John Merrow says that the celebration of Kaya Henderson’s five years as chancellor of the D.C. public schools is premature.
In a scathing article, he reviews what has happened in the District of Columbia under the nine-year rule of Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson.
Last month Kaya Henderson celebrated her fifth anniversary as Chancellor of the public schools in Washington, DC. Five years at the helm of an urban district is a milestone that few big city superintendents achieve, and she has been praised for hanging in and for calming down the storm created by Michelle Rhee, whose 3+ year reign was marked by numerous controversies, included the massive scandal sometimes called “Erasergate,” when USA Today investigative reporters found that thousands of student answers were changed–and almost always from ‘wrong’ to ‘right.’
The Washington Post, a consistent cheerleader for Henderson and her controversial predecessor, celebrated Henderson’s anniversary with a largely laudatory article that included praise from two members of Washington’s education establishment, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the long time Executive Director of the Great City Schools, Michael Casserly. The latter called Henderson “one of the most effective and popular school leaders any place in the country.” As the Post put it, “Unlike her predecessor, whose turbulent style and top-down approach made enemies of many teachers and politicians, Henderson is credited with taking a more collaborative approach.” That’s another way of saying that Henderson is a “kinder, gentler version of Rhee,” a familiar observation over the years.
But a closer look at what Henderson has achieved reveals that there’s little reason to celebrate.
Looking at the huge score gaps on NAEP and the dismal performance of D.C. students on the Common Core tests (which he calls a “catastrophic failure”), Merrow wonders why the applause for Henderson.
It seems to me that the District’s academic performance–the NAEP gaps, the PAARC scores, the exodus of veteran teachers and principals–are prima facie evidence of the bankruptcy of the Rhee/Henderson ‘test and punish’ approach. Henderson may in fact be a ‘kinder, gentler version’ of Michelle Rhee, but she’s still an acolyte and enthusiast for policies that damage learning opportunities for children….
Nationally, many in education people are waking up to the failures of ‘test and punish,’ and the new ESEA pulls back on testing. Of course we need ways of assessing teachers, but teachers themselves have to be part of the process. Every other country uses tests to assess students, not to play gotcha with teachers.
The approach to ‘education reform’ begun by Michelle Rhee in 2007 and continuing under Kaya Henderson to this day is a failure and a fraud. Washington’s students and teachers deserve better……
I find it reprehensible that both the educators in Georgia went to prison for changing test answers and that for doing the same, the educators in D.C. suffered no repurcussions.
A sign of how corrupt the “reformers” are:
They have lost John Merrow, who is a supporter of reform. But he supports real reform, and not faux “reform” where the primary goal is making profits for charter school CEOs and privatizing education and breaking the teachers’ union so it’s fine to sacrifice the most vulnerable children to those reprehensible goals.
Almost every “reformer” I see posting here is the second kind of reformer. Whether or not a charter school CEO seeks to deceive the public through misleading statements is irrelevant. Whether or not children are abused in charter schools is irrelevant. Whether or not principals at charter schools cheat is irrelevant. Whether or not the statistics they post leave out huge numbers of at-risk kids who are kicked out of charter schools is irrelevant. What they mean by “reform” is to advance their privatization goals and the most vulnerable children are pawns, not the goal. Those children can be thrown out with the trash if they don’t further the privatization goal and the faux reformers’ supporters don’t say a word.
There are a few real reformers like John Merrow willing to speak out — the rabid attacks on him by the likes of Eva Moskowitz and her minions and billionaire supporters are truly frightening and meant to keep everyone else quiet. And, just like many “good” Germans did in Nazi Germany, the reformers who actually are in it to educate kids are far too cowed to speak out about the corruption because it isn’t directed at them and right now they benefit from it. For the moment. When the dishonest is directed at them, it will be too late.
The supporters of the “faux reformers” who still fight oversight and accountability in the privatization movement, and who rabidly attack anyone like John Merrow who points out the corruption are playing a dangerous game. Just like the Republicans who supported Donald Trump. Eventually, if you keep promoting the people who blithely tell lies and think honesty is what millions in advertising and political contributions buys you, you have made it impossible for the public to tell the difference between the truth and a lie. The Nazis were brilliant at that kind of propaganda, and the charter school folks are close behind. Attack and destroy everyone who points out the truth. Unfortunately, the only place that leads is to fascism.
Thanks for posting this. My state has a morality provision attached to the
teacher certification law; but, to the faux reformers the end clearly
justifies the means.
And it begins….
A recent tweet from John Merrow:
“Some are attacking me personally re http://themerrowreport.com/2015/12/08/a-premature-celebration-in-dc/ … Why? Because they cannot refute the facts of Henderson/Rhee failure.”
The faux reformers really have no shame, do they?
The National Academy of Science produced a lengthy report this summer about the DC schools under Rhee and Henderson. I wrote this piece that underlines Merrow’s point. https://tultican.wordpress.com/2015/10/21/d-c-schools-a-portrait-of-corporate-education-reform-failure/
This particularly struck me in the John Merrow piece linked to in the posting re “catastrophic failure”:
[start]
Faced with these disastrous results, Henderson tried to embrace them as a wakeup call. According to the Post, she told the Mayor and the City Council that the results would help reset expectations. “What we have effectively told our kids is that if you make it to the 50-yard line you made a touchdown, when we knew that a touchdown is at the other end of the field.”
Her public posture is curious. Who is the ‘we‘ that Henderson is referring to, if not herself and Rhee? After all, they have run the District schools for going on NINE years. Shouldn’t they have ‘reset expectations’ a half dozen or so years ago? And why on God’s green earth aren’t the Mayor and the City Council asking some tough questions of Henderson and demanding explanations for the consistent failure? Are they so grateful for the calm that they are willing to overlook massive educational malpractice?
[end]
1), In bidness-minded rheephorm lingo the fact that Henderson wreaked havoc on so many school employees and students and their parents and associated communities with less “overhead” [aka turmoil and legal troubles and scandals and noisy tumult] than Rhee counts as success. Actual success? Numbers & stats can be massaged and tortured until the “correct” figures appear.
2), Anyone else notice that the rheephormsters that fall out of favor, or are thrown under buses once their usefulness has ended, suddenly stop using “I” when discussing the successes cum failures that are being pinned on them and start using pronouns like “we” in order to dilute and diffuse their own responsibility?
For everyone interested in a “better education for all”: George Orwell. His book 1984 and his article “Politics and the English Language.”
IMHO, one of Mr. Merrow’s better pieces.
😎
KrazyTA… loved your quote…”Faced with these disastrous results, Henderson tried to embrace them as a wakeup call…” For someone like Henderson whose in a permanent comatose state… the “wake” cycle never will come! Maybe “sleeping beauty” needs to give it a rest and let a real leader take her place! How many times can “ed reformers” respond to their poor tests results with “ye olde wake up call” EXCUSE!
I don’t know- I sometimes feel sorry for the ed reformers “on the ground” because the promoters so over-hype this stuff that it seems as if anything short of miraculous is not good enough.
It’s a problem they created themselves, but still. Ordinarily a person could be proud of progress and point to that as good solid work, but she has to be a miracle worker or she doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve created. They’re almost victims of the huge promotion machine they’ve created.
Yep. Now that the promotional machine has shown us all that it is possible to achieve miraculous results with every at-risk kid except those with severe special needs who need to be taught in separate schools for severely handicapped children (as the CEOs of the best performing charter schools claim), the charter schools not getting stellar results look truly bad — and that is most of them! And since those charter schools can no longer blame the teachers’ union for their utter failures to match the miraculous results of “high-performing” charter schools, the only blame is with their own operators. It must be galling for them to hear the boasts and claims of the high-suspension high-attrition schools who deny that they ever push out students.
I think that the ramped up expectation of miracle-or-nothing of these TFA reformers comes from believing that teachers in traditional public schools are idiots who can’t get the job done, and that getting the job done is a simple matter of bringing some good old (data driven) business know-how mixed with a healthy dose of elbow grease (say about 80 hours a week worth) to the problem.
I’m not sure what to make of a group that calls themselves “The Best And The Brightest.” Seems incredibly dismissive and presumptuous. But their understanding of education and it’s challenges is very incomplete, despite how “school smart” Rhee, Henderson, and etc. may be.
I eagerly searched Merrow’s new site for any indication that he’d addressed the concerns raised by PBS’s ombudsman in his condemnation of Frontline’s report on Success, but I turned up bupkis.
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/blogs/ombudsman/2015/10/26/a-high-stakes-schoolyard-fight/
Has Merrow responded to this elsewhere?
THANK YOU, John Merrow, for staying on this and setting the record straight. Your integrity is intact, which is more than the “reformers” can ever say.