Archives for category: Rhee, Michelle
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Matt Di Carlo Reviews TNTP Study of Rhee Reforms

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2012 //
9

Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute always applies a rigorous analysis to any study or report he reviews.

Here he looks at the methodological issues raised by the TNTP review of the DC reforms. Among his concerns: the teachers who responded to the TNTP survey were a non-random sample, and those who responded might be different from those who did not; in addition, the “evaluation” is based on only a single year of data. Di Carlo concludes that the study isn’t very interesting because of its flaws.

When Gary Rubinstein reviewed the same report, he made the sensible point that TFA and TNTP have been recruiting teachers for the DC schools since 2007, so one must wonder why so many of their own recruits are found to be ineffective.

Or is it the veteran teachers who are ineffective?

Linda Darling-Hammond once memorably said that you can’t ” fire your way to Finland,” and nothing in this study indicates otherwise.

In fact, it seems from both Matt and Gary’s analysis that the fastest way to be labeled “ineffective” is to teach in a high-poverty school, and the best assurance of a bonus is to teach in a low-poverty school.

To me, the fundamental problem with this “study” is that TNTP, as Matt notes, is an advocacy organization with a strong point of view, not a research organization known for dispassionate perspective.

I don’t see how anyone can take seriously the research claims of an organization with a clear self-interest as well as conflict of interest.

Let them advocate all they want, and they will. But please, media, recognize that they have a point of view and are not putting evidence-first.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations

That Deeply Flawed Report About Rhee’s IMPACT Program: UPDATE

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2012 //
7

I am reporting this because I forgot to include the link. As readers of this blog know (and hopefully forgive), I sometimes forget but always try to rectify.

Gary Rubinstein closely examined the report written by The New Teacher Report about teacher retention in DC and found it to be deeply flawed.

Aside from the obvious conflict of interest inherent in an evaluation of DC schools by an organization previously run by Chancellors Rhee and Kaya Henderson, the report itself says nothing useful about the reforms it claims to appraise.

First, the report shows that teachers in low-poverty schools get higher ratings than those in high-poverty schools. Either the school system has been assigning its worst teachers to high-poverty schools, or the evaluation system favors those who teach in low-poverty schools.

Rubinstein concludes that Rhee’s IMPACT system favors those who teach in low-poverty schools. He wonders, “Why would anyone want to stay in a high poverty school in D.C. and miss out on the bonus pay and promotions that are available to 42% of the teachers in the low poverty schools?” What teacher would be so foolish as to choose to teach in a high-needs school where the odds of failing and being fired are high?

The great irony of the TNTP report, he points out, “is that TNTP and TFA train many of the teachers who work at these high poverty schools so this statistic that there are so few high performing teachers at these schools (just 11%) is in stark contrast with their PR about how good the new teachers are. It seems that the TNTP and TFA teachers are getting low IMPACT ratings.”

Rubinstein says that this paper “would not survive any sort of peer review process. The main conclusion they try to make is obvious and meaningless. Much more important is the repeated suggestion that the system by which the evaluations are made is skewed to benefit the teachers who teach at the schools with the fewest needs.”

Categories Accountability, Rhee, Michelle

Rhee’s Organization Vindicates Rhee’s Reforms: UPDATE

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2012 //
18

Michelle Rhee founded The New Teacher Project.* Subsequently, Rhee was chancellor of the DC school system for four tumultuous years. One of the people who worked for Rhee at The New Teacher Project was Kaya Henderson, who is now chancellor of the DC schools.

So if you want to get a truly rigorous, definitely independent study of Rhee’s reforms, what group should be hired to do the review? Obvious: The New Teacher Project!

Here is the not surmising conclusion of the study: Rhee’s reforms are working! Great teachers are retained, bad teachers are fired.

Surely, in a year or two, we will see dramatic improvement in the DC test scores now that there is a great teacher in every classroom. The black-white test scores gaps and the Hispanic-white test scores gaps–now the largest of any city tested by the federal government–will close. With a great teacher in every classroom, all children in the DC schools will be proficient. Maybe as early as 2014.

*After this post first appeared, a reader informed me that Rhee did not “found” The New Teacher Project, although she often claims that she did. My informant says it was founded by insiders at Teach for America, who then asked Rhee to run it. If you check her Wikipedia entry, you will see that she is credited as the founder. I will leave this to Wendy and Michelle to sort out.

Categories Education Reform, Merit pay, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations

Georgia Charter Referendum Passes Easily

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2012 //
3

Voters in Georgia passed an amendment to the state constitution enabling the governor to set up a commission to approve charter schools over the objection of local school boards.

The margin of victory was 58-42.

This is an ALEC-inspired model law, meant to strip away the powers of local school boards.

It had major financial support from Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, Alice Walton of the Walmart fortune, a member of the Gap family, charter school operators, and other supporters of privatization.

Critics fear that charters will restore racial segregation.

One certain result is that public schools’ budgets will be cut to pay for charter schools of uncertain quality across the state.

Chalk up a big win for the rightwing privatizers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Georgia, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Walton Foundation

Rightwing Groups Pour $$$$$ into Tennessee

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2012 //
2

StudentsFirst and another far-right group called Tennessee Federation for Children are pumping huge amounts of money into state legislative races for candidates who support vouchers and charters.

Tennessee Federation for Children is affiliated with the pro-voucher organization called American Federation for Children, run by billionaire Betsy DeVos of Michigan. AFS honored Michelle Rhee and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin for their efforts on behalf of vouchers in 2010.

This report in the Tessessean says:

The Tennessee PAC affiliated with StudentsFirst, a Sacramento, Calif.-based organization led by former Washington, D.C., Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee, has pumped $376,266 into Tennessee this year. That sum includes contributions to a handful of local school board contenders in Nashville and Memphis but far more to candidates seeking state legislative seats. Most of the recipients are Republicans.

StudentsFirst’s Tennessee PAC, formed last year, spent $66,150 in the Volunteer State over the past month alone, according to financial disclosures submitted last week.

During the same four-week time frame, a PAC called Tennessee Federation for Children, a branch of a Washington organization that expanded to Tennessee this spring, accounted for $145,302 in contributions and other expenditures. The group spent $248,539 in Tennessee altogether this year, with money going to direct mail efforts and to pro-voucher candidates.

*************************
When I was in Chattanooga in September this year, a Democratic candidate told me that a campaign gift of $1,000 was considered huge, so you can imagine the power of this kind of money for conservative Republicans and a few rightwing Democrats.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Tennessee, Vouchers, Walker, Scott

The Record of Privatization: Look the Other Way

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2012 //
6

G.F. Brandenburg is a retired teacher who keeps close watch on the D.C. Schools and national trends. He is the blogger who discredited Michelle Rhee’s claims about miraculous results when she taught for three years in the early 19902 in a Baltimore school run by a private firm called Educational Alternatives Inc. In a comment about “the KIPP challenge,” he points out that experiments in privatization have been tried and failed. In “the KIPP challenge,” I called on KIPP to take over an entire small district to show what they could do and erase all concerns about skimming and attrition.

This is from Brandenburg:

There was one experiment similar to what DR and AR propose: a baker’s dozen of Baltimore elementary schools were assigned either to Edison/Tesseract or to remain as BPS. A detailed study was done by some researchers at UMBC; links to the study are at my blog. I won’t pretend to recall all of the details, but I recall from what I wrote and graphed a few years ago that there was essentially no difference between the two groups of schools in performance on the tests they were using at the time.

Except at one school where the principal and one of the teachers (one Michelle Rhee) devised a two-fold way of producing a small increase in apparent test score results:
1. Push out enormous percentages of students from one year to the next, and
2. Take advantage of the fact that the testers simply disregard the score of any student whose scores are below a certain level.
At that school, Harlem Park, attrition was much higher than at any other school studied, and the numbers of students whose scores were set aside was much higher than in any other school studied.

We all know that Ms Rhee later rode this small, fraudulent blip in scores to fame and fortune.

And what about this Edison experiment?

The city of Baltimore canceled the experiment because Edison schools actually cost MORE than the regular public schools AND produced results equal to or worse than the regular public schools.

Categories Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle

Big $$$ to Convince Bridgeport Voters to Abandon Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2012 //
13

Connecticut blogger and political insider Jonathan Pelto broke the story:

Corporate reformers and privatizers have poured record amounts of campaign cash into Bridgeport, Connecticut, to persuade voters to turn control over their schools to the mayor.

One of the big givers was NYC Mayor Bloomberg, who gave $20,000 to help Mayor Finch gain control over the people’s schools.

Mayoral control in New York City did not narrow the city’s achievement gaps.

Mayoral control has not improved the schools in Cleveland, Chicago, or Detroit (Detroit tried it, abandoned, and one of its recent mayors went to jail for various reasons).

The mayoral-controlled public schools of Washington, DC, have the biggest achievement gaps in the nation, double the gaps in other big cities.

Will the voters of Bridgeport vote to relinquish their right to elect their school board?

Can the public be persuaded by big money to abandon democracy?

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle

Michelle Rhee Shows Her True Colors

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2012 //
38

Michelle Rhee is endorsing and funding rightwing candidates across the nation, showering cash on those who are opposed to teachers’ rights and unions and support privatization of public education.

In Ohio, she is using her StudentsFirst millions–collected from anonymous billionaires, millionaires and corporations–to support opponents of public education.

An Ohio blogger writes:

Now, here in Ohio, Michelle Rhee’s true colors simply cannot be ignored.  Rhee has chosen to fund multiple candidates in Ohio who are running for the Ohio House this year, citing their individual votes to support the Kasich budget that cut public education funding by $1.8 billion as a reason for StudentsFirst’s support.  Let me restate that: StudentsFirst supports these candidates because they supported Kasich’s budget that cut $1.8 billion from school funding.
PlunderBund (http://s.tt/1rpCF)

Of all her endorsements in Ohio, the most disgusting is that Rhee is supporting a candidate with no education experience running against Maureen Reedy, an experienced and admired teacher. The two are candidates for an open seat in the 29th district.

Maureen Reedy was a teacher for 29 years. Rhee claims to “love” effective teachers. Maureen Reedy was Ohio’s Teacher of the Year in 2002. But Michelle Rhee is supporting her Republican opponent.

Maureen Reedy has pledged to expose the frauds that allow profiteers to waste millions of taxpayers’ dollars in Ohio. She has pledged to support public education in the state legislature. And that is why Rhee opposes Maureen Reedy.

This election tells us who Michelle Rhee is. She supports far-right Republicans, not Democrats. She supports those who voted to defund public education. She supports those who advocate for privatization of public education and who benefit from ineffective, for-profit schools. She does not support effective teachers. She opposes effective teachers.

Forget what she calls herself.

Judge her by her actions.

She is a rightwing Republican who hates public education and those who support it.

Want to know why Rhee opposes Maureen Reedy? Here is an excerpt from an article Reedy wrote for the Columbus Dispatch:

Charter schools are a poor investment of Ohio’s education dollars and have a worse track record than public schools in our state; there are twice as many failing charter schools as successful ones, and one in two charter schools is either in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 traditional public-school buildings. Five of seven of Ohio’s largest electronic-charter-school districts’ graduation rates are lower than the state’s worst public-school system’s graduation rate, and six of seven of the electronic charter schools districts are rated less than effective.

And finally, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow has failed in every identified state category for eight years, a worse track record than the Cleveland City School system, which is under threat of being shut down by the state. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is run by unlicensed administrators. Lager, in addition to his $3 million salary, earned an additional $12 million funneled through his software company, which sells products to his charter-school corporation. Just how much does the average teacher in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow earn you may ask? Approximately $34,000 per year.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Vouchers

The Biggest Problem in U.S. Education Is….?

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2012 //
8

Chris Lehman has written an excellent post pulling together solid data about the “reformers'” solutions and the issue that refuse to address: poverty.

What is the problem in U.S. education? What is the cause of low test scores? Is it bad teachers, as the reformers claim?

Or is it poverty, where the U.S. leads the advanced nations of the world?

Can school reform cure poverty? Has it?

If you don’t address the causes, you will never solve the problem of low academic performance.

Nice job, Chris.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Klein, Joel, Poverty, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

How Rhee Demonstrates Her Love for Teachers: UPDATE

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2012 //
9

Michelle Rhee, through her organization StudentsFirst, dropped $500,000 into a ballot initiative in Michigan, where there is an effort to establish the right to collective bargaining in the state constitution. Rhee thinks this is a terrible idea, because she loves teachers, but only “effective” teachers, the kind that get high test scores very year. If teachers join unions, the teachers won’t be effective any more or they might protect teachers who don’t get high scores every year.

Turns out that the right to join a union is contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Canadian Constitution. But corporations don’t like that idea. It restrains them from cutting costs. In a globalized and competitive world, the winners produce the most at the lowest cost. That means teachers must be low-wage and cheaper, or as Jeb Bush recommends, replaced by computers.

Thus the battle in Michigan.

Categories Michigan, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »