It is one of the curiosities of our time that reformers point to D.C. as one of their triumphs, based on the gain of a few points in test scores on NAEP and rising graduation rates.
D.C. remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation. And on those same NAEP tests that gladden the hearts of reformers, the D.C. schools have the biggest achievement gaps between blacks and whites and between Hispanics and whites of any urban district in the nation.
D.C. is not a model for the nation.
Reformers pointed to impressive graduation rates as evidence for the D.C. Miracle.
Now we know that the D.C. graduation rates were phony, and that about a third of graduates received diplomas despite absences and lacking credits.
Jan Resseger writes here about the collapsing legacy of Michelle Rhee.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Read this and weep:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/about-a-quarter-of-dc-public-schools-lack-required-certification/2018/06/21/28da8d84-74dc-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.7342c8af85a9
About 25% of the school teachers in publicly-operated schools in WashDC, are not certified.
The publicly-operated schools in our nation’s capital are a national disgrace. No wonder that in some neighborhoods, the participation rate (percentage of eligible students, who actually attend publicly-operated schools) is among the lowest in the nation.
LikeLike
The charters and religious schools that take vouchers are worse than the public schools.
LikeLike
What is really the grandmother of all ironies, is that as bad as DC public schools are, people from Prince George’s County, MD, sneak over the DC line, and illegally enroll their children in WashDC public schools, on an “underground railroad”.
LikeLike
I will post a piece on Monday demonstrating that the charter schools in DC have a lower graduation rate than the public schools.
Of course there are many excellent private schools in DC, but their tuition is far higher than any voucher would pay for. No one goes to Sidwell Friends with a voucher.
LikeLike
I do not follow your reasoning. WashDC has one of the lowest participation rates in the nation. In one neighborhood, (Conn, Av NW), ~78% of eligible children do not attend public schools. If charters/religiously-operated schools are so bad, why do 78% of the children attend them?
LikeLike
Charles,
My guess, having lived in DC when I worked in the first Bush administration, is that many white families enroll their children in private schools, not voucher schools or charter schools. The number in voucher schools is very small, less than 2,000. More than half the children in DC are in charter schools, but bear in mind that DC is still one of the lowest performing districts in the nation. How did all that “choice” with public dollars help?
LikeLike
What a total crock the pro-charter, pro-corporate-ed-reform propaganda film“WAITING FOR SUPERMAN” was and is, particularly in its hagiographic portrait of Rhee.
The Rhee footage for WFS was shot in the years 2008-2010, with the documentary released in Fall 2010. So, with almost a decade having passed to allow some perspective, let’s revisit WFS’s portrayal of Rhee.
Here’s the first segment on Michelle Rhee, with the dynamic musical score, low angle shots as she struts cockily around schools and the DCPS offices:
28:25
https://vimeo.com/115805401
28:25
Rhee makes a blanket, unqualified claim that — without any apparent exception (no use of qualifiers such as “most” or “many” or “a majority of”, or “in some/many/most neighborhoods”) — all of D.C.’s students were, at that point and prior to her arrival, “getting a crappy education … I don’t THINK they re. I KNOW they are.”
John Deasy did the same thing when he took over Los Angeles’ schools. What a total morale killer. In response, 93% of LAUSD teachers voted a No-Confidence message to be sent to Deasy, who then said of the vote, “I don’t pay attention to that nonsense,” instead of attempting to reach out and say something to the effect of ..
“Obviously, I need to communicate my intentions better to my district’s teachers. This just shows that they don’t have a correct understanding of what I’m trying to do here, so I’m going to get to work on changing that.”
On the contrary, Deasy’s message responding to LAUSD teachers vote of No-Confidence was much like Rhee’s in D.C. In effect, Deasy, Rhee, and others said,“F— you! F— you, all!”, as Deasy, Rhee, etc. followed the marching orders of their union-busting, school-privatizing corporate masters such as Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates and others.
In effect, Rhee, Deasy, and the rest of the Broad Academy Graduate Supe’s / Chancellors storm into town and say:
“You teachers all SUCK, but thankfully, I, your savior and your students’ savior, have arrived to make everything right, as I am your only hope to get you teachers to stop sucking, and save vulnerable children from your appalling suck-i-tude.”
The arrogance, cluelessness, and counter-productiveness of Broad Academy grads’ pose is truly staggering.
Back to WFS …
… and then, as the upbeat rock music kicks in with a rapid drumbeat (from the Go-Go’s song “DREAMIN’ “) and song underscoring this Rhee segment. This is “Triumph of the Will”-level manipulative propaganda — Leni Riefenstahl couldn’t have done better.
28:43
https://vimeo.com/115805401
28:43
With ‘DREAMIN’ underscoring the images, we get:
— imagery (low-angle shots of Rhee confidently strutting around, leading Mayor Fenty on tours, etc.)
— Guggenheim’s gushing, celebratory narration. In an excited, breathless tone of voice, Guggenheim intones:
“The education world went into a frenzy at just the possibility that Michelle Rhee and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty could actually turn around the school district.”
— some corporate ed. reform douche blathering approvingly, “She said that she was going to tear up the district,” as if that was a good thing.
Eventually, viewers are treated to the majorly dumbass animated segment of a cartoon teacher ripping kids’ skulls apart at the forehead, then pouring “knowledge” into kids’ heads. WTF???!!! Later, that cartoon is continued and because the cartoon teacher is reading “Rules from the Blob”, she messes up pouring the knowledge into the kids’ now split-in-half heads, spilling it onto the floor. (“The Blob” is the Teachers’ Union and the bureaucracy, according to Jonathan Alter, as he is interviewed).
Eight years later, I still can’t believe that Guggenheim and his collaborators thought that including this creepy cartoon was a good idea. No person with even the most rudimentary understanding of the teaching and learning process would have done so.
No analysis of “WAITING FOR SUPERMAN” would be complete without the ghastly horror of Rhee firing a principal on camera (???!!!), originally filmed for a news segment in John Merrow’s multi-part PBS report on D.C. schools.
Guggenheim actually cribbed the firing scene footage from PBS without first getting permission or making any payment to PBS. (Merrow, PBS, and PBS’ lawyers later blew a gasket at Guggenheim’s larceny, but that’s another story.)
Merrow later gave a riveting account of what occurred off-camera.
When a smiling Rhee gleefully asked Merrow,
“Hey, you wanna film me firing a principal? C’mon!”
… waving them to follow her to her office. Merrow later reported that he and his crew audibly gasped in horror at Rhee’s suggestion, and the maniacal delight with which she suggested it.
“In my decades of reporting on education, I had never experienced anything like this,” Merrow recalled later. Merrow went on to become one of Rhee’s harshest critics, resulting in his being marginalized by the pro-corporate-ed-reform corporate media (but that’s another story.)
This is not just cruel behavior. The demented glee with which this was done suggests psychopathic tendencies, or perhaps sociopathic tendencies as it shows not just a total lack of empathy and an appalling disregard for another person’s suffering, but also, if Merrow’s account is accurate, this behavior reveals Rhee’s sadistic pleasure while inflicting such suffering.
Here’s the firing:
51:50 – 52:25
https://vimeo.com/115805401
51:50 – 52:25
What leads up to the on-camera firing is a cocky Rhee telling Guggenheim, “I don’t have to worry about pissing the union off, or making this person upset, or that person upset.”
(Answering to the citizens paying your salary is not a bad thing, lady. It’s called Democracy. Look it up!)
RHEE (to the principal): “The bottom line is that I don’t believe that you are going to be the leader who can take the school in the direction that we need to go in, and have the highest expectations for the kids … I’m terminating your principalship NOW.”
Thankfully, Randi Weingarten is then shown condemning Rhee’s despicable “scorched earth policy” saying that it “may make (Rhee) popular … ‘I am the change agent!’ but it’s not going to change schools.”
It was later shown — in the USA TODAY expose, and elsewhere — that this “raise-scores-or-else-get-fired” mentality is what produced the massive cheating scandal that follows Rhee to this day, and the more recent graduation/false attendance scandals.
Ten years later, we now know that Weingarten was partly incorrect. Rhee didn’t change DCPS schools for the better. She actually ended up making them significantly worse.
Finally, there’s this part where Director/Narrator Davis Guggenheim brags about how, thanks to Michelle Rhee, D.C. Schools’ had “made clear progress,” as “test scores were up around the city,” which, again, we all know now were the result of administrators and teachers (under pressure from administrators, who were, in turn, under pressure from Rhee) changing answer sheets.
1:22:50
https://vimeo.com/115805401
1:22:50
GUGGENHEIM: “After a short time, Michelle Rhee made clear progress. Test scores were up around the city.”
What a crock.
Ms. Rhee had only been in office for two years when WFS was made. Anybody who knows anything about educational progress understands that any quick, massive test score increase, even it was genuine (it was not), after such a short time, could not, in any way, be definitively traced to the work of the Superintendent (or “Chancellor,” in Rhee’s case). Any attempt to claim so is patently absurd.
As Gary Rubenstein and others have shown — through rigorous data analysis — that one should always be skeptical of sudden “miracle” increases in things like test scores, or graduation rates, or college acceptance rates. (as with Rhee’s claim that when she was a teachers, her students went from the 13th to the 90th percentile.) Even if you assume that test scores are a valid measure of progress, a successful district-wide course correction’s results takes at least five years, and perhaps a decade to show up — as in places such as Massachusetts and New Jersey after they voted a massive increase in school funding.
LikeLike
Michelle Rhee’s “collapsing” legacy?
Once you reach black hole status as Rhee has, there is no further collapsing possible.
LikeLike