Huffington Post reporter Joy Resmovits notes renewed calls for investigation of cheating under Rhee but then points out that the issue has been thoroughly investigated, at least to the satisfaction of Rhee, Henderson, Duncan, and the Huffington Post.
She notes the latest cheating “audit” by Alvarez & Marsal and even refers to the fiirm as auditors. But A&M is not an auditing firm. It has no experience investigating test security.
A&M is a high priced management consulting agency. It restructures bankrupt companies. It was hired to turnaround the St. Louis public schools. Its CEO took charge; he had previously run the clothing store Brooks Brothers. A&M collected $5 million and left after a year with the schools in worse shape.
The NYC Department of Education gave A&M a no-bid contract for $15.8 million to reorganize NYC school bus routes. Executives were paid $500 an hour plus per Diem. When their new schedule was implemented, it was a disaster, with thousands of kids stranded on the coldest day of the year.
And now DC hires them for “test security.”
Why not bring in the investigators who got to the bottom of the Atlanta mess? Real investigators, not a business restructuring team.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beautifully and truthfully put, Diane.
THIS is EXACTLY what we must form and circulate a petition for. I will try and craft one this evening.
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You only bring in real investigators when you actually want to find real answers. Duncan et al do not want to know the system they created and continue to support and profit does not work. That is unless you equate increased profits with success.
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APS cheating scandal lead attorneys: Mike Bowers, former state Attorney Genera (R)l; Bob Wilson, former DeKalb County District Attorney (D). Both attorneys with respected careers and reputations for thorough fair-mindedness. Their job was to find out what happened and get to the bottom of it. Common Cause honored them with a Democracy Award for their investigation. The key was the goal of the investigation: find out what happened. See also: http://nyti.ms/nL3ZFq
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Thank you so much for the link …. yes, they definitely need to get some good investigators into DCPS and do the due diligence that will rip the total top off the DeFormers ‘magic’ bullet … perhaps restitution for the 600+ teachers whose careers were ruined (+ their lives/families) and the countless students who should be able to get tutors/mentors/education–perhaps with some of the STUDENTS FIRST $$$ ….
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I think we know “why not?” Because the fix is in for Rhee.
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How discouraging, how enlightening! Huffington Post, since she sold her company to a concern I am not aware of, has, by this example, become nothing more than another cryptic site whose motive is nothing more than one, “carrying water” for corporate America. This painful example is all I need to know that her post is nothing more than a sly shill for them, and NOT a site that has creditability. I’m sorry to see, yet another website that claims to present truthful fact find, is promoting such thinly veneer poppycock and deceiving the public in this kind of crass, untruthful sophistry. I think it would be great to start a petition/protest to her and have the thousands of teachers who are either victims of the attack on public education, or are appalled at the fallacious “information” that has only one purpose; to further cloud the vital facts about this insidious campaign that is destroying America’s educational
life.
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Hello, my friend. Long time since we’ve made contact, and what an interesting place to find you. Though, of course, I shouldn’t be surprised 🙂 And your comment represents my exact thoughts, though I could never have said it so well.
I’m finally exhausted of teaching and quitting this year at the ripe age of 52. My heart’s broken… I’ve never had any calling that I was more sure of than teaching, yet my health and family are suffering, and all the corporatizing has left me utterly joyless. It’s insane. We should talk.
Jan C.
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Oh what a treat to hear from you once more! So sorry to hear of you educational nightmare. Mine is the same destruction, and it appears that the rats of education are
winning. Here’s my email address: sweet.pea.6@hotmail.com. I would love to get together and compare notes…it’s been a very disillusioning life for the past four years…
Mary
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I do not comprehend how these supposedly highly educated, intelligent people could have been expecting rapid change. Knowing the CC and the curriculum standards in Ohio, I know that the kind of “success” that was “achieved” should have been looked upon with suspicion, without an investigation. Michelle Rhee should not have “expected” rapid results. The approach makes no sense. One doesn’t “infuse” a system with success by “injecting” standards horizontally into the curricula. A vertical approach takes time. I suppose that in the world of “instant gratification” we are to assume that we “must” turn around every situation by applying principles of “efficiency”. To what end? We are not preparing U.S. students for success.
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Is the Obama administration covering for Rhee?
http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/04/is-president-obama-covering-up-for.html
http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-buck-for-atlanta-cheating-scandal.html
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has anybody sent Diane’s details of the “auditors” to Ms Resmovits? If not, she should have these details. Just another lazy journalist who doesn’t do research.
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I’m a little surprised at Joy Resmovits this time. She usually does a fairly decent job of reporting on education issues. Maybe someone can clue her in.
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Because the people at the top are not educators–they’re business people. Don’t forget, these are the people who think children can be run like a business. It will be interesting to see how high or how low states’ test scores will be this year. I would like to see more “education” reporters who not only know WHAT questions to ask, but HOW to ask them. Like teachers do all the time.
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Education reporters. I just wonder what type of experience they need to be experts to report on it? The best advice I ever received from a teacher regarding writing: write about what you know.
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And who owns the Huffington Post? And what is his agenda? And why do you think he bought the Huffington Post? And then you really have to scratch your head as to why Ariana Huffington would sell to someone like Murdock don’t you? Money more important than the public is all it is. GREED. Now are some of the spinning results of this. They have to protect their darling front person don’t they? What if it blows up in their face? Remember the hacking in England? I know someone caught up in that mess. These are not nice people and will do anything to push their agenda.
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ALL you have to know to understand this educational betrayal of someone who knows better, is Murdock! The betrayal started when Huffington sold out in more ways than one when she gave her readership over to one of the major media malevolent moguls!
She damn sure knew what he was and where his ideology is centered…CORPORATE AMERICA!
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When you don’t really want to know something, you don’t hire people that will tell you the truth of a thing.
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Huffington Post had an extremely disappointing and annoying article (from 2010) on Albert Shanker. The article was titled, “Is Teachers Union Scrubbing Al Shanker’s Legacy?” and was authored by Marcus Baram who did not do his homework, to say the least. He claimed that Shanker was for teacher accountability and merit pay. Baram gave this supposed quote from Shanker as if it were the truth: ” When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” He gives no date, place or source for this quote which is quoted in all the right wing educational blogs as if it were true. And then this clown uses Joel Klein as a reliable source of information about Shanker. Good grief, that is absolutely APPALLING.
Read and weep, if you can stand it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/14/is-teachers-union-scrubbi_n_763029.html
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Dear Joe,
That quote was manufactured. No one has ever been able to identify a source. It seems to have appeared first in a newspaper in Mississippi. I suspect it was a smear.
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Huffington Post reporter Joy Removits is a 2010 graduate of a small, private, selective, expensive, single-sex college in New York that touts its ” small, intimate classes” and its exclusivity (“we are the most sought-after liberal arts college for women in the United States”). So, her real-world experience in public education is more than limited.
In her piece on cheating in the DC schools (which wasn’t terribly good), she makes this stunning error:
“Concerns about inflated test scores and cheating in D.C. first cropped up in 2008 and exploded in 2011, when USA Today published an investigation showing a high number of right-to-wrong erasures on D.C.’s exams.”
Notice that she writes the concerns over cheating popped up due to “a high number of RIGHT-TO-WRONG erasures.” Earth to Joy Removits…it was an extremely high level of WRONG-to-RIGHT erasures in half the DC schools that led to allegations of cheating.
A quick review is in order:
(1) Rhee and Henderson were very reluctant to have any kind of investigation, and
(2) more than half of all D.C. schools had irregular erasure answer patterns on tests, and
(3) USA Today noted that ” the odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance”, and
(4) the initial inquiries that finally took place were quite limited, and
(5) the school system refused to release the names of the schools that were investigated, and
(6) the school system refused to release the investigative reports, and
(7) for a school to be “flagged” for possible cheating a “classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test, meaning that ” a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.”
Then, belatedly, came the Caveon look-see. It was very, very limited. There was no rigor. There was no real analysis. The DC schools “leadership,” as USA Today reported, made sure that it was paying for a white wash.
Henderson said that the Caveon peekaboo “…concluded that there was no evidence of cheating.” Henderson then said that the DC schools were “cleared of wrongdoing.” That was and remains a patently false statement.
Then Henderson hired Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) to perform yet another very limited look-see, telling A & M “to ignore the 2008, 2009 and 2010 erasure results.”
A & M is a company that has no experience or expertise in test security matters. A & M is a company that deals almost exclusively with business, assisting “clients ranging from global enterprises to middle market companies that are both publicly held or privately owned, as well as large and mid-cap private equity firms, corporate management and boards of directors.”
A & M advertises the fact that “When the stakes are high, companies and stakeholders look to A&M to help find the right answer…” Some of its employees describe it as an “entrepreneurial place to work” that delivers “value to clients.” They say it has a “questionable work culture” that is “very aggressive, even cut-throat.”
It appears that Kaya Henderson hired a company that fit well with the culture that she and Michelle Rhee put in place in DC.
It also appears that Henderson got what she paid for. A continued cover up.
Given Joy Removits’ piece in the Huffington Post, it appears that she failed to “develop the kind of critical thinking” her private, selective, expensive college promised.
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Yet the cheating now seems to be a part of the DCPS culture and ethos (ignore the incorrectly titled link – this story deals w/ 2012 cheating at 11 schools):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/memo-could-revive-allegations-of-cheating-in-dc-public-schools/2013/04/12/9ddb2bb6-a35e-11e2-9c03-6952ff305f35_story.html
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