Next U. S. Secretary of Education: Michelle Rhee????

Okay. Time to face reality. Mr. Donald J. Trump is going to be the 45th  president of these great United States. 

If nothing else, we know the KKK is happy. “Make American Great Again!” Overturn Roe v. Wade! Also, maybe: overturn Brown v. Board of Education.

Now we hear that Michelle Rhee might be in line to become the next U. S. Secretary of Education. If you have forgotten who Rhee is, or was, a brief refresher course will be offered momentarily.

First, let’s consider two more Trump choices who have said they are not interested. Dr. Ben Carson said no thanks—but would have been a “perfect choice” in a bi-partisan list of “perfect choices” to head the Department of Education. That is: presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Barrack Obama have seemed constitutionally obligated to select individuals who lack all experience in education. 

I think Mr. Trump should make me Surgeon General. I mean, I watch a lot of TV shows about doctors and hospitals.

Anyway, it could be worse. I wonder if America’s four million front line educators were really ready for Ms. Eva Moskowitz to head the Department. Moskowitz was also under consideration, but informed the president-elect that she had no interest in the cabinet position. This is true even though Mr. Trump wants to push school choice even farther and even though Moskowitz believes every child should be allowed to attend an elite charter school—unless that child has serious behavior issues or crippling handicaps.

Those kinds of children, if they manage to get through the doors of Success Academy at all, should all return to the regular public schools.

Meanwhile, like so many leading advocates of school reform, who only care about the children, Moskowitz piles up the dough. I can’t find current figures; but she made $567,500 for the 2012-2013 school year, running Success Academy Charter Schools, an operation serving 11,000 students. Not bad, considering school superintendents in  large urban, public school districts with a hundred times as many students make half as much.

Then again, what did anyone expect when American education has been turned into a get-rich-quick, money-making scheme? Didn’t we realize shady operators would focus only on the money?

Exhibit A: Trump University!

Our normally litigious president-elect settled a series of fraud cases this week, aimed at his famous university, first denying fraud had been perpetrated in his name, and then coughing up $25 million to pay the claims of thousands of students who were prepared to argue in court that they had in fact been…um…defrauded. I realize many Trump fans don’t believe anything they read except what can be found on the backs of cereal boxes; but even Fox News couldn’t help reporting the Trump University debacle.

And if you haven’t noticed, you can pretty much shake any for-profit education tree and money-grubbers and even outright crooks will rain down round your ears. I’ve previously highlighted K-12, Inc., another stellar charter operation, where five top executives paid themselves a total of $35.4 million in salary and bonuses for 2013 and 2014. I’ve focused on Corinthian College. There, too, five top college officers took $22 million in salaries and bonuses over a two-year period. Sadly, once the U. S. Department of Education started investigating—citing high pressure recruiting tactics to juice enrollment—the Corinthian enterprise came unraveled and the school went belly up.  

(The money continues to roll in for the top officials at K-12, Inc. This chart shows compensation for Fiscal 2016.)

Too bad students, lacking preparation to do real college-level work, had been tricked into enrolling. 

To bad they had to borrow 86% of all money used to attend Corinthian. 

Too bad they agreed to pay interest rates as high as 17.9% for those very loans, nicely set up for them and payable to...Corinthian.

Good news? 

The profiteers profited. 

Now thousands of young Americans are stuck with those loans—and stuck with college credits from Corinthian of such dubious value that reputable institutions of higher learning won’t accept them for transfer.

And now, speaking of money, we come to the matter at hand: the potential elevation of Michelle Rhee to head up the U. S. Department of Education. 

Perhaps the most famous graduate of Teach for American, Rhee labored three long years in a real classroom, at which point she realized she knew everything there was to know about fixing the nation’s schools. Quickly, she rose through the ranks of educational bureaucracy and took control of the Washington, D. C. Public Schools. As chancellor, Ms. Rhee stressed improving math and reading scores in keeping with dictates of No Child Left Behind.

That law is now defunct; but raising scores in accord with that law was, according to Rhee at the time, really important.

What happened when Rhee pushed administrators and staff to improve test scores? As anyone could have predicted, successful schools raised their scores! If scores didn’t rise, Rhee fired staff and administrators. Typically, she fired one principal while cameras were rolling, filming a documentary about the wonders of Michelle Rhee. In just three years as head of Washington schools, Rhee managed to terminate hundreds of educators because scores on standardized tests mattered—as long as those particular tests were being pedaled by politicians and school reformers.

All the while, Ms. Rhee was making her name in education. She gave speeches and charged colleges $35,000 to impart her wisdom. She wrote books about how to fix education and they sold wonderfully. Even Oprah gave her love on her program. But Rhee’s abrasive style was also rubbing people the wrong way. 

True. There were educators who loved her. Those who raised test scores (and many did so with great gusto) got fat on bonuses. 

Unfortunately, for Rhee, reporters also started digging. 

At one school, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, test score improvements were stunning. In 2006 only 10% of students at Noyes scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math. Two years later 58% did. It was amazing; and Rhee basked in the admiration of the leading school reformers. In 2009, Noyes was one of 264 schools nationwide to win a prestigious National Blue Ribbon School award. Twice, in 2008 and 2010, Ms. Rhee awarded teachers at Noyes (which served preschoolers through eighth grade) $8,000 bonuses. Wayne Ryan, principal at the school, was awarded $10,000 on both occasions. 

Unfortunately, a 2011 report by USA Today revealed that high-performing schools in Rhee’s district had “extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.” The pattern showed up in 103 schools, more than half of all buildings in the D. C. district. 

In 2009 seventh-graders in one class at Noyes averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures on the reading test. 

The average, citywide, was less than 1. 

What transpired in the meantime? The D. C. schools won another $75 million in the “Race to the Top” program run by Arne Duncan, then U. S. Secretary of Education, because Duncan also loved standardized testing. Principal Ryan was featured in a series of recruiting advertisements, calling him “one of the shining stars of DCPS” and a man known for his “unapologetic focus on instruction.” 

The Office of State Superintendent of Education also began to notice all the fishy smells and ordered an investigation. Top D. C. school officials dragged their bureaucratic feet. The State Superintendent’s office asked McGraw-Hill to examine test results at 96 D. C. schools, including 8 of 10 buildings which won TEAM awards from Rhee “to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff.” Based on rising scores in 2007 and 2008, more than $1.5 million in bonuses had been paid. Now McGraw-Hill found that three award-winning schools had wrong-to-right erasure rates that raised red flags in 85% of classrooms. After 2009, the district hired an outside investigator to examine eight schools, including Noyes. Just like that, test scores plunged in 2010. A second investigation, after tests were completed that year, found 41 schools, including Noyes again, had at least one classroom with unusually high numbers of erasures. 

When Rhee was reached by phone in 2011 she reminded reporters she was no longer chancellor of the D. C. schools and passed on chance to comment. D. C. officials also refused to comment at the time—refused to let reporters visit schools—refused to let them talk to principals, including Adell Cothorne, the new leader at Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus. 

And now we discover that Michelle Rhee might be our next U. S. Secretary of Education.

I can’t say where we’re headed in the future; but I am ready to make one bold prediction. If President Trump selects Rhee—and the Senate confirms her—we can expect one dramatic change in U. S. education. 

Test scores are surely going to rise!

(Eraser sales will also skyrocket.)

If You Write about Education, Shouldn't You Talk to Educators?

Sometimes, you have to wonder. 

Do the people who write about American education ever talk to educators? And do they know they should?

Those questions came to mind again when I read “The Education Assassins,” a recent editorial in The New York Times.

The title was slick and hooked my attention. Luckily, no actual bullets flew, but it turned out there were those who hoped to eliminate the U. S. Department of Education.

Typically, the author, Frank Bruni, made mocking reference to Governor Rick Perry, who wanted to eliminate the Department, but couldn't remember which one. Common Core was also mentioned. Readers learned that Jeb Bush was for Common Core. Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat made a cameo appearance in the column. So did Lamar Alexander, former U. S. Secretary of Education, now, like Murray, interested in reducing the Department's sway. 

Indeed, if Ms. Murray and Mr. Alexander have their way, new legislation might hamstring Mr. Duncan. 

“There’d be no federal say, for example, in how (or if) public schoolteachers are evaluated. If the bill passes—and it has significant bipartisan support—the department would be a shadow of itself,” Mr. Bruni warned.

Naturally, he talked to several school reformers, none of whom ever taught, to get insights for his editorial. And what story about U. S. education would be complete without Joel I. Klein adding a bit of folksy wisdom? Without federal involvement, the former chancellor of the New York City Schools insisted, “Some states will do good stuff, but there will also be laggards and a lot of happy talk.”

I found myself thinking: “Who knows ‘happy talk’ better than Mr. Klein?” (He certainly knows very little about teaching.)

When Mr. Klein ran the NYC schools he routinely faulted teachers. He insisted “grading schools” was key to improvement. He was all for charter schools, never realizing charter schools might drain off capable students, leaving kids with disadvantages concentrated in neighborhood schools.

Mr. Klein never realized this might happen because Mr. Klein is a lawyer by trade, hired by a billionaire mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg (who never taught) to run the schools. Certainly, Mayor Bloomberg’s attitude was clear. He once said the problem in education was that we no longer hired teachers from the top of their college classes. They came from the bottom twenty percent, “and not of the best schools.”

Yes. Teachers were the problem. Sure, sure. Sure they were.

At this point, I began to ponder some of the myriad problems every frontline educator can see. I thought back to poor Mike, who missed 106 days of class in one year, not because he was sick but because his mother allowed it, when I had him in seventh grade. I thought about how, while Klein and Bloomberg were spending their days bashing teachers and hatching plans to increase the weight of standardized test scores in determining teacher pay, they missed an obvious obstacle.

That is: 200,000 New York City students, roughly 1 in 5, missed a month or more of classes every year.

Nevertheless, I kept reading. I was praying Mr. Bruni might talk to a real teacher or principal or school counselor. Several think tank reformers were quoted. A politician called Duncan “a helpful voice” during his six years as head of the Department of Education. 

Again, I found myself wondering: “Duncan? The poor man hasn’t strung two sentences together in six long years to indicate he has any idea what challenges frontline educators face.”

What, then, does Mr. Bruni miss in the end?

He misses what almost all writers about education today miss. No one asks educators who survived the slaughter at Sandy Hook how much “grading schools” might have helped on that sanguine day. 

No one talks to the principal at my wife’s old school about tying teacher pay to test scores, and how that might compare to being chased from her building by a knife-wielding, schizophrenic mother. 

No one offers suggestions for what frontline educators might do to aid the 6,000,000 children who are victims of abuse and neglect every year in the United States. 

No one goes into a tough Chicago neighborhood, where Mr. Duncan once ran the schools, and asks teachers, “What help could you use in meeting the needs of teens who happen to be gang members?”

No one ever asks.

I spent thirty-three years with the Loveland City Schools, a highly-regarded system, just outside Cincinnati. And if the Department of Education ever did anything to help me or help my peers or help students, I am not aware of it. The bureaucrats, politicians and reformers talk blithely about what educators must do.

They never talk to educators.

They don’t talk to Chris Burke, now principal at Loveland Middle School, and an educator I greatly respect, who says increased standardized testing has been detrimental, forcing his staff to spend nineteen days on test administration this year. “It’s all about compliance,” he tells me, with a hint of resignation. He mentions, to my surprise, that 35% of seventh graders at LMS opted out this year.

Katie Rose and Jenn Ramage, two dedicated young teachers, join the conversation, calling the testing process “nuts.”

“Nineteen days,” Katie exclaims. “Can you believe it? And forget Reconstruction [which the curriculum says she should cover at year’s end]. I only had one day left to cover the Civil War.”

Her disgust in the face of all this piddling interference with real attempts to educate teens is clear.

I’ve been working on a book about teaching for some time, myself. And I keep asking every teacher or retired principal or counselor I meet what they think about the direction we’re headed. I try to pose one question in the most neutral tone possible: “Do you think all the testing and recent changes in education have enhanced learning, hurt learning, or had, basically, a neutral effect?”

At a wedding in California a few weeks ago, I sat down beside a woman who turned out to be a retired elementary school principal. When I got to the word “hurt” in my usual query she interrupted. 

“HURT,” she said emphatically. “Does anyone say anything else?”

I laughed and said she had to let me finish. “But, to be honest, no,” I admitted. “They don’t.”

That’s what those who write about education might discover if they ever took time to ask. The growing backlash against testing, the bitter disdain for Mr. Duncan among frontline educators (the NEA called for his resignation in 2014), the willingness to shut down the U. S. Department of Education, these are not matters of mere politics.

These issues affect educators and the children they deal with every day.

When I asked Jeane Weisbrod, my old friend, who retired recently after a career in Loveland, she told me me she resented all the testing because it meant “sacrifice of valuable instructional time.”

I was talking with current staff members, and retirees, during a ceremony to honor Jeane and Diane Sullivan, a retiring art teacher, and Ora Sue Peabody, a fine school secretary, who was hanging up the phone for good in July. 

Jane Barre, former Loveland Middle School principal, called the metastasizing testing burden “lunacy” when I asked her opinion. Jane went on to serve as assistant superintendent for another local district after she left Loveland. When she began that job testing took up ten percent of her time. By 2009, testing ate up half her day, making it hard to accomplish anything else of substance. Diane chimed in to say she felt sorry for younger teachers who would have to deal with this mess for years to come. Like Diogenes, but stopping occasionally to sample the brownies, I was looking for anyone who felt our “leaders” in Washington knew what they were doing. Sue Lundy and Lauren Cripe, two of the best educators I ever knew (Sue is retired; Lauren just finished her tenth year) agreed all the testing was terrible. 

Sue called it “crazy.”

So, there you have it. That’s what Mr. Bruni missed. Those who work with children, or have worked with children, believe Secretary Duncan and the politicians have absolutely led us down the wrong path. 

They believe learning has suffered harm.

In fact, if we want to help children, here’s what we might do. Take part of the $70 billion spent by the Department of Education every year. Hire more counselors and more psychologists to work directly with kids. Get creative if you want to aid our nation’s youth. Take $20 billion and award $20,000 college scholarships to a million high school seniors every year. Use another $20 billion to help 1.6 million children who experience homelessness, who suffer both in and out of school. 

That would provide $12,500 in good housing for each child.

I think real educators, those in the academic trenches, could come up with all kinds of ways to use money and manpower to improve the lives of the boys and girls they work with every day. Arne Duncan? Let him go into a classroom in an inner city Chicago school. Let him work with teens in gangs.

Joel I. Klein? Let him have a chance to teach, too. He can work with kids who've been sexually abused at home and see how much “grading schools” matters.

If Mr. Bruni were to ask me, or ask most of my old colleagues and friends, what we thought about the Department of Education, I suspect most of us would say, “Sure. Scrap it. And scrap all the standardized tests.”

Those tests cost $1.7 billion annually.

I’d tell him: “Take that money and divide it among 17,000,000 elementary school students. Let each child take $100 to the nearest book store. Let them buy books—and see if reading scores don’t go up faster than they have in the last fifteen years, despite this absurd fetish for all the standardized tests.”

If nothing else, if you are writing about education, start by talking to people who actually do the educating. 

Spend more money on books. That might help students improve reading scores.

*********

If you liked this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon.

Or contact me at vilejjv@yahoo.com and I can probably send you a copy direct for a little bit cheaper. My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot do.

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

I actually taught for 33 years, more than all nine U. S. Secretaries of Education, Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Brill and about a hundred more “school reformers” combined.

Yep. Combined!

Rick Perry Was...Um...Uh..Right: Get Rid of the U. S. Department of Education

IF YOU SAW RICK PERRY'S MOST RECENT DEBATE PERFORMANCE you know it was... um...not marked by...uh...Let me think. Give me a second. Oops.

I think the word I'm looking for is "coherence."

At the time, Mr. Perry was outlining the steps he'd take if elected president and trying to list three federal departments he'd eliminate. One was Commerce. Another was Education. The third was... uh...well... maybe Baking?

Still, the Governor was onto something. I'm a retired teacher and the chances I'd vote for Perry are as slim as a New York City fashion model. That doesn't mean I wouldn't be thrilled to see President Perry, if he should win, close down the U. S. Department of Education. I doubt many teachers would mourn its passing, or notice, unless someone announced it over the PA system at their school and gave them the news. 

Like I say:  I can't see a scenario where I end up voting for the Texas Hair Model. But if he does get to the Oval Office I hope one of his first acts is to issue an executive order that sends Arne Duncan, that insufferable ass, right back into the classroom in the lowest performing school in the US of A. 

I'd like to see Arne do a little teaching. 

Really, what does the Department of Education do?  (Its budget for 2011 was estimated to be $71 billion and employees numbered  more than 5,000.) I'm going to say this for sure:  I taught 33 years, and never saw a hint of evidence that what the Department was doing was helping teachers or in any way helping students.

So let's see if we can't cut a few dollars from the federal deficit. On this Tea Party folks and Real Teachers can unite. According to Friday's New York Times, even the Department of Agriculture is cutting back these days. Dozens of reports are being scrapped this year. So we're not going to have the annual goat census (it was 3,000,000 in 2010). 

The catfish census (177,000,000) is out and we're going to have to do without a report that calculates the value of honey sales by North Dakota bee keepers ($70 million). 

We won't know any more which state is #1 in sales of mink pelts (Wisconsin) and we won't have a clue which state (Texas!) shipped the most flats of pansies.



Maybe we don't need the Department of Education.
Maybe we need to get all bureaucrats and education refomers into the classroom.
Then let them work their magic!

Young teachers might not recall:  but the U. S. Department of Education was created in 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, and then turned over to control of Shirley Hufstedler, who you might guess had an extensive background in education.

No! If you guessed that, you'd be a total doofus! That would have made sense. Ms. Hufstedler was a former federal judge.

It was the start of a tradition, where seven out of nine people who ran (or run) the Department never taught a day in their and another taught only phys. ed., and so routinely failed to understand the challenges in a real classroom. So what did we gain? Well, the people at Education churned out all kinds of reports. They tabulated and measured. They put together cool charts and graphs, issued all sorts of regulations, and multiplied the paperwork speech therapists and special education teachers and just about everyone else had to complete.

(If Secretary Duncan and leading reformers have their way teachers are soon going to have to fill out a whole lot more forms and we're going to bury U. S. education in useless statistics.)

Then in 2002, the Big Wigs at the Department of Education began focusing on implementation of No Child Left Behind. They talked a great game:  helping states write new standards, then national standards when state standards yielded less-than-zero results. Mr. Duncan almost guaranteed success and called for a "Race to the Top" program, a bold new plan to improve America's public schools.

If you think it's a mess now, wait until the avalanche of "value added" charts and graphs hits schools and bureaucrats set about trying to measure everything every teacher does, has done, or ever might think about doing, from the first grade art teacher (number of brush strokes per child), on up to the middle school speech therapist (correct syllables spoken), to the high school band director (notes played per minute).

It's going to be the I.R.S. model for education.

WE'VE SPENT BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on this effort--and about all we've got to show for it is more frustration for the good teachers, who are always swamped trying to do their jobs.

Don't get me wrong:  We need to do more to weed out bad teachers. And once we do I say we fill those empty spots at the front of the classroom with the likes of Duncan and Michelle Rhee, with Wendy Kopp of Teach for America (let that lady TEACH!), Joel I. Klein, self-appointed saviour of the New York City Schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who says the key is grading schools), Steven Brill (who wrote a book fixing schools) and Davis Guggenheim (producer of Waiting for "Superman") to name just a few.

We don't need to wait for Superman. We've got Rhee and Kopp and Brill, sitting on the bench, telling real teachers what to do, just waiting for the chance to get in the game and save the day.

So...yeah....um...I say we do without the goat census and close down the Department of Education. And for god sakes, make these experts TEACH.