Gary Rubinstein has a keen eye for teacher-bashing disguised as research.
In this post, he takes apart a new paper from Michelle Rhee’s old outfit TNTP, which blames teachers for “low expectations.”
He begins:
Before Michelle Rhee was a board member for Miracle-Gro she was the founder and CEO of StudentsFirst. Before that, she was Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools from 2007 to 2010. Before that, she was the CEO of The New Teacher Project.
And even though Rhee is not a public figure anymore in education, she continues to influence education policy through The New Teacher Project which has since changed its name to TNTP. TNTP puts out slick papers that it calls research but is really propaganda disguised as research. Their first one was called ‘The Widget Effect’ which laid out the case for replacing salary schedules with a system based on merit pay based on statistically inappropriate analysis of standardized test scores.
And over the years they have put out other papers with clever titles like ‘The Irreplaceables’, ‘Rebalancing Teacher Tenure’, and ‘Teacher Evaluation 2.0.’ These papers are often quoted by ed reform propaganda sites like The74 and Education Post.
One of their most recent papers is called ‘The Opportunity Myth.’ Its central thesis is something that reformers love to use in their teacher bashing arguments, which is that too many teachers shortchange their students by having low expectations for them. The work they assign is not challenging enough and since students always rise to the challenge of whatever you assign to them, these teachers are negligent in their duties.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Michelle Rhee is a slick con artist with a knack for fictional writing (probably her only marketable skill). These people (like Michelle Rhee) give “getting a college education” a bad name. It just goes to show that one can go to college (even an Ivy League) and still be so poorly educated and un-knowledgable that they have to lie, cheat and steal to make the big bucks. People like Michelle Rhee should be exposed as the frauds that they are so that the colleges that have “educated” them can be exposed of their own frauds and mismanagements. Michelle Rhee is the perfect example of “the college myth”.
“It just goes to show that one can go to college (even an Ivy League) and still be so poorly educated and un-knowledgable that they have to lie, cheat and steal to make the big bucks.”
Maybe especially an Ivy League. I suppose I shouldn’t malign all Ivy League grads, but it sure seems like a disproportionate number of them are involved in scams, corruption, fudged “research”, etc. and many of them are indeed very poorly educated in any real sense. Many of them are so privileged that they’ve never had to really think about things for themselves, or think about the consequences of their actions on everyone else. As long as the well-off benefit, things must be working!
I’m cynical and enraged at the practices of colleges lately. We have been in the sorting/choosing phase with our 17 year old and have been offered much advice from some older friends (parents) and relatives. Very eye opening.
We’re at the same stage with my stepdaughter. Would you mind sharing some of that advice? Thanks!
Dienne77
1. Have them take the intro courses regardless of an AP score of 5. Many of these kids can’t write due to CC ELA bull crap and they need the practice. Many of these kids flounder in college math classes because of that high AP score…..college calculus is way different than HS calculus. Explain that it’s an easy A for them until they acclimate to their surroundings.
2. Don’t over extend the freshmen by having them join numerous clubs and activities to try and “pad” their college resume in the first year. They need to navigate life along with coursework, making new friends, and trying to fit into a new environment. This is a slow process for many.
3. Admission staff know when parents or a paid life coach have written the essay for the application….Thank you Varsity Blues scandal.
4. Approx 40%(? can’t site this #) of students transfer from their school of choice. Either they mess up and can’t take it OR they want to change their major and the school doesn’t have the “program” or classes needed. Try and make sure that your child is in a school that has many options.
5. Cap the amount of applications. Use the common app and then do 4-5 individual. Sometimes too many choices becomes overwhelming for their undeveloped minds.
6. The colleges are coming out and stating (regardless of what their website claims) that they are no longer looking at SAT/AP/ACT scores for admission. Submit them in if taken, but they are optional (except for certain majors) …..This I hope, drives the College Board into the ground!!! It enrages me that we are extorted into paying for these stupid tests when they aren’t needed.
That’s advice that rings true.
and most telling descriptors for Rhee: slick con artist
“Low expectation syndrome” is a fabrication of so-called reform. As someone that worked with ELLs that were extremely lacking in formal education, my motto was “teach them where they are, and take them where they need to go.” All of my students from the grade level definition would be considered “failures.” We need to spend more time teaching students than rating and ranking them. Labels that narrow options for students are often counter productive. I taught ESL in both high school and elementary school. Many of the elementary students that were so far behind when they were newcomers managed to get accepted to college by the time they graduated from high school. These students met and exceeded grade level expectations through the hard work of professional teachers and their personal commitment to learning.
Quotable quote: “We need to spend more time teaching students than rating and ranking them.”.
“Before Michelle Rhee was a board member for Miracle-Gro”
Rhee was shilling for Miracle-Gro (in the DC schools) long before she was on the board. I assume that’s probably why they asked her to serve on the board.
There is a deeper back story to this concept, that goes back to an organization called EdTrust. This group was involved in the crafting of NCLB. When I worked in Oakland public schools, back around 2001, they hired EdTrust to bring in their model of systemic reform, which they called Standards in Practice. The concept was very similar to this TNTP analysis. The idea was that the reason many Oakland students were working below grade level was that teachers were delivering lessons below their grade level. The method to remedy this was to place every teacher in the District into groups that met every month. In these groups, teachers were asked to bring in their lesson plans. Then those plans would be analyzed to identify how they were below grade level, and the state content standards would be used to revise or create new lessons that would be properly aligned to the grade level, as specified by the state standards.
Can you guess what happened? For some reason, teachers lacked enthusiasm for this process. Few brought forth their lessons to be dissected in this way, and after a few months attendance at these mandatory sessions fell off, and the program was abandoned. The concept was not successful in “raising expectations” for students.
This is what EdTrust now has on their site on the concept:
https://edtrust.org/resource/standards-in-practice-instructional-gap-analysis-strategy-aligning-instructions-with-standards-and-assessments/
Thanks for this first person account. It is also clear from the linked document that the effort you describe was part of the Gates-funded Common Core effort. Perfected alignments between standards, instruction and assessments stike me as absurd unless you want one-size-fits all, and all of the time. In that case you are engaging in a system of training more than education.
“For some reason, teachers lacked enthusiasm for this process.”
Amazing. Teachers unwilling to participate in asinine self-abasement. Obviously supports the idea of their incompetence.
“The work they assign is not challenging enough and since students always rise to the challenge of whatever you assign to them, these teachers are negligent in their duties.”
LMAO! (about a thousand times) while imagining a U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Congress approved firing squad getting rid of people like Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates.
Yea, sure.
Teachers can assign anything they want and that doesn’t mean all the student will “rise to the challenge” or even attempt to do the assignment.
I taught for thirty years 1975 – 2005 and there was only one reason why students did not “rise to the challenge” — no matter what level the work was.
They didn’t make any attempt to do the work or any part of it,even if it was below their grade level.
The grades in my classes were mostly based on completed work and if a student completed all the work mostly correct (didn’t have to be perfect) and turned it in demonstrating they were learning what was taught, they’d almost always earned an A in those classes.
But the students that earned low or failing grades earned those graded because they would not “rise to the challenge”. To earn a FAILING grade meant the student did not turn in even 55-percent of the work.
The most challenging assignments were allowed to be done over and turned in again. For instance, a student turns in one of the most challenging assignment but earned a failing grade on it because they didn’t follow directions or understand how to do the work for whatever reason. Then that student asks for one-on-one help at lunch or after school and/or reads my comments and learns from them, does the work over, and turns it in again for a higher grade.
During my thirty years of teaching more than 6,000 students, only ONE girl turned one of those assignments in five times. First grade was a FAIL, then a D, then a C, then a B, and then an A.
After she earned the A, she never had to do similar challenging assignments over again and earned her A the first time because she learned the skills to do it right the first five times with the first assignment.
The interesting thing about this particular girl was she belonged to a gang, was mean and hard, grew up in poverty, and broke all the stereotypical molds. The first A she ever earned was in that class where the students were allowed to do the challenging assignments over “to rise to the challenge”. At the start of that school year, she was a disrupter in the class until she earned that A on that one assignment and discovered she could think and learn. After that, when another student complained about all the work it took to “rise to the challenge,” I didn’t have to say a word, because she verbally jumped all over them for being lazy, and they were so scared of her, they never complained again.
I repeat: that was only ONE out of SIX THOUSAND.
And what are the Michelle Rhee’s doing to teachers – punishing them for students that refuse to “rise to the challenge”. That is like shooting the cowboy when his horse refuses to drink.
I can’t speak for all teachers, but I know that challenge was there for all my students but few decided to “rise to the challenge”.
There was another example of this “rise to the challenge” but this example was a parent early in my career as a teacher near the end of the 1970s. She was the only parent in thirty years that asked me for advice and then did what I suggested. Over the years, a few other parents asked the same question but never followed my advice.
Keeping it short:
Mother says, “My daughter is reading five years behind grade level. (I was teaching an 8th grade English class in a Middle school at the time) What can I do to catch her up?”
Lloyd replied, “Turn off the TV and everyone in your house reads every night for at least an hour or more, as a family. After reading, gather together and talk about what you read. Make sure everyone at the table has a turn to talk. The more you read, the faster she will improve as a reader.”
That one parent decided to “rise to the challenge”.
Fast forward to the end of that school year, and that parent wrote a letter to the school board praising me for the advice I gave her because her daughter caught up and was reading at grade level. That mother was the only parent in thirty years that decided to “Rise to the challenge” I offered her.
Keep in mind that the child poverty rate in that school must have been close to 100 percent and the street gangs around the school in the local community were considered very dangers to the point that the principal warned all of us teachers to never take a walk along those streets on the other side of our school’s fence because we might vanish and never be found.
Well-said, Lloyd. This is another example of how reformers’ prescriptions are based on a fantasy conception of the typical student. The typical student is unwilling (and often unable, due to pre-existing conditions like knowledge deficits) to do tough work. Giving him tough work often results in despair, failure and/or revolt. Given this reality, the responsible, professional course of action for a teacher is not to jack up rigor, but to provide meaningful, intelligible work that actually stands a chance of getting done. Reformers should reacquaint themselves with the adage the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Well, my household was not poor but 2 of my 3 elemsch kids were struggling [would later get LD IEP’s]. Husband often had to work late – dinner was often mom-&-kids downtime from hw struggles, accompanied by Nickelodeon TV.
I turned to my SpEd-teacher sis & she gave similar advice: turn off the TV during dinner. Read them a story instead. Some nights, make it a joke-book, & ask them to contribute their own jokes – turn that into dinner as time to tell a story, or relate anything they found interesting that day (etc). We did this, & it made a huge difference in family relations. The rest wasn’t easy to solve, but solid family relations gave us the foundation we needed to tackle it.
There is another thing the story shows. Cultural hero stories lay out teachers either as villainous predators or bigger than life heroes, perhaps necessarily due to the needs of a good story. The Escalante fellow comes to mind as does the band director in Mr Holland Opus. It would stand to reason that these fictions, while based on fact, are not reflective of any reality save the general statement of values inherent in works of fiction. But public impressions, fired with stories, create images of heroic teachers turning students into successful people. When reality sets in, there is disappointment.
You would think that a mythology that suggests the teacher as the primary driver of student success would be quickly passed over by research, but apparently there is little relationship between some research and fiction.
The real Escalante dropped the students from his math class who did not cooperate to learn what he was teaching them. I think that is in the film, too.
As often with this blog and the comments it amazes me when another side isn’t seen. I agree with Rubinstein that it’s a bit too far to say a lesson is completely weak because it doesn’t exactly match a given standard. He’s right that the lesson is trying to match slope.
I also think that this demonstrates an issue with many of the “reports” or “research” done in education – a half decent point is masked by faulty logic and/or examples.
I’ve taught and coached teachers in tough schools in DC and other places. And just as many head will say bad teachers don’t exist (and that the notion of poor teachers is a bad reason for reform), I’m not surprised to see the notion of lower expectations being swatted away here as a tool of Ed reformers.
And yet I can tell you that I work with and coached teachers who did have low expectations of students. Of people who would say “these kids can’t do that level of math” Or who to give the higher order thinking problems with only one set of students and the regurgitation to everyone else.
I disagree with Rubenstein that the problem provided is a strong as he thinks it is. For example he talks about multiple points in the line having the same slope. I think a great question would’ve been to ask students to determine another point on the line in between the two and points. If students fully understand the concept of slope then they would realize that all points on the line have the same slope
Another type of question I could’ve asked is for students to find two other points on the graph that would create excitement with the same slope as the original segment. Neither of these questions are multiple-choice. Neither of these questions have only one answer. And both of these questions were deeply explore students understanding. That’s the point that Rubenstein seems to completely mess in his blog post they only focusing on one aspect. And yes I have been a math teacher for math education for as long as he has.
They rise to the challenge? Does parental completion of homework count? A student who cannot meet the new higher standard has two choices. 1. Give up 2. Cheat.