A decade ago, Richard Phelps was assessment director of the District of Columbia Public Schools. His time in that position coincided with the last ten months of Michelle Rhee’s tenure in office. When her patron Adrian Fenty lost the election for Mayor, Rhee left and so did Phelps.
Phelps writes here about what he learned while trying to improve the assessment practices of the DC Public Schools. He posts his overview in two parts, and this is part 1. The second part will appear in the next post.
Rhee asked Phelps to expand the VAM program–the use of test scores to evaluate teachers and to terminate or reward them based on student scores.
Phelps described his visits to schools to meet with teachers. He gathered useful ideas about how to make the assessments more useful to teachers and students.
Soon enough, he learned that the Central Office staff, including Rhee, rejected all the ideas he collected from teachers and imposed their own ideas instead.
He writes:
In all, I had polled over 500 DCPS school staff. Not only were all of their suggestions reasonable, some were essential in order to comply with professional assessment standards and ethics.
Nonetheless, back at DCPS’ Central Office, each suggestion was rejected without, to my observation, any serious consideration. The rejecters included Chancellor Rhee, the head of the office of Data and Accountability—the self-titled “Data Lady,” Erin McGoldrick—and the head of the curriculum and instruction division, Carey Wright, and her chief deputy, Dan Gordon.
Four central office staff outvoted several-hundred school staff (and my recommendations as assessment director). In each case, the changes recommended would have meant some additional work on their parts, but in return for substantial improvements in the testing program. Their rhetoric was all about helping teachers and students; but the facts were that the testing program wasn’t structured to help them.
What was the purpose of my several weeks of school visits and staff polling? To solicit “buy in” from school level staff, not feedback.
Ultimately, the new testing program proposal would incorporate all the new features requested by senior Central Office staff, no matter how burdensome, and not a single feature requested by several hundred supportive school-level staff, no matter how helpful. Like many others, I had hoped that the education reform intention of the Rhee-Henderson years was genuine. DCPS could certainly have benefitted from some genuine reform.
Alas, much of the activity labelled “reform” was just for show, and for padding resumes. Numerous central office managers would later work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Numerous others would work for entities supported by the Gates or aligned foundations, or in jurisdictions such as Louisiana, where ed reformers held political power. Most would be well paid.
Their genuine accomplishments, or lack thereof, while at DCPS seemed to matter little. What mattered was the appearance of accomplishment and, above all, loyalty to the group. That loyalty required going along to get along: complicity in maintaining the façade of success while withholding any public criticism of or disagreement with other in-group members.
The Central Office “reformers” boasted of their accomplishments and went on to lucrative careers.
It was all for show, financed by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, and other philanthropists who believed in the empty promises of “reform.” It was a giant hoax.
Gerry Brooks’s take on assessments look like they’re out of Rhee-ality:
The politicians have been scamming us for years led by the dafake test. However, getting rid of the test leads to the falling of the dominos. It does not stand alone.
If we get rid of tests the same racist system of failure is still there,?the fake grade levels, and on and on.
I have sympathy for the author of this post because no one listens to me either, including many of the followers of this blog.
Listen carefully. The system design is what makes teachers look bad! Unless that changes, the politicians will always win and kids will always lose.
Wake up and take action ! Subvert the system for kids.
NICE metaphor: dominoes falling because the test does not stand alone
“Like many others, I had hoped that the education reform intention of the Rhee-Henderson years was genuine. DCPS could certainly have benefitted from some genuine reform.
Alas, much of the activity labelled “reform” was just for show, and for padding resumes”
Including his own?
Phelps landed firmly on his feet as a tanker wanker at the Pioneer Institute.
I know people like Phelps seem to be reformed reformers, but it’s clear that some such people are now simply trying to rehabilitate their reputations and cash in claiming the opposite of what they once claimed.
There are lots of people who got it right from the getgo.
Unfortunately, Phelps is not among them.
PS
I don’t take his having been wrong and “converted” as a testament to his credibility.
Being wrong in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is either dishonest or just plain dumb.
Rhee was one of the early publicity seeking leaders that set the stage for what has been called ‘reform.’ She was one of the first deceitful, lying administrators to capture national attention. Who can forget her ‘Time’ magazine cover where she defiantly stood in front of a chalkboard with a broom with which she swept away all the bad teachers. It is fitting that she has been exposed as a fraud and one the early dishonest members of test and punish regimen and so-called reform.
With her broom, she swept the truth away.
With her broom, she swept her own credibility away.
“What was the purpose of my several weeks of school visits and staff polling? To solicit “buy in” from school level staff, not feedback.”
Precisely what all top down reform tries to do: to make it look like it is grass roots when it is lawn mower. Every reform is this way, from Mao’s cultural revolution to Friedman’s capitalist oligarchy, all those who,would rule alone must rule falsely.
Does anybody remember Rhee’s hare-brained “Capitol Gains” initiative? This was the program whereby students would be paid in cash (???!!!) for completing homework, and doing well on tests? Rhee predicted that this would revolutionize and transform student achievement in D.C. (I think sexual harasser, Roland “Two-Tier” Fryer was also involved in this fiasco.)
NBC did a news story on this, with Rhee blathering glowing predictions about the program’s future, so I later followed any developments. Eventually, the NBC News story was scrubbed from the internet — the only such scrubbing of a Rhee story I’ve ever witnessed — with this disastrous program being quietly abandoned and never spoken of again. Rhee hagiographer Richard Whitmire suffered from a amnesia regarding Capital Gaines when writing his book on Rhee, as did Rhee herself in her own book recounting her tenure in D.C.
There was a similar scrubbing of any Capitol Gains stories on the pro-Rhee Washington Post.
Thankfully, Jim Horn wrote about this, and included an excerpt from one of these Post stories:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2008/09/fryer-and-rhee-teaching-children-to-ask.html
Fryer and Rhee Teaching Children to Demand: Show Me the Money
JIM HORN:
Hoping to further his “research” on how to instill rat learning in children with ca$sh rewards, crackpot economist-cum-education-researcher, Roland Fryer, has brought some of Eli Broad’s bags of money to the D.C. area for another grand experiment on unwary middle schoolers. Michelle Rhee, of course, is in for a million + with D.C. education funds.
Operating under the appellation of the American Inequality Lab (AIL), Fryer and his paymasters are on their way to finding a prominent place in the dustbin of discarded educational atrocities against the poor, if and when people eventually wake up to this kind of Wall Street-inspired corruption of children.
The name for this exploitation: Capital Gains.
What are children learning? To show up on time and keep their mouths shut, of course. Seems to me that Broad and the rest of the social entrepeneurial tax cheats who advocate this kind of experimentation on children could save a bunch of money simply by getting rid of school, altogether, and giving all these children jobs now rather than later stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or emptying garbage cans at the mall. But, then, I guess I am missing the whole point of going to school.
Clips from WaPo:
WASHINGTON POST:
. . . . The $2.7 million for the program has already been set aside, half coming from the District and the rest from a grant to Harvard by the Broad Foundation.
Those who forgot that yesterday was day one picked up on it quickly. In Meredith Leonard’s sixth-grade English class, there was the usual low-level din until she issued the reminder.
Silence blanketed the room, she said. “Everybody was in awe.”
Under Capital Gains, every two weeks, students will be scored on 10-point scales according to a series of performance indicators. All schools in the program are required to review behavior and attendance, which means showing up on time for every class. Individual schools can choose other criteria, including grades, homework, class participation and adherence to the dress code. Each point is worth $2. . . .
. . . . For the first two pay periods, beginning Oct. 17, checks will be distributed by school staff. Later, they will be deposited directly into student-owned savings accounts at SunTrust Bank. Students will be able to access the money with or without their parents, and no one can withdraw money without the child, officials said.
Each school has a program coordinator, officials said, who will be responsible for ensuring that no student withdraws money under duress. “We can arrange for appropriate responses on a case-by-case basis,” said Dena Iverson, spokeswoman for Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
Betts and his staff did a two-week trial run this month to give teachers practice with the scoring system and to give students an idea of what would be expected to earn points. He said that the sixth- and seventh-graders were “right into it” and that attendance and punctuality ticked up. Grades did not.
Eighth-graders, he said, are “crafty folk” and are likely to wait until the program ramps up before they make many changes. “They’re like ‘Jerry Maguire’: ‘Show me the money,’ ” he said.
I still have not been compensated! I was laid off or fired during Michelle Rhee’s time in DCPS. I was terminated in November 2009 after having been employed for 22 years. And I have never been made whole!