In The New Republic, Jeff Guo writes about Michelle Rhee’s brazen attempt to buy the Tennessee legislature. In the last election cycle, she supported hard-right Republicans except for one Democtatic legislator who supports vouchers. This renegade also supported the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which sought to prevent teachers from discussing homosexuality. (Rhee’s StudentsFirst named the author of the “Don’t Say Gay” as its “Reformer of the Year.)
Guo tries hard to understand how a “reformer” parrots the same education agenda as the far right, ALEC, and others who despise public education and unions. He doesn’t get the connection among Rhee and other corporatist organizations like TFA and Stand on Children.
The grand deception: Using progressive rhetoric, even appropriating the language of the civil rights movement, to advance reactionary goals and privatize public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The grand deception: Using progressive rhetoric, even appropriating the language of the civil rights movement, to advance reactionary goals and privatize public education.”
I believe that defines the whole neo-liberal movement: Using progressive rhetoric to get your foot in the door, and then governing non-progressively.
It’s just another way to lie.
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I wish that progressives could see (and conservatives would admit) that this is what Obama did and does. But somehow everything that Obama does is automatically progressive (if not SOCIALIST!!!) just because Obama does it.
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Like when Barbara Byrd-Bennett cites Martin Luther King Jr., while she is recommending the closing of 50 Chicago public schools?
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Carter wanted testing and did not want teachers heavily involved in decision-making even before the DOE was officially set in place (I typed quotes from him from his White House Diary and then lost them and don’t feel like retyping them, but they are on pgs 45 and 145. )
Ok, so the mixed bag of good and bad from teachers’ perspectives has been part of the national education concept since that time. (This was interesting to me–that these notions are not new).
Second, LaBerry represents a group of minorities (presumably) who see gay rights, apparently, as a moral issue and so they get caught in this quagmire of equal Ed opportunities for all, but then have to find a way to make isolation possible in the midst of that. Yet if charters had been proposed during racial integration, everyone knows the lines would have been drawn to isolate based on race and so the notion would have never flown (or would it have? Some old southerners looked at race as a morality issue too, for whatever reason). Knowing that testing and keeping teachers’ opinions out of the conversation were ideas back in 1977, did charters come up then too? And is the reason they are less taboo now (if they were conceived of then) that we are post-racial (even though many places and many people point towards us not being post-racial?)
I think Michelle Rhee just wants to promote Michelle Ray.
Who are the heroes of “reformers” pre-Gates, Bush et al? Can they go back earlier in history to make a case for charters and vouchers?
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Rhee. Not Ray.
She wants to promote herself.
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Correction:DeBerry–
not typing well today
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And I still hope someone will answer two questions for me:
Do TFA recruits take Praxis tests?
What would things look like if NCLB had never passed?
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An alternative to lies spread by the Rheeject and her posse. See excerpt here and full link below:
From School Reform City, Hope—& Caution, interview with Sarah Carr, author of
Hope against Hope: three schools, one city, and the struggle to educate America’s
Children
Excerpt:
In the abstract, there are some benefits to choice, but I just think it’s been so hard to kind of make it a fair playing field where the most vulnerable families have access to the better-performing schools. In practice, it hasn’t played out as it should.
One consequence of New Orleans’ school reform drive you say is overlooked: When the school district laid off 7,500 public school employees right after Hurricane Katrina, it dealt a huge economic blow to the black middle class.
It’s kind of neglected in the whole narrative of school reform, because people are so focused on how we are going to grow by the numbers. There’s not enough attention paid to the broader ways in which school reform can affect a community. I heard somebody say the other day about New Orleans: “Kids are smarter, but the community is weaker.” I think there’s some truth to that. A large part of that is because of the displacement of thousands of black middle class [workers] from the city. Some have come back and are teaching in the schools, but there’s a lot [the fired public school employees] who couldn’t afford to come back, or were so alienated by the firing that they didn’t even try to come back.
Any other drawbacks to the portfolio management approach?
The choice and the portfolio model there have given some families who felt badly served by the old school system access to more structured, stable, ambitious schools, but I feel that it hasn’t reached the most vulnerable yet—kids with severe special needs and the kids who might be coming with more behavioral challenges, or who are coming out of incarceration or alternative schools, or the families who are the most vulnerable and disconnected from the system. The schools have such pressure to meet these test score gains that they don’t have any incentive to enroll them. A lot of these families have a hard time navigating the choice landscape. There’s been too much of this trickle-down approach to school reform, where it starts with the low-income families that are the easiest to reach and connect with and educate, but it hasn’t reached the kids in a lot of cases who need it the most.
One of the things I find interesting about the portfolio approach: If a school isn’t meeting its targets, you have another operator come in and take it over, so there’s constant movement and change in the system. I have some sympathy for people who say that schools that persistently fail kids should be shut down or changed or taken over at some point, but I also feel like there needs to be some degree of stability and connectedness in a system. In New Orleans, that’s been problematic because not only did you have the turmoil of Katrina, but now you have schools that are constantly being reinvented and converted and changed and chartered. I question whether or not kids in schools are going to be able to develop the connections and the relationships they need in the long-term to make continued growth possible.
Yes, there are human casualties to persistently failing schools, but there are also human casualties when kids are bounced around a lot like stocks in a portfolio.
Another argument for portfolio management is that it takes away a big bureaucracy and makes things responsive at the site level, but in New Orleans you see that some of the non-profits that emerge to lead and support the schools can become a mini-bureaucracies in and of themselves. … It’s important that people hold these non-profit school operators’ feet to the fire, just as they might have done with the traditional school district bureaucracy.
One consequence of the decentralization of New Orleans schools was a lack of a citywide discipline policy. Certain charter schools were kicking kids out at a much higher rate than others.
They have [now] tried to standardized the expulsion process, but it’s still so easy for a school operator to covertly push a kid out. And suspensions are all over the map, and they’re self-reported by the schools, so you don’t even know if they’re being honest in terms of their suspension levels. It’s not fair to the kids or to school operators who are trying to do their best to serve all kids, where kids are spending months out of school because of outrageous suspension levels. It also results in a system where you the most challenging, needy kids end up out of school.
One of the students who I wrote about in the book, Brice, was given a 45-day suspension because the school didn’t know what to do with him. He ended up getting more enmeshed in a bad scene and arrested. If he hadn’t spent those 45 days out of school, his story would have been really different.
What future do you see for New Orleans schools?
It’s going to be 90 to 95 percent charter for the foreseeable future. I think they’re trying to deal with some of these problems, like serving kids with special needs fairly, and making sure that students aren’t serving suspensions for 45 days, but in some ways I worry because I feel like a lot of the people who are leading this and making decisions don’t know enough about the realities of poor families’ lives to create the policies and the structures needed to solve the problems.
There’s been all this focus on comparing the schools to the pre-Katrina ones, but I feel like the focus needs to be on comparing the schools to what they need to become. Even though you can’t forget history and the past, you need to stop saying, ‘Well, at least we’re better than the pre-Katrina schools.’
Does New Orleans give a fast-forward look at what other cities might see in the future?
Yes—with the charters, with a portfolio push, with this question of the role of the [teachers] union, and whether or not reform should be driven by a community, or imposed by the outside—those are all issues and tensions that places are grappling with on smaller scales elsewhere.
After Katrina, the proponents of portfolio and charter schools and imposing from the outside were able to do what they wanted much more quickly there, but that’s happening in a smaller way in communities across the country.
What do you hope people take away from your book?
First, I hope that it challenges the more ideological polarized debate about these conversations. And that it humanizes a story that has been recklessly politicized at times. And I hope that it shows how hard it is to reinvent a city in the long-term if the focus is explicitly on the schools. Schools can do a huge amount to turn around people’s lives, but if you have a city with a broken system and where families don’t have access to living wage jobs, and to affordable health care and to housing and safe communities, the schools can’t fix all of that on their own. I hope it prompts people to think about community reform in a more holistic way.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/sarah_carr_hope_against_hope/
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“A lot of families have a hard time navigating the choice landscape.”
Yes. I have wondered about that all along too. Many working patents or single patents will be at a disadvantage when it comes to “shopping for a school.”
I do believe most parents want to know that there is a convenient, safe, and welcoming school for their child/children without having to compare, shop etc.
I feel charter school zeal is often perpetuated simply by a need to stand out or feel important, on the part of the patent. Whereas other parents care more about their children truly BEING important, in the context of a whole where all children are valued. (And that does not mean achievement isn’t honored; it just means humans are valued first). If claims like Rhee’s complaint about our society honoring mediocrity are perpetuated by a welcoming, free school for all children ring true, then you find ways to distinguish excellence within the welcoming context. You don’t knock down the entire institution.
I attended public school K-12. I excelled in academics and felt acknowledged, distinguished and appreciated–and I was not lauded in areas where I did not excel. Likewise I saw the talents of others similarly appreciated. I am sorry Michelle Rhee has never seen that situation. Her particular points are not universals.
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Parents, not patents
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A) Kudos to Diane on the Seussian Rhyme Scheme though it should be for the new Rhee-public (it may be a proper name but I’m still going to abuse those “Re-“es).
B) TFA’ers take no tests. They just have to take a 5 week training – you can see this on their site for pre-reqs and you can see from the training schedule that tests are not one of their components – http://www.teachforamerica.org/why-teach-for-america/how-to-apply/applicant-prerequisites
This is intentional because teaching just requires passionate people and no real skill that can’t be learned in short order. To make TFA’ers take those tests, would be to legitimize them.
Whether your state will require them to take it eventually as part of a larger certification process varies and really depends on what programs your state has for alternative certification and whether tests are integral to all forms.
C) As for NCLB…it’s obviously impossible to predict an alternate future – by sheer definition (and probably also quantum mechanics) whatever choices could have been, were resolved to one path, and we’re on that path now. From my sheer encyclopedic knowledge of dystopian film and time travelling literature, things could have been worse, things could have been better, ultimately we’re stuck in this reality (and hopefully not Rhee-ality).
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I still find it helpful to speculate on what might have been, so that I can understand what driving forces came to pass etc. and why. Did we end up where we wanted to be? Why? Why not?
I like to hear what people think in that regard.
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What you see is nothing more than a planned hostile takeover modeled after a business proxy fight. The business parasites come in to manage and turnaround the “failing” schools, change the metrics of success or the rules to avoid being held to the same standard that allowed them to take over, draw as much money as they can, then leave for their next host. This is identical to what Bain Capital did to make money. It is legal, aided and abetted by our corrupt political parasites, but it is reprehensible.
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Why is Rhee in Tennessee? Because it ends with a double e, so that’s the place she needs to be. Maybe she’ll get a cameo, to fire some teachers on Glee.
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How Michelle Rhee Misled Education Reform
A memoir illustrates what’s wrong with her brand of school reform
Another exposé on the real Rhee:
Some of the specific causes of Rhee’s early career, such as giving principals the right to accept or reject teachers being transferred into their schools, or not requiring that layoffs be made solely on the basis of seniority, are perfectly reasonable. The mystery of the education-reform movement is why it insists on such a narrow and melodramatic frame for the discussion. You’d never know from most education-reform discourse that anybody before the current movement came along ever cared about the quality of public education. (Remember that the reason both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush became president was that, as governors, they successfully established teacher-accountability regimes that were accomplished in ways that got them reelected and established them as plausible national figures. Rhee treats Clinton as someone who doesn’t have the guts to embrace the cause, and doesn’t even mention Bush.) You’d never know that unionization and school quality are consistent in most of the country (including Washington’s affluent Ward 3) and the world. You’d never know that the research results on charter schools are decidedly mixed. You’d never know that empowered and generally anti-union parents’ and employers’ organizations have been around for decades. (Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spellings, was once an official of the Texas Association of School Boards.)
Surely one reason that the education-reform movement comports itself in this strident and limited manner is that it depends so heavily on the largesse of people who are used to getting their way and to whom the movement’s core arguments have a powerful face validity. Only a tiny percentage of American children attend the kind of expensive, non-sectarian private schools where many of the elite send their children. It is worth noting that these schools generally avoid giving their students the standardized achievement tests that state education departments require, making the results public, and paying teachers on the basis of the scores, and that they almost never claim to be creating hyper-competitive, commercial-skills-purveying environments for their students. Sidwell Friends, of presidential-daughter fame, says it offers “a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.” That doesn’t sound like it would cut much ice with Michelle Rhee.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113096/how-michelle-rhee-misled-education-reform
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Wow. Rhee’s husband decided to “punish” public schools by witholding funding?
What’s the ratio of public schools to privatized schools in TN? He’s in a position to harm the vast majority of kids in that state in order to benefit the charters he favors?
Might be time to hold some elected officials accountable in that state. Looks like reformers are completely out of control if they’re “punishing” people by witholding taxpayer money.
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M: may I add another dollop of info, albeit non-rhyming, about the the author of the upcoming THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD: KEEPING IT RHEEAL?
Turns out that Steve Jobs was not the only star in the entrepreneurial firmament who ‘creatively borrowed’ illuminating ideas from others in order to making himself shine ever brighter. Rumor has it that StudentsFirst—on behalf of its founder—has ‘creatively borrowed’ from the late Steve Jobs and patented the phrase “Rheeality Distortion Field.” This is supposed to describe an individual who has the marvelous ability to “make the worse appear the better cause.” For example, “teacher defamation = teacher elevation” and “parent disembowelment = parent empowerment” and “$tudent $ucce$$ [for me!] = student success [for thee!].”
A wondrous magic power indeed!
But as is the case with “the best and the brightest” [to reference David Halberstam] it seems that StudentsFirst didn’t quite place themselves in the 90th percentile on this one. Seems that the phrase was used in The Dialogues of Plato (Apology) when recounting Socrates’ defense against murderous slander:
“I have had many accusers, who accused me of old, and their false charges have continued during many years… But far more dangerous are these, who began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause.”
Reality [not Rheeality] check: those who told “falsehoods” and claimed that Socrates “made the worse appear the better cause” were NOT the good guys!
Could this end up in the same category as that “Reformer of the Year” award they gave—but later rescinded—to a Tennessee legislator?
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/03/student-speaks-out-against-studentsfirst-award-to-anti-gay-legislator/
Come to think of it, perhaps there’s something about the water in Tennessee…
🙂
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