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Oh No! I Am a Member of StudentsFirst

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2012 //
23

After I blogged about Change.org dropping Michelle Rhee and Jonah Edelman, I got an email from a representative of Change.org asking me to explain its policy on my blog. I told him my concern was not with its policy, but with the deception involved in signing people up as members of an organization they did not wish to join. On our third exchange of emails, he informed me that I was a member of Students First. He said his records showed that I had signed one of its petitions a year ago. He gave me a website where I could view my member profile, but I was unwilling to click on the link for fear that doing so would reconfirm my “membership.” Maybe the second click would put me in a category of “active” membership.

This is horrifying. I never knowingly signed to join Michelle Rhee’s Students First.

When Rhee boasts of her huge membership, she is counting people like me who were snared without their knowledge. She is using my name to inflate her numbers.

This is deceptive practice. It is fraudulent. There ought to be a way to bring a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission or some other watchdog agency to protest the deceptive capture and misuse of my name and that of many others.

I choose the organizations I join with care and forethought. I didn’t choose to belong to Students First.

Michelle Rhee, take my name off your membership list!

How can I do it without clicking the website of the organization that entrapped me? Is there a place to click that says “remove my name?”

On a happier note, a reader informed me that a Chicago teacher named Jen Johnson started the ball rolling with a campaign called “Change.org: Stop Supporting Union-Busters” Petition.”

We must celebrate every small victory. We must remember that lone individuals can make a difference.

Change begins with one person.

Sometimes change begins with one writer, like Thomas Paine, or one speaker, like Martin Luther King Jr.

Change begins with one and then multiplies. Many people signed the petition, others wrote. I mentioned Aaron Krager in the earlier post. Another post may have played a part in changing Change.org.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Stand for Children, StudentsFirst

Change.Org Drops Rhee and Edelman

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
16

In an earlier post, I described how Michelle Rhee’s Students First collects “members” whenever anyone unwittingly signs a petition at change.org for a “kittens and puppies” cause or when they agree that they respect teachers. This is deceptive advertising. It turns out that Jonah Edelman’s Stand for Children also benefited by misleading people who signed heart-warming petitions at change.org.

Never doubt that citizens can make a difference. In response to protests and petitions, change.org will no longer be collecting signatures for Rhee or Edelman because their organizations are anti-union. Change.org claims to be a progressive website, not just a free-market platform for anything. As a progressive website, it was subject to growing criticism for enabling groups like Students First and Stand for Children to promote their agenda of privatization and union-busting.

And don’t doubt for a minute that one person can make a difference. Aaron Krager communicated directly with change.org and wrote a blistering critique of their actions. Krager wrote:

Change.org can hide behind Stand for Children’s focus group tested mission statement all it wants. It doesn’t stop the truth from existing. Stand for Children wants to privatize education, pick and choose the students who receive it, take away the rights of the people working in the schools, and allow corporate funders to dictate education policy. It simply does not fall in line with Change.org’s own policies. Saying so denies the truth and merely aligns Change with the one percent that already benefit at our expense.

Just because a group claims to be working for “the civil rights issue of our era” does not mean it’s true. Now, even Mitt Romney says that his agenda of vouchers, charters and privatization is a civil rights agenda. It is not. Stand for Children claims on its website to be working on behalf of better education by promoting its anti-union, privatization campaign. That is not a civil rights agenda. Michelle Rhee is promoting charters, vouchers, and privatization while encouraging rightwing governors to strip teachers of any right to due process and collective bargaining. These are not progressive groups. They work hand-in-glove with those who want to roll back the New Deal. They work not for children but for the powerful elites who like privatization.

Diane

A READER SENDS THIS WARNING:

Change.org is still collecting sigs for the group. Their petitions remain. The only thing they have agreed to is to stop offering them paid promotion of their petitions. Please read the HufPo article more closely and you’ll see this is so. They have already gained over a million sigs through these automatic ads.

Bottom line: Don’t sign any petitions on Change.org until you feel certain that you are not automatically registered as a “member” of Students First or Stand for Children without your knowledge.
Categories Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Stand for Children

How Rhee Cons the Innocent

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
6

A reader submitted this post:

http://backburner-nkk.blogspot.com/2011/08/ive-been-conned.html

It tells the now-familiar story of how an unwary person was conned by Michelle Rhee’s Students First. The reader was going through her email, and along came a “puppies-and-kittens” petition from Change.org, and “Click!”

Too late: “And suddenly, there it was…the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the Trojan horse of all Trojan horses: Join the Fight to Save Great Teachers,  a petition initiated by Students First, the education policy lobby run by faux education expert, Michele Rhee.  Remember her?  The mythologized Bee Eater who got results in the Washington, D.C. schools, and then quickly ducked out when her mayoral patron was evicted from office?”

This blogger was repentant but not fooled:

Here’s what Students First says they’re for which sounds a lot like “kittens and puppies” at first blush:
  • Elevating the teaching profession by valuing teachers’ impact on students;
  • Empowering parents with real choices and real information; and
  • Spending taxpayers’ money wisely to get better results for students.
But Students First (SF) perpetuates a fraud on families through smoke and mirrors:
  • SF narrowly defines the value of teachers’ impact on students, equating impact with large scale test scores.  It devalues the impact of teachers’ relationships with students and their families by minimizing the effects of teacher experience and the trust that families build with teachers over time. It fails to recognize the strength and local knowledge that comes from commitment of and by the school community.
  • SF says that choice is good but is blind to the information on the demographic consequences of school choice. A National Education Policy Center study suggests that charters actually increase segregation of students. For many children excluded by charters through “cherry-picking” and “counseling out” there is no choice if they are to get the supports they need. And the children who are disproportionately affected by these tactics? The poor, those with disabilities, English language learners, the very children SF claims to be helping.
  • SF promotes responsible use of taxpayers’ money, but ignores the shell games played by commercial charter operators to profit at public expense.  Hedge fund investors capitalizing on the “crisis in education” have joined the fray.  Public school districts lose in this tug-of-war for resources.
Earlier today, another reader sent in a comment and chastised me for my description of D.C. test scores under Rhee. He said I should have written about the change in test scores during her tenure in office, not just the fact that D.C. has the largest achievement gaps for black and Hispanic students of any city in the nation. He was right.
So I looked up the scores  in fourth grade reading, which Rhee says is a disgrace to the nation, and recorded the changes over time in her district. This is what happened on her watch. The scores of higher-income students went up significantly from 2007-2011. The scores of lower-income students were flat from 2007-2011. The scores of white students, black students, and Hispanic students were flat from 2007-2011. Why is she telling the nation how to improve achievement when she didn’t do it?
Diane
Categories Education Reform, NAEP, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst

How Students First Recruits New Members

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2012 //
24

A friend told me she signed an online petition on Change.org for some cause to make the world a better place, and promptly received an email from Michelle Rhee of Students First thanking her for joining. She was astonished to discover that she was a member of Students First, because she never signed anything that identified the group. This is apparently standard practice for Rhee’s group, as demonstrated by this blog by a teacher who also found herself to be a “member” of a group she had not joined.

When Rhee arrives in a state to demand an end to teachers’ job protections, she says that she has thousands and thousands of members in that state. That supposedly gives her more political clout, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars she can spend to elect candidates who want to crack down hard on teachers. Apparently a significant part of her “membership” consists of people who unwittingly signed up by agreeing to support something completely unrelated to Rhee and her cause of turning teachers into employees with no job protections.

Even more disturbing than the deceptive way that she garners members, however, is the deceptive message that she sends to her new “members.” She claims that only one in three fourth graders “can read at grade level.” This is demonstrably false. She is confusing NAEP’s rigorous proficiency level—equivalent to a solid A—with “grade level,” which is a floating mean (at any given moment, half of all students are “above grade level”).

One-third of our fourth-graders meet NAEP’s rigorous standard of “proficient”; two-third are above basic; one-third are “below basic.” We should worry about that one-third who are “below basic,” not distort the statistics to generate a make-believe crisis.

Rhee should tell her “members” about the genuinely desperate situation in the District of Columbia, where she was in charge for four years. There, an appalling 56% of fourth-graders were below basic in 2011, far more than the national rate of 34%.  I am citing federal data from NAEP here. How can she presume to tell other districts and states how to fix their schools if she was unable to do it in D.C.?

The District of Columbia has the largest black-white achievement gap and the largest Hispanic-white gap of any urban district tested by the federal government. For America’s urban districts, the black-white gap in fourth-grade reading is 30 points; in D.C., it is a staggering 64 points. The Hispanic-white gap nationally in this grade is 29 points; in D.C., it is a huge 51 points. No other district comes close to D.C. when it comes to achievement gaps.

She says in her letter that “…studies have shown that in just one year, students with an effective teacher are able to improve by one and a half grade levels. These effects are so significant that the “achievement gap” between low-income or minority students and their wealthier or white peers can effectively be erased by only three consecutive years of highly effective teachers.” Readers of this blog recognize this as the same claim made by Melinda Gates.

Reminder: It didn’t happen in D.C. on Rhee’s watch. Also, it has not happened in any other district. Not in New York City under Joel Klein’s control nor in New Orleans, the district often held up as the model for the nation because of having wiped out public education and the teacher’s union.

And as blogger and TFA alum Gary Rubinstein has demonstrated, the study on which this claim is based is 20 years old and the findings are not all that strong, nor has anyone figured out how to fill an entire school district with teachers who get a gain of eighteen months in twelve months of instruction. Certainly Michelle Rhee has not.

Last August, I was on a panel with Rhee at Martha’s Vineyard at an event sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Rhee began reciting her well-worn complaints about “bad teachers” and her dubious claims about how effective teachers could overcome any obstacles. One of the panelists, Professor Lawrence Bobo of Harvard University, abruptly asked her why she thought that any teacher, no matter how “effective,” was sufficient to level the playing field for a child of 14 who was growing up in desperate poverty. With his great authority, he literally silenced Rhee, whose claims suddenly seemed like empty rhetoric.

It will take many years to clear away the empty claims about miracle-workers and miraculous transformations. And not until then will public policy begin to address wisely and realistically the needs of children who are falling behind and need help.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle

The Disturbing Connection between David Coleman and Michelle Rhee

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2012 //
2

If you are a reader of this blog, you saw earlier posts about the close connection between David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, and Michelle Rhee. Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week confirms this here.

I learned from Ken Libby–a graduate student at the University of Colorado who likes to read IRS filings by advocacy organizations–that Rhee’s Students First has a board of directors; that David Coleman is the treasurer  of her board of directors; and that the other two members of her board are employees of David Coleman’s organization Student Achievement Partners (one of the two wrote the new CC math standards). To those who ask Coleman why he is on Rhee’s board, he responds that his term ends in June. That is non-responsive.

What outsiders really want to know is whether he shares her agenda and whether he rejects any part of it.

Rhee is a lightning rod. She has advocated for policies that will remove all job protections from teachers. She has supported rightwing governors who want to destroy teacher unions. She advocates for charters and vouchers. She has accepted millions of dollars from known and unknown sources to promote privatization. She has spent millions of dollars to support candidates–usually from the far right–who agree with her views. She treats test scores as the sine qua non of education. She is a darling of the far right.

There is something unsavory about the close alliance between Rhee and the man who drafted the nation’s standards.

The public has a right to know.

Diane

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Rhee, Michelle

What is NCTQ?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2012 //
16

Several  months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate raged, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues.

U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments–ranging from classwork practice to state tests–to improve instruction.”

Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.

Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in such low regard?

The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I value, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1995.00.

Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

And I was there at the creation.

An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Rhee, Michelle

Who is David Coleman?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2012 //
53

A few years ago, I met David Coleman for lunch and we talked about education. At the time, I didn’t know much about him, but I knew that he was deeply involved in the writing of the Common Core standards, which were then in the formative stage. We had a wonderful conversation about books and education, and David reminded me that he was a classicist, that he loves ideas and reading, and that his values were the same as mine. I left the lunch feeling that I had met a kindred soul.

I saw him once briefly since then, at a meeting of the Albert Shanker Institute, where he encouraged the AFT to endorse the CC standards. The board agreed, though I demurred. I remain agnostic.

I thought I knew David Coleman. I knew that he had created a data and assessment company that he sold to McGraw-Hill. I knew that he had been a Rhodes Scholar. I knew he had all the right credentials. I came to realize that David was the architect of the Common Core standards, not just one of many hands. I also knew—from the accounts of others—that he disdains fiction and personal writing. I don’t like the idea that some disembodied national agency tells teachers to cut back on the novels, poetry, and short stories and focus on informational text. That shows not only a hostility to imaginative literature but a disregard for teachers’ professionalism. I mean, he can have his opinion but why foist it on the nation?

Last week, the College Board announced that David Coleman will be its new president. One assumes that David will integrate the AP assessments with his prized Common Core standards.

But I just discovered that I don’t know David Coleman at all. I just discovered that he was the treasurer for Michelle Rhee’s Students First. (http://kenmlibby.com/?p=300) I assume that means he supports what she advocates. One doesn’t join the inner circle of a group with which you are not in sympathy. So I assume he supports her well-publicized war against collective bargaining. He supports her opposition to seniority and tenure. He supports her battle to base evaluation on test scores. He supports her efforts to privatize public education. He supports her contempt for experienced teachers.

Not only is he the treasurer, but the other officers of her board are (or were) part of his organization, Student Achievement Partners. One of the directors wrote the math standards for the nation. His organization seems to be integrated with hers.

In the version of this blog that I published this morning–very early–I wrote that I had heard that he stepped down from his role as the keeper of the accounts for Students First. But a friend called to tell me that this was not true. He did  not step down. He is still treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s Students First.

Now I am certain that I don’t know who he is or what he believes.

Diane

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/education/david-coleman-to-lead-college-board.html

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2011/10/kick-off-of-parents-as-partners-week.html

http://www.dailycensored.com/2011/10/18/the-crocodile-in-the-common-core-standards/

Categories Coleman, David, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst

How Does Rhee Sleep at Night?

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
3

The latest report on Michelle Rhee shows her collecting millions of dollars from Wall Street financiers, assorted billionaires, and mega-foundations, all to redesign American education as she sees fit. www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-education-rheebre84e1oa-20120515,0,7834441.story

She has become a convenient vessel for the most rightwing governors who want to dismantle public education and reduce the teaching profession to at-will employees.

How can she sleep at night knowing that through her efforts, millions of teachers will live in fear and insecurity, knowing that their job depends on their students’ scores on lousy tests? That’s quite a legacy.

How can she sleep at night, knowing that she is promoting for-profit entrepreneurs whose first interest is profit, not children?

What exactly is her credibility for redesigning American education? She left behind a school district with the largest black-white achievement gap of any city tested by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. The average black-white achievement gap for big cities is about 30 points; in the District of Columbia, after Rhee’s tenure, it was over 60 points.

Her IMPACT program is discredited by the day. Scores went flat after it was imposed by Rhee.

We have not heard the last of the massive cheating scandal that occurred on her watch.

In my one encounter with her, last summer in a panel discussion on Martha’s Vineyard, I found that she just repeated the same stale slogans about teachers and poor performance. She seemed woefully unaware of current research. She looks for applause by bashing teachers. She has chosen to be a tool for those who want to privatize public education and undermine the teaching profession.

It’s really a shame. She could have used her moment in the sun to improve public education and to help those who work in our nation’s classrooms. She has chosen not to.

Diane

Categories NAEP, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst
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