Politico reported this morning on a continuing debate about the “test/and-punish” policies of Michelle Rhee, whose ideas about testing, school closings, and teacher evaluation were reflected in the iniatives of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top:
“EDU-PINION: Pundits are once again debating the legacy of Michelle Rhee, the controversial former D.C. public schools chancellor who became a national figure in the education reform movement. Citing recent commentary questioning whether Hillary Clinton should embrace Rhee-style reform to the same extent as Obama did, Jonathan Chait of New York magazine pushes back. “Rhee’s policies have worked,” he writes. “If you believe education policy should be designed to increase learning and economic opportunity for low-income children, then Washington, D.C., is a model that should be emulated.” More: http://nym.ag/1sooTbc”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For a supposedly evidence base movement those reformers are pretty good at hanging on to unsubstantiated and worse claims.
PBS” John Merrow was once an unabashed Rhee-lover, acting as her video Boswell, as it were, following her around and documenting her like Boswell did Samuel Johnson. For more than two years, he produced a 20-part PBS series of glowing video reports of Rhee’s tenure as D.C. schools chancellor. (All of this hagiography is available on YouTube, for those who care to watch.)
Eventually, however, Merrow did a total and astonishing 180, and started calling her a total fraud. One report even had a chastened and guilt-ridden Merrow asking about Rhee’s reign of fraud, “Who Created Michelle Rhee?”
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6316
With few more years to give him further perspective, Merrow recently minced no words about Rhee’s damaging effect on D.C.’s schools: (CAPITALS are mine)
JOHN MERROW: “Some of the bloom came off the rose in March 2011 when USA Today reported on a rash of ‘wrong-to-right’ erasures on standardized tests and the Chancellor’s reluctance to investigate. With subsequent tightened test security, Rhee’s dramatic test scores gains have all but disappeared. Consider Aiton Elementary: The year before Ms. Rhee arrived, 18% of Aiton students scored proficient in math and 31% in reading. Scores soared to nearly 60% on her watch, but by 2012 both reading and math scores had plunged more than 40 percentile points.
“But it’s not just the test scores that have gone down. Six years after Michelle Rhee rode into town, THE (D.C.) PUBLIC SCHOOLS SEEM TO BE WORSE OFF BY ALMOST EVERY CONCEIVABLE MEASURE.
“For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is understood to be between three and five years.
“Veterans haven’t stuck around either. After just two years of Rhee’s reforms, 33% of all teachers on the payroll departed; after 4 years, 52% left.
“It has been a revolving door for principals as well. Ms. Rhee appointed 91 principals in her three years as chancellor, 39 of whom no longer held those jobs in August 2010. Some chose to leave; others, on one-year contracts, were fired for not producing quickly enough. Several schools are reported to have had three principals in three years.
“Child psychiatrists have long known that, to succeed, children need stability. Because many of the District’s children face multiple stresses at home and in their neighborhoods, schools are often that rock. However, in Ms. Rhee’s tumultuous reign, thousands of students attended schools where teachers and principals were essentially interchangeable parts, a situation that must have contributed to the instability rather than alleviating it.”
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This last stuff is at:
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6490
EXCELLENT information. Thanks.
Michele Rhee’s policies worked?
Sure, just the way George W. Bush claimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq a few months after invading the country, and with the same level of truthfulness and basis in reality.
read all the comments, inc this one “One need read no further than “my wife works for a D.C. charter school” to figure out what skin Chait has in this game.
Yeah, I remain skeptical….
Besides billionaires taking over mass media, it is being infiltrated by what amounts to sleazy EDU PR BS. Campbell Brown, for example, has gone from no bias, no bull to all bias, all bull. None of these people can be taken seriously. Unfortunately pols listen, just like they listen to their own BS PR. They are all pawns in a game they don’t understand. Money is not life. Power is not humanity. Stupid is unfortunately stupid.
I don’t know why pundits worry so much. DC is lockstep on market-based ed reform. John King attended a charter promotion event just today. He sounds identical to Arne Duncan, who sounded identical to the Bush ed reformers.
Ed reform has an absolute lock on Our Nation’s Capitol. Everyone is ON SCRIPT.
I don’t think one can get a job in DC without reciting the market-based formula.
Denver, Colorado is our new national template, BTW. We should all take a field trip to Denver to see what exciting innovations will be appearing in our local schools.
Giving blame where blame is due. The point of origin for ed rephorm was the Bay Area of California.
“Worked” to do what?
Shelley’s policies really worked well. She decimated the Af-Am teaching corp in DCPS, spurred a massive multi-part USA Today investigation into DCPS test results and best of all created a massive achievement gap between white and black and Hispanic students. results. Dag, her policies really did work. If you’re a bigot.
Why are we still talking about Rhee? She has been thoroughly discredited. And Chait plays an old data game: no context. Cherry-picking statistics is as old as the humanity.
Off topic. The Center for Media and Democracy just won a court case to get info. about the alteration of the UW mission statement by the office of the Governor.
CMD/PRWatch belongs at the top of an investigative media honor roll.
Really good piece about public school parents fighting budget cuts in Kansas:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/us/kansas-parents-worry-schools-are-slipping-amid-budget-battles.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=B7522B8E93F5DAA7DF3FA4ABAEA12AC8&gwt=pay
If only there were a huge group of paid education advocates and lobbying groups who could assist them! 🙂
How can they say they care about “public schools” when they’re MIA in all these battles?
If this was a battle about opening charter more schools every DC ed reformer would be penning outraged editorials in support of the parents. Because it’s public schools they don’t care at all.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
Main evidence is test scores in reading and math, a severely truncated concept of education. Well-suited to the 19th century. The only credit he gets, and it is a dubious bit: his wife teaches at a DC charter school. New York magazine has low standards for reporting and they have been met.
The Rhee legacy: erasers and masking tape. Two “policies” that worked quite well.
Historhee Rhee-worked?
I’ll buy that.
The one point I do think that Michelle Rhee makes that is worth thinking about (and I find myself thinking about it a lot, with no resolution, really) is that private schools mess things up for everyone. If you’ve seen Michael Moore’s WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, one of the featured countries has laws against having a school and charging tuition. So public school is all there is.
Now, while that might seem un-American, I think what Michelle Rhee has done (or did do) was try to find a way to combat the inevitable upper hand that private schools often have over poor public schools (or public schools serving poor populations). Because, those private schools are going to do anything they can to attract students and at least help them feel successful (I know not all private schools are worth much), but the fact that we have elite private schools makes the job of public schools harder. And so she rested on the conclusion that charters are it. And I know a lot of other people who have done the same.
NC is in its charter chapter. I hope public schools survive. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, I fear, in terms of numbers of people choosing charters over traditional because they built it and so here they come.
Thanks, RttT. Now we almost have to listen to Michelle Rhee.
I think test and punish represents the moment of truth about whether a public school can remain or must go charter. . .because of the fact that there are private schools.
because private schools
reform is really about that
can’t stop ’em, so they tried what they thought was the next best thing
This idea highlights the tension between equality and liberty (or equity and freedom, as Harlan Underhill would say). The main sticking points with this idea are, as you point out, that it sounds completely insane to Americans, and also that it’s unconstitutional.
But here’s a provocative article on this topic from many years ago by Erwin Chemerinsky, the constitutional law scholar and law school dean.
Click to access chemerinskyessay.pdf
“In this Essay, I want to look behind these explanations and argue that the central problem in achieving equal educational opportunity has been the lack of a unitary system of education. Desegregation and adequate, let alone equal, funding for schools will not occur in most cities as long as parents have the ability to move their children to suburban or private schools, where far more funds are allocated to education than in inner cities. A crucial aspect of Brown’s wisdom was the importance of a unitary system of education. Minority children are far more likely to receive quality education when their schooling is tied to wealthy white children. The failure to create truly unitary systems is the core explanation for the inequalities in American schools today.
Consider a simple analogy to today’s dual system of medical care for the rich and poor. If wealthy people had to receive their medical treatment in public hospitals, is there any doubt that their quality would be dramatically different? As long as the public hospital system is just for poor people, often predominately racial minorities, the public hospitals will never be the same quality as top private hospitals. The same is equally true of the school system.
Therefore, in this Essay, I propose a radical solution: the complete abolition of private and parochial schools in the United States and the creation of large metropolitan school districts. Under this proposal, every child will be required to attend these public schools. As a result, equality of school funding and meaningful desegregation, as well as a unitary system of education will occur. Desegregation and equalization of funding can be achieved through this approach,
whereas any other approach is unlikely to succeed.
I do not pretend that this is likely to happen. The rich and powerful will perceive that they have far too much to lose if they cannot send their children to private and parochial schools or to separate, wealthy public school systems. A Supreme Court that is untroubled by the current unequal educational system is not about to find a compelling interest in eliminating separate schools. But at the very least, I suggest that the goal should be to maximize the creation of a unitary system of education. With this goal in mind, reforms such as school vouchers are moves in the wrong direction because these reforms allow parents to opt out of public schools, and further frustrate the goal of a unitary system.”
Must be why she sends her kids to private school. Do any reformers actually send their own kids to charters?
I Mom,
I’ve read that more than 80% of families with income $200K or more send their children to public schools, so I don’t follow the line that “private schools mess things up for everyone.”
Did “the fact that we have elite private schools” make it harder for Harrington Park and Northern Valley Reg’l HS public districts to educate Cory Booker (Rhodes Scholar and Ivy law school grad)? Yet he sought to make Newark, NJ a “charter school capital.”
Book lady,
Your reply has a tone reflecting a defensive reflex.
I support public schools. The ship you are defending has sailed.
Read Michelle Rhee’s book. Also, she worked in DC not NJ.
Book Lady, I have read the same thing. I live in a wealthy community with a high school that rivals the top notch private schools. Naturally there are some people who send their children to private schools for a multitude of different reasons, but they still have to pay the taxes that fund the public schools. Of course, the amount that the community spends on education is far beyond what a less affluent community could afford. What we need to do is come up with a more equitable way of funding schools. You really do not need all the bells and whistles my local high school has to provide kids an exceptional education.
Shorter version of Chemerinsky:
When there are schools with children who are poor and especially minority, the US government and the people in charge think those kids are worthless and deserve nothing but the cheapest possible education.
However, there are middle class communities where parents are able to subsidize their kids education. Those schools work.
We need to desegregate so that the middle class families can dig into their pockets and subsidize the education of poor kids.
Of course, the other possibility is to have billionaires pay far more taxes — as high as they paid under Eisenhower – and use that money to give poor kids exactly the same education given in private schools. Very small classes, tutoring, every luxury one can think of.
I hear this from the reformers as well. Basically the reformers are saying, “I know we lied when we presented schools like Success Academy and KIPP as being a model because they are simply educating the kids who cost the least while throwing out the expensive kids who would cut into their profit margin. They have been lying all this time. What we really need to do is have middle class parents subsidize the education of all poor kids, so that the 1% doesn’t have to do so.
I’m disappointed by Chait, as I’ve been an admirer of his for a long time.
I wonder how Urban Institute estimated the “predicted” rise. Seems like a lot of fudging could occur here.
I think it’s interesting that the math scores rose more than reading. Confirms E.D. Hirsch’s thesis that much of reading ability is the fruit of knowledge transfer at home and thus less affected by what goes on at school, whereas math tends to be learned mostly at school, so schools can affect those scores more easily. As Laura points out, yeah the scores on these tests went up, but let us reckon what was sacrificed (e.g. social studies, art, etc.) to get these gains. Mr. Chait, can you do an accounting of that? Did the Rhee reforms work to make better educated kids, or just better takers of math and ELA tests?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/13/michelle-rhee-reported-to-be-stepping-down-as-studentsfirst-chief/
She went into fertilizer management (after her stint in school reform). Last time I looked at the company’s leaders (internet posted photos), I didn’t see diversity.
Maybe Rhee is going to run for mayor somewhere and needs the accolades and press? The system is rigged. Michelle should slither into oblivion with her pedophile hubby. When is he going to be indicted?
MAYBE this resurrection of Ms. Rhee is a sign that the reformers are afraid their narrative is fraying! https://waynegersen.com/2016/06/01/repeating-a-bogus-set-of-facts-doesnt-make-them-true-but-might-help-expand-for-profit-schools/
Hypocrisy or irony? Hypocritical irony? Chait blasts Trump University as a scam at the same time he champions Rhee. Perhaps just plain self-serving dishonesty: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/trump-university-a-scam-just-like-trump-campaign.html