G.F. Brandenburg has followed Michelle Rhee’s meteoric rise and fall.
He was first to blow the whistle on her specious claim that she raised test scores to miraculous heights as a brand-new teacher in a for-profit school in Baltimore.
Michelle Rhee: Is She Merely A Liar, or is She Just Stupid? You Decide
She was an unknown until Joel Klein found her and recommended her to Adrian Fenty, the new mayor of D.C.
Brandenburg has a plan for her.
Valerie Strauss wisely reviews the scathing report of the falsified graduation rates and wonders whether the reformers will pay attention to the crash of their favorite district.
Other observers, like G.F. Brandenburg, have called Rhee and her bag of tricks a hoax from the beginning, the beginning that is when she claimed to have raised the test scores of low performing students to dramatic heights in only two years as a new teacher. From a class scoring below the 13th percentile to one scoring above the 90th percentile. The media loved the story. If you believe it, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
There is a new scandal in the District of Columbia that has shaken true believers in Rhee-style reform to their core. An independent investigation of the high school graduation rate determined that 1/3 of the district’s graduates should not have received a diploma.
Reformers have been touting the District of Columbia public schools as a model of success ever since Michelle Rhee wielded her broom and swept away every “bad” teacher. Although she had no prior experience as an administrator or principal, she was chosen by Mayor Adrian Fenty to overhaul the school system. She did so in a spirit of meanness. She openly scoffed at collaboration, which she said was for losers. She set out to fire as many teachers and principals as she could, and she set test score goals that every school was expected to meet. She left when the mayor who appointed her was defeated in 2010, but the District has remained true to her cold-hearted vision. Rhee then formed a group called Students First, devoted to firing teachers, busting unions, and promoting charters and vouchers. Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children honored her with an award for her service to the cause of destroying public education, an award she shared at the time with Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker.
But not long after her departure, there was a major scandal in 2011, when USA Today conducted an investigation and determined that the test score erasures at Noyes Educational Complex were literally incredible. Rhee scoffed at the claims of cheating, as the principal of Noyes was one of her stars.
Her successor Kaya Henderson continued Rhee’s policies, and the new chancellor Antwon Wilson (a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy) is also a true believer in Rheeform (at his most recent post, in Oakland, he nearly bankrupted the district by hiring large numbers of administrators).
D.C. continues to be a reform shrine, but it is really a monument to Campbell’s Law. When the measure becomes the goal, both the measure and the goal are corrupted.
The graduation rate scandal is probably the tip of the iceberg.
This is a favorite of mine. Roland Fryer is an economist at Harvard whose work has been heavily subsidized by Eli Broad and Bill Gates. He is a great believer in incentives and choice.
Thus, it was quite surprising to read this study (which I wrote about here).
This is the key finding.
We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earn- ings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings
I have always said that the three groups best equipped to fight corporate reform were students, parents, and retired educators. Given the amazing success of Pastors for Texas Children in blocking vouchers, I must add a fourth category. These are people who cannot be accused of having an ulterior motive. They are free to speak out and act.
Kentucky activists, mainly retired educators, are fielding candidates to challenge legislators who harm public schools. Forward Kentucky has the story.
“One of the striking stories of the 2018 elections in Kentucky is how many educators and former educators are running, and how many other candidates listed public schools and education as a prime reason for their entering the race. How did this happen?
“In this post, Gay Adelmann of Save Our Schools KY (and a ForwardKY contributor) describes her own work, and the work of others, to be sure that incumbents who voted against public education had a pro-public-school challenger. Many groups were involved, but kudos to Gay and the other people in this story for lining up a large number of educators to run.
::[Gay Adelman writes]:
“Last November, Lucy Waterbury, myself, and Bob Wagoner and Tim Abrams with Kentucky Retired Teachers Association met to discuss ways that we could work together to support public education. We lamented the fact that many well-intended legislators don’t fully understand the unintended consequences poorly planned legislation can have on our public schools. We also discussed how many of these legislators have not set foot in a public school in a decade or more, and often their own children attend private schools. The only way to understand and write meaningful legislation that will positively impact public education outcomes is to have lived it. So we said, “Who better than retired teachers to run for office? They’re retired, so they have time on their hands. Plus they’ve lived the experience.”
“During the conversation, we talked about the fact that most educators are female. In addition, because women outlive men in general, most retired teachers are females. It’s somewhere in the 90% range.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get retired teachers to run for office? We looked at each other and said, “We need a few good women!” And it stuck. The idea of A Few Good Women Kentucky was born.
“In December, Lucy and I returned to speak at the KRTA monthly event. We encouraged them to help us identify retired superintendents, principals, and well-known teachers who were willing to step up.
“In the meantime, David Allen, formerly of KEA, was doing some more work in his circles. He reached out to multiple teachers and educators he knew, encouraging them to run. He started posting messages on social media and in Kentucky Teachers in the Know, a closed group on Facebook. Once we learned of his efforts, we tag-teamed to support his efforts through marketing, data, and cross-promotion, educating people about the importance of getting educators to run. We also made an effort to minimize duplication, so that we would not have multiple candidates filing against each other.
“We also connected with the Kentucky Initiative, attended local party meetings, followed up on leads, and reached out to anyone we thought would make a good candidate.
“Our target list was different than the target list of other groups. We specifically wanted to make sure that anyone who voted against public education and 2017 did not run unopposed in 2018. Party was not as important as their understanding of the threats to public education. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t some overlap.
“A Few Good Women KY worked with other members of Save Our Schools KY, KDP, the Kentucky Initiative, NKP, and Indivisible District 4, and sent feelers out to other groups as well. We would hear of someone considering it and tag team to help them understand the importance of filing, and offer to help them connect with groups and services to support their campaigns, since this was going to obviously be a year of grassroots campaigns. In the debut episode of Women on Watch, Joni Jenkins referred to it as a $200 insurance policy. Having a challenger keeps legislators on their toes and prevents them from voting on or introducing bills the remainder of the session without having to answer for it in November.
“In addition to recruiting current or retired educators, we also identified those with a track record of being outspoken champions for public education: School board members, grassroots activists, and public school parents.
“In fact, I realized my own senator did not have a public education champion running against her. And, she showed she was susceptible to being swayed by Koch rhetoric when she voted for charter schools, despite the warning of many of her constituents (myself included). So, I decided if I was going to talk the talk, I needed to walk the walk, and I filed to run for State Senate.
“It’s more important than ever to provide voters with assistance in navigating through the corruption and hidden agendas. A Few Good Women KY will offer tools to educate voters on how to spot and avoid Koch candidates, as well as literature for candidates to take with them when they canvas their neighborhoods. And, we will showcase candidates who have a proven track record in favor of public schools. We want to make it as clear-cut as possible for voters. We don’t have any money, so we have to work harder AND smarter at getting the word out.”
Money matters, but dedication, enthusiasm, and knowledge can beat the Koch Brothers.
Go for it, Kentucky!
You inspire us all!
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is running for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He presents himself as the anti-Trump, the real progressive.
But New York progressives don’t buy it. They know that Cuomo has helped Republicans retain control of the State Senate. The Assembly passes progresssive legislation, and the State Senate kills it. An”independent” group of Democrats in the senate vote with the GOP.
Cuomo has refused to help his own party. He likes divided government.
Cuomo has been dreadful on education issues. He is the champion of charter schools. He has pushed tax credits for religious schools.
Public schools? He doesn’t like them.
To learn more, read this article:
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/cuomo-new-york-idc-clinton-resistance
The New York Times is a great newspaper. It is the most influential newspaper in the world. It has great reporters and opinion writers.
But, sadly, the New York Times has one glaring deficiency: its editorials on education echo the greedy, free-market views of Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers.
One person, Brent Staples, has written almost every education editorial for many years. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago. He is a brilliant man with a libertarian blind spot. Perhaps he studied under Milton Friedman or one of his mentees.
Whatever the case, the editorials of the Times sound as if they were written by the public relations staff of Charles Koch or Betsy DeVos.
New York Times: The time has come to decide which side you are on: those who care for the common good or those who believe in me first.
Note to the New York Times: defend democracy, not the plutocrats and privatization.
I took pictures at the sites of some of the grisliest scenes of mass murder and torture in Cambodia and posted them on Twitter. Some of the photographs on display in Pnomh Penh were so gruesome that I could not look at them, other than to recognize what they were and look away. Nor did I enter the glass-walled monument at the Killing Fields, about 20 miles from Phomn Penh, stacked high with skulls, arrayed by age and gender. I couldn’t.
The Cambodian genocide is especially puzzling because it was directed by Cambodians against Cambodians, not against a particular religion or ethnic group. Pol Pot wanted to abolish all religions, all educated people. He wanted to reduce the country to an agrarian society, with no engineers or teachers or doctors. He came from a privileged family. He had a good education. He went to Paris and was influenced by the radical Communists he met. He went to China and met Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao was persecuting teachers and other educated people and sending them to the countryside to force them to work as peasants. When PolPot took power in 1975, he drove everyone out of the cities within days by warning that American B-52s were about to bomb then. The cities were completely empty. Then he began a systematic campaign to wipe out every vestige of modernity. He killed between 1/3 and 1/4 of the entire population between 1975 and 1979.
Cambodians are a Buddhist people. Thousands of Buddhist monks were executed. Pol Pot was a madman but he found followers to do his bidding. He killed most of his top advisors , convinced that they were conspiring against him.
How does a country recover from a tragedy of this magnitude? As our guide explained, people with any education taught those with less. Those with a twelfth grade education taught thise with an 11th or 10th grade education. So on down the line. Those with only a sixth grade education taught the youngest children. And that s how the next generation was educated in a country where most of the teachers were killed.
There was no punishment for Pol Pot or his henchmen. In his paranoia, he sent troops into Vietnam, convinced that Vietnam was conspiring against him. The Vietnamese retaliated and deposed him. He died of natural causes while hiding out in the jungle in Thailand.
Cambodia decided not to prosecute the mass murderers. They wanted reconciliation, or retribution. No one was punished for the mass murders of more than a million people.
The crimes of the Pol Pot regime are acknowledged. There is no denial or obfuscation. Just a stark reminder of brutality and madness.
Our tour guide’s family did not suffer. They were poor farmers, Pol Pot’s ideal. But he hates Pol Pot, and he hates Communism, which he associates with mass murder.
As you may have figured out, I am home, my trip to Asia concluded. I mentioned in an earlier post when we were traveling in Vietnam, we happened upon an awards ceremony at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. The Temple is situated in the midst of beautiful gardens in central Hanoi.
Several hundred young children were sitting in the outdoor audience, getting a pep talk about the importance of the tests. Nothing is more important than doing well on the tests. Beyond the outdoor space was an interior room dedicated to Confucius, the patron of academic excellence. The stones on the side of the outdoor space had graven names of the nation’s best test takers.
The children with the highest scores were called forward, and their teachers tied a red scarf with a yellow star around their necks (a small version of the Comminist flag). Their classmates applauded.
One of my tour mates, a professional cellist, told me he saw a sign that said that three types of people were not allowed to take the tests:
Criminals
Musicians
Singers
He understood the singers and criminals, but why musicians? Spoken as a musician.
Just two days ago, the Bradley Success Academy in Goodyear, Arizona, shuttered, stranding its students.
The school sent a letter to parents expressing its regret.
One parent said she was finished with charter schools.
“”I will never put my child in another charter school again … because they are financially unstable,” Stephanie McMullen said.
“And then there are the practical concerns.
“I’m afraid he’s going to be behind and other kids like him are going to be behind,” McMullen said. “It’s not right. Teachers are out of work, too.”
“Preschool teacher Michelle Miller is one of them.
“For all the hard work that we’ve done all year long, it’s heartbreaking that they would do something like this to us,” she said as she held back tears.”
The school enrolled 450 students. It was started in 2003.it was managed by for-profit Imagine, which has a record of making money in real estate.
A reader of the Blog alerted me with this comment:
“And, another charter school closed its doors abruptly. The Bradley Success Academy shuttered his doors & locked the gate in Goodyear, Az,. a small suburb to the west of Phoenix. (One of those cookie cutter developments built on the edges of an old western town) It signed charter papers in 2003. The letter cited overwhelming financial problems. In looking through their Facebook pages, it seems many parents were unhappy. The Facebook page also touted their expertise in Special Ed. But, looking at the credentials and expenses, no monies were spent on Spec. Ed. Could be wrong, I’m not an expert at finacial reporting.
“I am currently investigating how much money they’re going to abscond with. One of the things that stood out in the financial report turned into Arizona Department of Education is they have over $8 million worth of capitol assets. Didn’t see any real problems with finances, other than revenue & expenses don’t quite line up.
“One of the charter holders is Paula Poultridge, Regional finance Director for Imagine Schools. Hmmmm…………………something to look at?”
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