Michelle Rhee is on a national vendetta against teachers. According to an investigation by a special unit of Al Jazeera, Rhee has poured large sums into a campaign to attack unions and teachers in California, using the services of a politically powerful lobbyist in Sacramento.
Since there is no research to support her campaign to destroy unions and to eliminate due process from teachers, her crusade is either an ego trip or payback for her failure to crush the teachers in DC.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here is a thought. I watched The Stream program on AlJezeera America on Sunday. I wonder if there is a way that REAL teachers can be trained for 5 weeks and infiltrate the ranks of TFA and take back schools by STAYING instead of bailing out in 2-3 years????
I don’t know how they can get around that since licensed teachers aren’t allowed into TFA.
It’s misleading to say Rhee or StudentsFirst are funding this. They are funnels for bid money from other sources. Money which has also niches her.
It’s the source of the money that’s the story.
Agreed, it’s the same astro turf organization. In this case it’s mostly Bradley money that funded her front group, $tudents Fir$t. I think Rhee pays herself, from her “non-profit”, several hundred thousands/year, plus speaking gigs and access to oligarchs’ power.
When I heard Rhee speak last year at a LAWAC meeting, where Eli Broad
intorduced her as the best educator in the Nation, and made her seem
as though she walks on water, her presentation was so full of
vindictiveness to teachers, and so wildly self-aggrandizing saying
“never mess with an angry Korean woman” and “I love to fire people”,
she seemed truly crazed…and Eli looked at her, beaming, as his
protege damned the teaching profession, and professional teachers.
I tried to get LAWAC to thereafter invite Diane Ravitch to present
balance to this one-sided Rheeformer, but they refused. Seems as though
Eli Broad and many other privatizers are on their Board.
Didn’t Romney also say he likes to fire people? Birds of a feather…
Rhee (a real four-letter word) simply has a pathological hatred for public schools. Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)
Wow. Why not step back and see that teachers and students often have conflicting interests? I don’t care if she is anti union or not. Is she making choices to hold teachers accountable to their students? If she is then I applaud her and don’t much care if anyone sees her as anti union. Unions have an amazing place in this country. But there are two professions I don’t want unionized: medical doctors and teachers. You don’t get to ruin lives and have your job protected. Screw up and you’re out. Period.
How do you think it should be determined whether a teacher (or a doctor) “screwed up”?
Have you ever met an adult in your life that said to you, “My God Casey, did you realize that my second grade teacher Mrs. Freeman has absolutely ruined my life!”
Everyone has experienced a particularly bad teacher at some point.
Collectively, teachers are infinitely important; individually they can do a lot more good than harm.
I honestly cannot take your post seriously. Teachers are besmirched enough to also go without union representation and protection, so that this treatment would only get worse.
Your idea that teachers and students often have conflicting interests — Sheer Pap Nonsense.
Troll alert.
“Why not step back and see that teachers and students often have conflicting interests?”
You are correct. A teacher may give all she has, working to make this world better, but the students and people like Rhee work against that.
Scapegoating will not solve our educational woes. And that is why I will never support Rhee, nor her organization, nor her recommendations, nor her laughable state metrics, nor her unethical behavior.
Teachers need to be held accountable, but Rhee and her organization have lost their currency in all things reasonable, practicable, and ethical regarding that topic. If you would like to donate to StudentsFirst, go right ahead because you believe in Rhee’s “brand” of education reform. But I get the feeling you are one of those rare people who is already an active member in her organization.
Do you think TFA teachers who tape their chatty students’ moths shut (as Rhee did) should be able to judge which teachers are bad?
If this is indeed the case, where she wants to rank teachers, as opposed to being part of a failed, ideological billionaire experiment, she would have to have a system to rank teachers that is predictive, demonstrable and scientific. None of these things have happened.
Standardized test scores are an incomplete way to measure students, and are counter productive if they crowd out instruction. The ‘metrics’, which seemed to be borrowed from call center sales metrics do not capture reality, with rankings radically changing year-to-year.
Your post might make some sense if in fact that Michelle Rhee’s intent was to improve education. But that is not what her intent was. It was to destroy public schools in order to turn them over to private venture groups.
Michelle Rhee sends one of her daughters to a private school that has very small class sizes, no standardized testing, and experienced teachers. What she advocates with her Teach For America is huge class sizes, standardized testing, and inexperienced teachers who take a 5 week summer program and then enter teaching in schools with the most disadvantaged students in the country. This is a far cry from what she would allow for her own children.
The fact is that Michelle Rhee is doing this purely for the money. She has no real interest in improving education for the children of this country. She has a six figure income, all due to her doing the bidding of people like Eli Broad, Alice Walton, and Bill Gates. Their intent is to destroy public school teachers’ unions, not because unions are bad for education, but because teachers’ unions are bad for the privatization of public schools and slow the ability of hedge fund investors to make huge profits. Get rid of the unions and there will be no one to protect public schools from takeovers.
Michell Rhee will go away as soon as the profiteers stop paying her. If there was no financial benefit to her, she would go elsewhere.
She is not very smart either if she went to one of the Calderons only two days ago. Their whole family may soon be under indictment on mainly bribery charges. It is huge news in California. Sad that only Al Jezeera picked up on this Rhee story of such importance. Where is the LA Times???
Rhee’s husband, mayor of Sacramento (who has had his own problems with the law after being accused of having sex with an minor), is rushing to open more charters above the 23 the two of them already opened.
Where are the people of Sacramento? Why are they not screaming? Someone here yesterday spoke of California voters as lazy thinkers so to speak…and I am afraid that is true…must be the perennial great weather that leads to an easier life than the East Coast with endless winters.
A quick note of disgust: Rhee & Johnson were invited to the State dinner. Sad but true.
What’s the French for “yuck”?
Is there not a prison cell waiting for the likes of Rhee for crimes against humanity?
PLEASE LOOK AT THE LAST ENTRY in the International Criminal Court definition WHERE I PUT A DOUBLE ASTERISK!!!
What are crimes against humanity?
“Crimes against humanity” include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
* murder;
*extermination;
*enslavement;
* deportation or forcible transfer of population;
*imprisonment;
*torture;
*rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
*persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds;
*enforced disappearance of persons;
* the crime of apartheid;
**other inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury. (this last bullet surely fits the crimes Rhee is guilty of committing… the mental injury is life altering for our nation’s title one students)!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe Rhee should share a cell with some of the school to prison pipeline student victims under her horrific DC regime. It is appalling how she is put on a pedestal by the”reformy crowd”. In reading the first part of the definition I completely gave a nod to this part in terms of Rhee and her role…” part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with knowledge of the attack..”
You really have it in for Ms. Rhee, don’t you?
I’d rather subject her to a lifetime sentence of stocking shelves at Walmart, waiting on people at customer service, and never being able to derive any other income other than her sales associate position at the company.
“Oh Ms. Rhee . . . . Please unload this pallet of Kraft macaroni and cheese and Hostess cupcakes and get the tag gun to reduce them 20% now that they’ve been sitting around this fifth year . . . . ”
Why put Rhee in jail (that’s 3 meals a day with lodging, medical care, and cable) when you can keep her alive and well and tortured in cheap retail America with a non-living wage? . . .
Mr. Segal, what WERE you thinking?
Good point Robert Rendo… or maybe Rhee needs to sit in a room and watch videos espousing “ed reform” nonsense that teachers have been forced to endure for way too many years now (for the rest of her days).. in addition maybe she needs to track inane data too. Working at Walmart would be heaven in comparison.
Michelle Rhee is a huckster. She is a self-promoting narcissist and sociopath. If she hadn’t stumbled across TFA and edu”reform” as her meal ticket to celebrity, it could have been reality TV, snake oil, or faith healing in a tent. She is not the almighty Oz of education, but the little dude behind the curtain — pretending to be somebody. We should be calling and treating her as a quack because she is.
She has no where near the empathy and conscience that the “little dude behind the curtain in Oz” had. More like the wicked witch sisters lack of compassion and caring (except for themselves).
Or tech billionaire. She could have run for public office in California like Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorena.
She does not have the brains of either Whitman nor Fiorena.
She is a fraud of a person…a media hype…a cypher.
Maybe not, but her corporate avatar is intact.
“On Feb. 20, lobbyists for StudentsFirst met privately with Thomas Calderon, a well-heeled political consultant. Initially, Ronald Calderon was at the meeting but left at the suggestion of his brother, according to the account provided to Al Jazeera. Thomas Calderon and StudentsFirst representatives did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
The next day, state records show, Ronald Calderon introduced a bill that would have adopted many of the education reforms advanced by Rhee and her nonprofit. Calderon’s legislation sought to increase the frequency of teacher evaluations and would have created a new rating scale to replace the state’s pass-fail system. The bill failed in committee.
State campaign-finance records show that StudentsFirst earlier invested heavily in the campaign of Democrat Ian Calderon, who won a seat in the California Assembly in 2012.
The infusion of campaign cash was vital. Calderon, 28, the youngest member of the Calderon political dynasty, was in a tight primary race against Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez, whose polls showed Calderon trailing.”
This would only be big news if it were a labor union lobbying a lawmaker on education.
Because it’s a saintly and pure ed reformer, it’s not “political” and StudentsFirst isn’t one of those icky “special interests” we’re always hearing about. They’re for the children! So what if they have to occasionally buy a lawmaker! They bought him for the children.
Can we start referring to the “vehemently anti-organized labor” ed reform movement?
Because, really. This is getting silly. They’re all bankrolled by the Walton heirs, the largest low wage employer in the country. Are we to believe they don’t push the agenda of the people who pay the bills?
Chiara, exactly. We have to stop making this about Rhee or even ed reform. It’s about Walton and other money and an ideological agenda.
Rhee is just a pretty smart huckster making a pretty good paycheck doing their bidding. I wonder if she is registered as a lobbyist?
It’s ridiculous. This single unelected individual who doesn’t live in any of these places she parachutes into and has no earthly idea what she’s talking about is lobbying my state legislature constantly. When’s the last time Michelle Rhee set foot in an Ohio public school? She didn’t even attend public schools when she lived here.
“StudentsFirst is active in several states, including Ohio. In fall 2011, Ohio state director for StudentsFirst Chad Aldis said StudentsFirst would lobby Ohio legislators and policymakers on three main issues:
Teacher and principal evaluations in which at least half of the evaluation is based on students’ academic progress,
Performance-based pay, and
A complete prohibition on seniority-based layoffs.
StudentsFirst lobbied in favor of laws on teacher evaluations that made it into the state budget enacted in 2011. And Rhee herself has made several trips to Ohio, including visits to co-host Waiting for Superman screenings with Gov. John Kasich and to speak at Kent State University.”
I think she’s using my 5th grader to push her political agenda. She doesn’t speak for me, and she doesn’t speak for my 11 year old.
Rhee (and StudentsFirst) speak for Walton, Gates, and other money. That makes her worse – her views are for hire.
She just lobbied in SC for a VAM bill in our General Assembly. After she spoke, the committee did not act on the bill. Poor Michelle.
Chiara,
Students Last also operates in MO to the tune of, I believe, six paid lobbyists.
CORE districts in CA are reforming
Social-emotional assessments are coming to judge/evaluate the schools along with academic assessments to be held accountable by the 2015-16 school year. They say social-emotional assessments are hard to measure.
http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Tonight-s-homework-class-playing-well-with-5261093.php#page-1
Some interesting parts of the article are copy-pasted below:
“The eight California districts incorporating social-emotional school won’t make sure every student is taught the skills, but schools will be held accountable for whether kids learned them.
In fact, the districts have promised the federal government they will do that.
The eight jointly received a federal waiver from many of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, including those that require a district to achieve 100 percent student proficiency rates in math and English.
Special status
Instead, the districts, which also include Long Beach, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Sanger, Fresno and Santa Ana, have created their own plan to judge district and school performance – one that includes academic test scores as well as social-emotional assessments.The districts are rolling out social-emotional programs and ways to measure them, with schools to be held accountable by the 2015-16 school year, said Noah Bookman, chief accountability officer for California Office to Reform Education, which is coordinating the eight districts’ efforts.
“When you look at schools that have been moving kids further faster, they are also the schools developing (social-emotional learning),” Bookman said.
Indeed, research shows that social-emotional programs in general improve behavior and academic success. But creating school-based evaluations is new.
Hard to measure
For example, how does one measure, say, whether a child feels a greater level of control over successes and failures, or whether students believe they can be good at math even if they initially struggle?
Teacher feedback, parent and student surveys will likely be in the mix.
The districts will be at the forefront of a national movement to rethink the role of schools in educating students, preparing them to believe in themselves and play well with others in life’s sandbox, Goren said.
“Our argument and the CORE districts have embraced this in order to do well by kids and help them be successful in school and in life,” he said. “It’s a grand experiment by brave and focused educators.”
3 R’s, ABCs and now – SEL
Five categories of social-emotional learning:
Self-awareness: Recognizing one’s emotions and thoughts and their influence on behavior, including assessing one’s strengths and limitations and possessing a well-grounded sense of confidence and optimism.
Self-management: Regulating one’s emotions, including the ability to set and work toward goals, manage stress, and control impulses.
Social awareness: Empathizing with others; understanding social and ethical norms for behavior; and recognizing family, school and community resources and supports.
Relationship skills: Establishing and maintaining healthy and rewarding relationships by communicating clearly, listening actively, cooperating, resisting inappropriate social pressure, negotiating conflict constructively, and seeking and offering help.
Responsible decision making: Making good choices based on consideration of ethical standards, safety concerns, social norms, the realistic evaluation of consequences”
By Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
I used the Second Step program for many years. Its use is mandated by LAUSD, however, the long LA and math and ELD blocks of instruction make it hard to fit in. The lessons are very good, but the kids who need it the most change their behaviors very slowly if at all. The behaviors that need changing are very ingrained and parents are as frustrated as the teachers in their efforts to help their children improve. Of course these disruptive behaviors impact teaching and learning in the classroom with the teacher getting the blame for poor classroom management. Often administrators don’t want these kids referred to the office because they don’t know what to do either and don’t want to be bothered with what they see as a classroom management problem. Frustration all the way around. The kids are probably the most frustrated of all.
In one way it’s tragic that Al Jazeera, a media company funded from the Middle East, is the one to break this story.
What that means is that the traditional news media in the US has been compromised so it doesn’t serve it’s purpose as the fourth arm of democracy that was supposed to keep the wealthy and the government in check.
Then again, Al Jazeera may be one of the few media sources that can’t be bought and if Americans end up keeping their public schools and defeating the Robber Barons and the Wolves of Wall Street. we’ll owe the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network our gratitude for allowing us to hold on to our democracy from being over run by the likes of Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, etc.
At this point she kind of has to be in this extra-offensive mode. She can’t turn back now. (Well, she could, but she probably doesn’t think enough of herself to allow that kind of admission of her humanity).
We are all in this together. There are no heroes and there is no hiding place. I do not envy Michele Rhee one bit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she supports the plaintiffs of Vergara Trial. They might want to invite her to the testimony, but I’m sure there’s gonna be a huge pandomonium.
WIKI on MICHELLE RHEE and TEACHING:
Inspired by a PBS special that she saw when she was a senior in college, Rhee signed up with Teach For America, went through their five-week summer training program, then worked for three years as a teacher in Baltimore, Maryland.She was assigned to Harlem Park Elementary School, one of the lowest-performing schools.She had difficulty controlling her classroom the first year. She said the stress gave her hives. In a speech at the Columbia Heights Education Campus in Washington DC, Rhee said that she once put small pieces of masking tape on the children’s mouths so they would be quiet on the way to the lunchroom and that, after removing the tape, skin came off their lips, they were bleeding and she had “thirty-five kids who were crying”.Rhee told Washingtonian magazine that she was demoralized by her first year of teaching, but said to herself, “I’m not going to let eight-year-old kids run me out of town”. She said she took courses over the summer and received her teachers’ certification, then returned to teach at Harlem Park.Rhee’s first year test scores showed a precipitous drop in her class: Average math percentile dropped from 64% to 17%. Average reading percentile dropped from 37% to 21%.
In her second and third years of teaching, Rhee team taught a combined class of the same students with another teacher.She told The New York Times that those students had national standardized test scores that were initially at the 13th percentile but at the end of two years, the class was at grade level, with some students performing at the 90th percentile. Earlier she had said on her resume that 90 percent of her students had attained scores at the 90th percentile. In 2010, a retired math teacher unearthed test score data on Rhee’s Baltimore school which indicated that her students’ scores went up during the 2nd and 3rd years, but that the percentile gains were less than half what Rhee had stated. In Math her scores went from 22 percentile to 52 percentile, an average increase of 15 percentile annually. In reading, her scores went from 14 percentile to 48 percentile, an average increase of 17 percentile annually. Rhee responded that the discrepancies between the official test scores and the ones she listed on her resume were because her principal at the time had informed her of the gains but those results may not have been the official state tests that were preserved.
Apparently she never once mentioned the real key to her teaching success: “erasures”
Very Interesting.
WIKI on MICHELLE RHEE and her MANAGEMANT STYLE:
Upon taking office, Rhee immediately began to make a series of bold changes that relied on top-down accountability and results from standardized tests. She said there was no time to waste because children were being robbed of their futures. In her first year on the job, Rhee closed 23 schools, fired 36 principals and cut approximately 121 office jobs. Stated reasons for the closings were under-enrollment and excess square footage.
In 2008, she also tried to renegotiate teacher compensation, offering teachers the choice of salaries of up to $140,000 based on what she termed “student achievement” with no tenure rights or earning much smaller pay raises with tenure rights retained. Teachers and the teachers union rejected the proposal, contesting that some form of tenure was necessary to protect against arbitrary, political, or wrongful termination of employment.
In 2010, Rhee and the unions agreed on a new contract that offered 20 percent pay raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for “strong student achievement,” in exchange for weakened teachers’ seniority protections and the end of teacher tenure for one year. Under this new agreement, Rhee fired 241 teachers, the vast majority of whom received poor evaluations, and put 737 additional school employees on notice. Of the dismissed teachers, 76 were dismissed in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act because they lacked proper teaching certification.26 other teachers were dismissed because their students had continually received low scores on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System. Teachers were observed by administrators and outside professionals for five 30-minute sessions during the year, and the teachers’ performance was rated during those sessions.Teachers who received fewer than 175 out of 400 points were deemed ineffective and were dismissed.
Had she been in charge at the time she would have even dismissed herself!
NY Teacher… my absolute favorite line when reading your comment via Wiki is this in referring to Rhee:
“Had she been in charge at the time she would have even dismissed herself!”
I think it would be a fine day if the media, those in education followed her directive right now and DISMISSED EVERY AND ANY comment or policy that this ill-informed, inexperienced, wretch with lack of moral character espouses. She should be ignored until she weathers away. But wait… she is a marionette puppet pulled strings operated by Walton, Broad etc…
Will someone please toss some water at this quack Rhee? It’s way past time for a meltdown.
If Dorothy threw some cold water on Michelle Rhee, she would squeal as she shriveled, “I’M ERASING, I’M ERASING. I’M ERASING!”
lol
Love!
roflmao!
Reblogged this on SD Educators United and commented:
Can we stop this lady?
Have been convinced for years, that this con artist, Rhee is rabidly anti-union because she knows that there is not a union in the world that would have supported her or her husband’s dangerous behavior towards children.
Not to mention her first husband and father of her two children, Huffman, whom she met through TFA where he also trained for 5 weeks. Now he is pressing her message in Kentucky where he is raising their children while she makes millions as a scam artist nationwide.
I wish this blog was more about the needs of students instead of the needs of unions.
And exactly who do you think is there to meet the needs of the students?
A teacher’s working conditions are a students learning conditions.
Their interests are very intertwined and not at all mutually exclusive.
BTW:
Rhee taped her students mouths shut.
Does that count as being about the needs of the students?
Unions are there to alleviate teachers’ anxiety so they can focus on the kids and their work. By the way, unions spend millions each year on training teachers on the latest curriculum techniques and classroom procedures. They help to educate parents with workshops and written materials on how they can help their children at home. They work with parents’ organizations. They, together with administrators’ unions (yes, administrates also have unions) lobby government not just for money for salaries and benefits but for funds for the schools. If they didn’t, the schools would be suffering financially even worse than they are now. I could go on, Bill F., but you probably are not interested.
You apparently don’t read the blog much, because Diane is OFTEN discussing how children are affected by this onslaught of testing, the cutting of art, music and other things and how that hurts students, the removal of play and joy from the school experience, and the inappropriateness of the Common Core, etc.
Bill get busy teaching and helping children. Walk the walk, make a difference. Stop complaining and whining. Goodnight.
What a ridiculous statement. Teachers unions ARE about public education.
Bill, the unions take a LOT of heat on this blog.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
teacher’s union. Propaganda ministry of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4MiniTru). Archaic usage: Organization representing the rights and interests of teachers; teachers’ labor union. See union.
union. Universal scapegoat. See, however, teacher’s union.
Unions are fighting for teachers. And most members representing unions are teachers at public schools. Stop whining? Your comments just echoes typical mindset of autocratic politicians and greedy corporatists.
This is not about Rhee vs teachers unions. It’s about Rhee vs all teachers. I don’t think the majority of teachers are in unions with collective bargaining.
StudentsFirst is pushing hard in SC, as non-union as one can get.
Michelle Rhee has $ 8 million dollars given to StudentsFirst a behest from the Walton Family Foundation made by her husband, Kevin Johnson, the Mayor of Sacramento, CA.
See Editorial Comments article in Feb 12, 2014 Sacramento Bee.
We all know that she is a very rich fraud, she never had any intention of doing anything constructive. A lot of noise, money in her bank account laughing all the way to the bank. Who suffers from people like her the future of America. We are a country being ruined by the elite and she is one of their poster children.
From the Reformish Lexicon:
bee eater. Unqualified but dependably Reformish sociopath in position of authority.
Michelle Rhee does not deserve the attention or funding she receives.
“Many people, including me, are not fans of Michelle Rhee (she was the focus of several protestors). I’ve previously questioned the “D” ratings she’s given Minnesota.
And there is a lot of controversy about her work in Washington DC. One of her strongest critics is John Merrow, who formerly had a regular show on NPR about education, has served as PBS education correspondent and who has won many national awards for his work. Rhee say there had been six investigations about cheating while she was there, but none “found wide-spread cheating.” Merrow calls investigators those investigators “a sham.”
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/joe-nathan/sometimes-surprising-speakers-mn-chamber-commerce-education-conference