This is a golden oldie. Imagine reading something written long, long ago, like three whole years.
This was written by G.F. Brandenburg, retired DC teacher. His blog is skeptical of Rhee and her misguided fixes. Here he questions the claims of Jason Kamras, who was named US Teacher of the Year in 2005 and became a favorite of Michelle Rhee. He designed Rhee’s IMPACT system, which has thus far produced no test score gains and is still under construction.
Bridgeport will be voting on whether the mayor should control the schools.
Mayoral control is high on the agenda of the privatization movement, because it allows one official to close public schools and hand them over to private corporations without paying attention to public opinion. Often there are hearings, but members of the public are limited to two minutes, and no one listens to them anyway. The mayor’s appointed board does whatever he wants them to do.
It is not as if mayoral control has a great record. Chicago has had mayoral control since 1995, and the district is among the lowest-performing in the nation on NAEP tests. Cleveland has had mayoral control for fifteen years, and its academic record is worse than Chicago’s. Washington, D.C., has had mayoral control since 2007, and it has the biggest achievement gaps in the nation. New York City has had mayoral control since 2002, and aside from doubling the budget and constant turmoil, and hundreds of school closings and openings, it is hard to see the benefit in terms of better education. The highest-performing districts in the nation on NAEP–Austin and Charlotte–do not have mayoral control.
Yesterday, the mayor of Sacramento, California, visited Bridgeport to urge voters to support mayoral control and relinquish their right to elect the Board of Education. This mayor is not just any old mayor. He is Michelle Rhee’s husband, Kevin Johnson.
The question is whether Bridgeport voters want to vote themselves out of the democratic process and allow their mayor to close public schools and privatize them. There seems to be a consensus among the privatizers that urban districts, whose residents are mostly poor and non-white, lack the wisdom to govern themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Rhee are in the forefront of that movement.
Jeff Bryant has written an insightful article about Michelle Rhee’s increasingly strained effort to promote the policies of the far-rightwing and ALEC, while claiming to be a Democrat. Rhee goes from state to state, funding GOP candidates and a few Democrats who are anti-teacher, anti-union, and anti-public education. She is not a centrist Democrat but a conduit for major corporate interests who are pushing a reactionary agenda of privatization.
Jeff Bryant asks whether Michelle Rhee is the Ann Coulter of education.
Rhee expends great energy insisting that Democrats support the hard-right agenda of ALEC. She tries to sell the idea of a bipartisan consensus to eliminate collective bargaining rights, teacher tenure, test-based evaluation, and privatization via charters and vouchers.
Democrats would be wise to stick to their historic agenda of equality of educational opportunity and public education.
Rhee has no popular base for her agenda. Although she claims two million members, most of those “members” seem to be people (like me) who innocently signed an online petition supporting teachers. When she held a rally in Hartford, Connecticut, last fall, no one showed but media and a handful of onlookers.
What she does have is a load of money, contributed by Rupert Murdoch, the Waltons, and assorted rightwing billionaires. She uses it to support Republican candidates and the few Democrats who endorse vouchers or promise to oppose unions.
Her relentless promotion of the anti-union film “Won’t Back Down” demonstrated her lack of any popular backing. The film had the worst opening weekend in thirty years of any movie in wide distribution (2500 screens), and immediately died at the box office, despite heavy marketing and advertising. The Regal cinema chain (owned by Philip Anschutz, whose company Walden Media produced the film) is now offering two tickets for the price of one. But in these hard economic times, it’s tough to sell a story in which the union members are the bad guys and the entrepreneurs are the good ones.
Yesterday I was on an NPR program interviewed by Michel Martin. I followed Arne Duncan, Margaret Spellings, Michelle Rhee, and Alberto Carvalho, the Miami superintendent.
Duncan said that Race to the Top did not require teaching to the test. Spellings praised NCLB.
Carvalho explained why he tried to help schools get better instead of closing them down. He said in several cases, he replaced the principal and made other changes, and the school improved.
Rhee took exception. She said that leaders should not tolerate failing schools. And she used this odd metaphor. She said–and I paraphrase–“if you take 10 shirts to a dry cleaner, and they scorch seven of them, why would you go back to that cleaners?”
So a school is like a dry cleaners, and children are like shirts. Teachers scorch the shirts.
Last month, at the GOP convention, Jeb Bush said that choosing schools was like buying milk. Some people like whole milk, some prefer 2% or 1%, or buttermilk or chocolate milk.
What metaphor will we hear next? The school is like a car-wash where the parents pick up their kids at the end of the line? Who makes up these silly lines? Is it some high-priced PR firm?
Being last, I had to try my best to set the record straight. So much to do, so little time.
G.F. Brandenburg writes a terrific blog, where he uses data to refute reformer exaggerations. He was one of the first, for example, to break the story about Michelle Rhee’s inflated claims of success as a young teacher in Baltimore.
Here he displays the data comparing DC public schools to charter schools. It is a healthy antidote to the fantasy so often spun by Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and the other luminaries of the reform movement.
Michelle Rhee is is a one-person PAC. She is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from rightwing billionaires and foundations and corporations to subsidize her program.
What is her program? Destroy teachers’ unions; eliminate tenure and seniority; privatize public education. Having failed to transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, she now wants to privatize public education everywhere.
When I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I learned from a Democratic state senator that Rhee had poured $105,000 into a race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Democrat. The difference between them? The conservative Democrat supports vouchers. My informant said, “Candidates here will jump through hoops for a contribution of $1,000. Getting $105,000 is unimaginable.” Rhee bought the election. The voucher-loving Democrat won. He added: Most of Rhee’s money goes to conservative Republicans.
She is trying to buy a seat in Connecticut now. A reader writes:
Rhee’s fraud of an organization has nothing to do with students, teaching or learning. It is a political lobbyist group that secretly slithers around the nation passing our billionaire donated cash to influence and bribe politicians. Her dirty donations push the privatization, anti-union, anti-public school, collective bargaining busting, teacher trashing dogma down their throats. Here she is a pariah and getting her money is the kiss of death here in CT:
If you read only one article today, read this one. Save it. Read it again. This is a must-read.
John Kuhn is superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt school district in Texas. He was the first person named on this blog as a hero of American education. If you read this, you will understand why.
A reader suggested I add John Kuhn’s great speech to the SOS March in Washington in 2011. It is here.
In this post, he nails the difference between charter schools and public schools. He agrees that much more is needed to help the students who are failing. But he explains exactly why the current crop of faux reform proposals is wrong.
A small example of the thinking in this brilliant essay about the lives of students and teachers and schools:
I believe fervently that Michelle Rhee and an army of like-minded bad-schools philosophizers will one day look around and see piles where their painstakingly-built sandcastles of reform once stood, and they will know the tragic fame of Ozymandias. Billion-dollar data-sorting systems will be mothballed. Value-added algorithms will be tossed in a bin marked History’s Big Dumb Ideas. The mantra “no excuses” will retain all the significance of “Where’s the beef?” And teachers will still be teaching, succeeding, and failing all over the country, much as they would have been if Michelle Rhee had gone into the foreign service and Bill Gates had invested his considerable wealth and commendable humanitarian ambition in improving law enforcement practices or poultry production.
The Wake County board fired its superintendent, General Anthony Tata, who had been hired by the previous board majority. That previous majority was elected with a pledge to end the district’s nationally recognized desegregation plan.
The vote to dismiss Tata was 5-4.
General Tata previously worked in D.C. as chief operating officer for then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. He is a graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy. He was known as a hard worker and an outspoken conservative who was a political commentator on conservative websites.
This is a stunning article about the teacher evaluation system that Michelle Rhee put in place in the District of Columbia. The article was written by Ben Nuckols of the Associated Press. He is not usually an education writer, but he dug deeper than many education writers.
Rhee fired about 1,000 teachers during her time as chancellor.
Since her evaluation system was put into place, 400 teachers have been fired.
Since the evaluation system was put into place, the federal test scores for the District went flat.
Some teachers get big bonuses. One teacher, at the end of the article, says she is rated “highly effective” and she turned down the bonus.
As Mary Levy, a long-time analyst of the DC school system, says in the article: We have gone from a system where almost no one was terminated, no matter how bad, to the other extreme, where good teachers as well as bad are terminated,” said Mary Levy, an attorney and a longtime analyst of city education policy. “The latter is probably more damaging due to the stress and demoralization it causes.”
Advocates of merit pay and test-based evaluation claim that it will strengthen the teaching profession because teachers will be drawn to the chance to earn a big bonus or higher salary.
This isn’t happening. As the article says, “But many teachers aren’t sticking around long enough to enjoy the higher salaries. The district has one of the highest teacher turnover rates in the nation. Half of new teachers leave the system after 2 years, according to Levy’s analysis, compared with about one-third nationwide. Levy recently began examining individual schools and found two-year turnover rates as high as 94 percent at one elementary school and 66 percent at a high school.
Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project, founded by Rhee, says it is too soon to judge the evaluation system. Give it 5 to 10 years, he says.
Question: Why are we foisting on the entire nation a method that has not been proven successful anywhere? Why not give it 5-10 years and see what happens before making it a national mandate, imposed by state legislatures at the behest of the Race to the Top?
Diane Ravitch's blog 