain stagnant. American children are just as capable as those around the world, and every child regardless of color or class is capable of achieving at high levels.”
Assumptions: Test scores are correlated with successful nations. Test scores accurately reflect skills. Tests compared comparable populations. Bad performance necessitatese immediate change. People who say otherwise are classist/racist.
“Inside those PISA results was another sobering reminder of our need to set high standards for the set of skills and knowledge we aim to teach our kids.”
Assumptions: PISA results can be improved by high standards. High standards will increase overall performance. We were unaware of student performance and the truth this gives us allows us to move forward where we couldn’t without this knowledge. High standards will make students perform tasks that they aren’t now.
“Even in Massachusetts there remains an unacceptably wide achievement gap between white students and children of color.”
Assumptions: This gap is acceptable to someone somewhere – probably the teachers unions.
“A student in Wyoming might have done all of her homework and even earned straight As in math but could transfer to a school in Georgia and find herself a year behind her peers in terms of what she’s expected to know. Worse still, she might graduate high school and enroll in college unprepared for the demanding coursework. The result is that too many of our children are not being adequately prepared to compete in an increasingly global economy.”
Assumptions: That student needs to know exactly the same knowledge that student in Georgia needs to know. Her school could be lying to her and let her not be CCR. This lack of CCR as assessed by test scores, will not make them a good candidate for employment. The solution to globalization is global competition for particular skills – nothing to do with wages or poverty.
“That’s why, contrary to the wild claims of the critics, so many states have voluntarily adopted the Common Core standards. In fact, it was at the state level—led by governors and chief state school officers—where the standards were developed. They were thoughtfully put together over several years — not by the federal government, but by a nationwide coalition of expert teachers, parents and community leaders. What’s more, states have the ability to tweak the standards to better fit their students’ unique needs. That’s a bottom-up approach that’s best for kids.”
Assumptions: Standards are what was lacking in many places. Rhee is actually telling the truth.
Lies: Voluntarily in this equation means coerced by money (RttT) and failing that, NCLB waivers with an option for a common curriculum of which the Common Core was the only choice.
The standards were developed and led by governors – lies – they were put together by Coleman and company, and the governors adopted them under coercion with no proof that what they were being sold worked. And several years apparently amounts to 1-2 in this equation since while they were put together starting several years ago, there wasn’t a significant comment period nor way for them to be meaningful altered from outside the Common Core groups and governors did not have a choice in changing them.
The changes Rhee refers to are a paltry amount – about 15% – whatever that means – otherwise they’d cease being common. Plus states can adapt more, but it seems that they can’t choose less – so tweaking is making them more onerous.
“Rank-and-file educators agree”
Assumption: A study about the ability of standards to improve instruction in critical thinking should not be extended to the package of testing that the CCSS is tied to by the federal government’s NCLB waiver and RttT requirements.
“Our teachers are among the best in the world and deserve both our confidence and a public education system that allows them to excel rather than ties their hands.”
Assumptions: Except those who aren’t so excellent. Bad standards were holding teachers back from being truly excellent. Nothing to do with resources, time, collegiality, those types of things.
“Tennessee and Washington, D.C., for example, were among the earliest adopters of Common Core, and they followed through with heavy investments in materials and training to help teachers and students prepare for the more rigorous standards. How are they doing? The 2013 Nation’s Report Card, published last month, showed D.C. and Tennessee making historic gains in student achievement.”
Assumptions: Achivements are attributable to the CCSS. Amazing how those students who have had all a few years of instruction are suddenly miraculously doing better – see those achievement gaps close overnight? The nation’s report card is unbiased and without political measurements built in.
“Properly implementing Common Core is how state officials and lobbying organizations such as the national teacher unions can now show their support for our kids. Raising expectations and delivering better results is never going to be easy.”]
Assumptions: There is still a lack of political will to adhere to the Common Core. Apparently NY has not held the CCSS in enough fidelity otherwise it would be farther. Don’t listen to anyone who says anything against the CCSS – they must be wrong – look at DC and Tennessee!
“To retreat from the implementation of Common Core standards would be to accept mediocrity from our public schools and inequity among our children based on nothing more than the ZIP code in which they live. In this intensely competitive world, that’s just not acceptable.”
Assumptions: Those who say anything against the CCSS must believe zip code is destiny and that there is no other way. The CCSS is the best and only solution. The CCSS will erase inequity. That anyone who suggests retreat wants to embrace mediocrity and inequality and nothing to do with them being developmentally appropriate, or that they exacerbate racial divisions.
Nice dissection.
Love it!
M: Very well said.
“Properly implementing Common Core is how state officials and lobbying organizations such as the national teacher unions can now show their support for our kids. Raising expectations and delivering better results is never going to be easy.”
So incredibly dishonest.
Just to be clear, Rhee is a lobbyist. She lobbies state legislatures and the federal government for a very specific and narrow set of policies and funding. She’s also self-interested. Lobbying is her career.
There’s no specifics in the piece about Common Core. I don’t think 1% of parents in this state have any idea what ed reformers have in store for them. I don’t know if the lack of information is deliberate, but even if it isn’t, it is INCREDIBLY arrogant. They are bringing this into every public school district in the country and there has been ZERO debate on it.
Notice something else: they’re already dodging accountability. If this thing fails, the people at the lowest levels will be blamed. She launches the preemptive finger-pointing in this screed.
Rhee and the rest of the lobbyists will skate completely. They will blame 1. teachers unions, 2. parents, and 3. local officials. They’re already setting up the excuses.
“Apparently she never read Tom Loveless’s article in which he demonstrated that the biggest test score differences are within states, not between states. Loveless concluded that Common Core would have little or no impact on student achievement.”
I don’t think Rhee reads anything that might cause her cognitive dissonance.
Michael Paul Goldenberg: studied ignorance and a self-serving carelessness with facts and logic characterize the leading charterites/privatizers.
For example, the only thing she understands about what “confronting inconvenient facts” means is—that it’s what she instinctively dreads would have occurred on Feb. 6 at Lehigh University if she had allowed herself to be on the same stage with Diane Ravitch in an open, wide-ranging and revealing discussion.
Being an educoward is the flip side of being an edubully.
Michelle “Masking Tape On Small Children” Rhee. “Dr. Steve “Strap Up Head Injuries” Perry. LAUSD Superintendent John “Fire Patrena Shankling For Doing Her Job” Deasy.
And ever notice how proudly they strut and how loudly they bray?
“Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.” [Jean Jacques Rousseau]
😎
Michelle Rhee wants you to know if Common Core fails it’s because someone else didn’t implement it properly.
LOL. “Accountability”. There’s NONE at the top among ed reform lobbyists.
Whatever they’re teaching at the Broad Institute or TFA, it isn’t “management” or “leadership”.
After ten years of NCLB–of standards-and-testing deform,
we are a couple of weeks away from 2014–the year when that magic was going to make all our children proficient and leave no child behind,
but take Ms. Rhee at her word for a moment (I know, that’s difficult, but humor me).
If Ms. Rhee is right, then ten years of standards-and-testing deform has left us in this horrific place where our schools are utterly failing, and so we should do a lot more of what failed so completely.
Now that’s one interesting piece of “reasoning.”
Who are ‘children of color’?
I’ll make a bold prediction.
When the (preordained) terrible CC test scores come back we will need an immediate infusion of….blended learning!
It will be an emergency! Change will be hard! The one and only way to excellence will be IPads and classes of 100 students plunked down in front of screens and really expensive individualized programs developed and marketed by Pearson/Microsoft.
But only in middle class and working class districts.
Educational feed lots of the future.
sadly accurate
The deforms are turning our schools into Confined Animal Feeding Operations–just pour that bullet list of standards down the kids.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
Michelle should become a teacher in DC Public Schools and show everyone how its done !
I’ll make another bold prediction – when education becomes for-profit then at first it will degrade to the level of Crunchhem Hall Academy run by Ms Trunchbull with her famous Chokey, a small closet in Trunchbull’s office studded with nails on the inside, forcing its inhabitant to stand poker-straight. A similar situation is already happening in KIPP charter schools. The second stage is Work House of Oliver Twist :”Orphaned almost from his first breath by his mother’s death in childbirth and his father’s unexplained absence, Oliver is meagerly provided for under the terms of the Poor Law, and spends the first nine years of his life at a baby farm in the ‘care’ of a woman named Mrs. Mann. Oliver is brought up with little food and few comforts. Around the time of Oliver’s ninth birthday, Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, removes Oliver from the baby farm and puts him to work picking oakum at the main workhouse. Oliver, who toils with very little food, remains in the workhouse for six months. One day, the desperately hungry boys decide to draw lots; the loser must ask for another portion of gruel. The task falls to Oliver, who at the next meal tremblingly comes up forward, bowl in hand, and makes his famous request: “Please, sir, I want some more”. A great uproar ensues. The board of well-fed gentlemen who administer the workhouse hypocritically offer five pounds to any person wishing to take on the boy as an apprentice.”
This Work House might be run by any corporation, may be called as an “internship program” by Microsoft – of course at first they will study kids requirement – like how much gruel they can live on. But God forbid showing any compassion to kids – this is a no excuses place : ”
Hungry Boy: Can’t sleep. Too hungry.
Workhouse Boy: We’re all hungry.
Hungry Boy: Yeah, but I’m scared.
Workhouse Boy: Scared? Of What?
Hungry Boy:
I’m so hungry I’m scared I might eat the boy that sleeps next to me.
Mrs. Sowerberry: Is the boy mad?
Mr. Bumble: Tis not madness, Ma’am, it’s meat
Mrs. Sowerberry: Meat?
Mr. Bumble: Meat, ma’am, meat! If you kept the boy on gruel this would have never have happened.
Mrs. Sowerberry: Oh my, this is what comes of being liberal. ”
And so forth. This is what happened in England when only profit was important as far as kids were concerned. Writers exposed this crime of treating children as no more than “input into workforce”. But the evil tradition still survives and those self-proclaimed surgeons of social justice and cannibals of human souls are now prospering again, coming out of England – Pearson and the rest of UK edumafia. They survived despite the great authors exposing the issue over and over again…
But again when we have “workforce input kids” then we must have a Work House, because this is where this input belongs, and so we just cannot escape…
My favorite analogy of the day. Thanks-
A few years back, didn’t Gingrich make some dumbass comments about how their should be no minimum age to employ children—or that we should lower the current minimum age (15 years-old, depending on the state), and also that we should not have any limits on the number of hours that workers under 18 should be able to be employed? The current limit is something like 10 hours/week or 20 hours/week, depending on the state. (Gee, if they worked as much as Newt wanted, when would they have time to do their homework?)
He also said that kids could be employed as school maintenance and janitors—replacing the adults currently doing those jobs—because it would teach those kids the value of hard work, and school officials could also save money as they wouldn’t have to pay those adult janitors/maintenance workers such large salaries and benefits (healthcare, retirement, etc.).
Sheesh!
And if that doesn’t work, we can start eating the children. Then the statistics for graduation rates would rise.
wonderfully said!
It’s actually Rhee and her cohorts who are failing our children. We need a strong public education system for all–student teachers who are trained well at the college level or not allowed to teach, a diverse curriculum that exposes children to the world and history and civics and the arts and facts and thinking skills. We don’t need unaccountable charters that have decided on a particular agenda and that only allows some of our kids to be educated with teachers who are doing two-year stints before going to Wall Street. Teaching is a very difficult job: it needs instinct, compassion, discipline, and excellent training. Most charter school teachers have not been trained that way and their administrators are more dollar oriented than child-oriented.
I dare Rhee to go back into an urban title one classroom for 3 years and live by her own “policies”! Let us see what test scores she gets for her students – without cheating that is.
Three years? She wouldn’t last three weeks.
I give her less than three minutes……
Joan, you are being too hard. I predict that she’d last almost a day before running screaming from one of the inner city schools in Buffalo. I’d even let her go to one of the charter schools – the ones that are all poor and minority. Let her have her pick, the result will be the same.
Neal McCluskey, Cato Institute, formerly known as the Charles Koch Foundation admonishes Rhee at the link below:
Michelle Rhee’s Common Core Crud
http://www.cato.org/blog/michelle-rhees-common-core-crud
Rhee’s fingerprints on the Common Core create more controversy about the national Common Core standards and related corporate profits.
Why does anyone believe her anymore, or even give her a voice. She so thoroughly discredited herself with the stunts she pulled in D.C.
Michelle Rhee, please go away. Quit selling yourself out.
All of this is so reminiscent of what happened in NYC during the Giuliani administration.
He was very pro voucher/charter. Completely anti-union. So much so that one year we saw front page headlines on all (and I mean ALL) the major newspapers about how NYC had scored dead last in the state tests. DEAD LAST!!!
Talk about anti teacher sentiment. “Fire them all!” was only one of many barrages fired at us. All areas of the media. It was very, very bad.
A few days later, written somewhere around page 34 or so in the Daily News, was a short blurb (about 3 paragraphs) which explained that we were the only city in the state to include scores from students with severe special needs when averaging our test scores. We had (and still have) quite a few kids who fall in that category. Many of them happened (still happen) to live in severe poverty. Very dangerous neighborhoods. I taught them.
Without those special needs kids in the average (remember: we were the only city to include them), we ranked 3rd (close to 2nd) in the state. A city our size with all of our ethnic diversity was close to the top ranking in the state.
There were no screaming headlines about this small fact. In fact, when I mentioned it to my friends, they expressed surprise that the papers hadn’t given it any coverage.
What was then a city wide phenomenon has now gone national. I have some very choice invectives for the perpetrators of these lies…but my respect for Diane and the need for informed and effective debate and dialogue on this blog prevent me from expressing them. Let’s just say that the “reformers” have been the status quo the past 12 years and there are still two very big similarities between pre reform and now: our test scores are still “lagging behind” (as they always have) and our poverty rate is still soaring.
We’re being lied to. Pure and simple.
All the Big Five did badly. I’m pretty sure Buffalo included their special ed kids – even those with “mental disabilities”. Perhaps not. I was always under the impression that NYC did better than Buffalo. That is why we weren’t allowed to use our large number of ELL students as an excuse for low test scores.
It appears that we are being played at both ends.
How wonderful that Ms. Rhee took time out from her Erase to the Top Tour to enlighten us all about the Pisa scores. The sky is falling, and so we need to do a lot more threatening of kids and teachers and administrators. Ignore the fact that if you correct the scores for the socioeconomic status of the kids taking the tests, U.S. students lead the world.
And memorize this central principle of the deform movement: learning is the mastery of a dull, boring bullet list, and it can only occur under conditions of coercion, of threat and force.
Rhee can also explain to you how to be a most excellent schools chancellor. Simply channel Lewis Carrol’s Red Queen: Stomp about yelling, “Off with their heads,” and practice believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast. For the benefit of all, she provides plentiful examples of impossible things to believe on her StudentsFirst (hilarious, that name) website. So, you don’t have to go to the Achieve website to find your impossible things to believe. She’s done that hard work for you.
Just get out of your head the notions that learning is supposed to be joyful and occurs as the result of internal motivation. Reward and punish. That’s the radical, bee-eater way to Rheephorm brought to you from the alternate Rheeality echo chamber of meritocratic deform.
Education has definitely become a chapter in Alice in Wonderland.
It’s disturbing that the US would want to emulate Shanghai. We have so much to learn from a totalitarian system.