Michelle Rhee Calls for Teachers with Telepathic Powers



I'm way smarter than
normal teachers.
Therefore, I rule.

 Every so often, I find myself agreeing with something Michelle Rhee says. The rest of the time, I think she sounds nuts.

Rhee likes to say, whenever she can, that smart teachers are better than dumb teachers, and on that we can all agree. I don't even want a dumb plumber coming to my house.

Rhee, of course, got into teaching by way of Teach for America, a program designed to help graduates of top colleges like Cornell (which Rhee attended), Harvard and Yale get into the classrooms of America. And, if you haven't heard leading education experts rave, trust me, they believe Teach for America teachers are going to save public education because, well, they're smarter than us...I mean smarter than us off-the-rack, bargain-basement, every-day teachers.

You can hardly go two days in a row these days without seeing a story about America's failing system of education, and usually, about the third or fourth paragraph, the writer pinpoints the main problem and it begins with a "T."

What makes Rhee so scary, though, is that she says teachers aren't the main problem, they're the only problem. Parents aren't a problem and neither are students. Certainly, culture is not.

M. Night Shyamalan, the producer, once asked her at a dinner to explain what five factors were most essential to a child's education. Rhee scoffed at the question and assured him there was only one answer: "Have a good teacher three years in a row."

Shyamalan bought it, and so do most of the big names in reform today, like Arne Duncan, but that's like saying all you need to make a good movie are good actors. You'd think the producer of The Happening would know better.

You'd think Rhee would, too, but she has the same problem Duncan and almost all our education leaders have at the start of the 21st century. That is: she didn't teach long enough, putting in only three years in a classroom, two of those working with another teacher, and combining classes.

You probably have to be retired and interested in stories about education to notice:  but if you watch or read a lot of interviews involving Rhee, she always talks about how she and the other teacher took kids who were scoring at "rock bottom on standardized tests" and took them "absolutely to the top." 

This is before record-keeping and gathering data became the watchword of education salvation. So no records exist; but Rhee's old principal backs her up.

Okay. Maybe. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. But what I notice is that Michelle Rhee never mentions the other teacher by name. I find that strange. It's like waiting to see Bigfoot.

It seems like it might be a while.

On this much Rhee is correct:  good teachers make a huge difference. But I taught 33 years and dealt with 5,000 kids and their families, and I wasn't the only person in the process that mattered.

Early in my career, for example, we had a young man in our school who missed 140 days in one year, and without any real medical excuse. It doesn't usually do much good to fail a kid, but in this case we had no choice, and fail him we did. The next year, with his immune system pumping out white blood cells overtime, he missed another 108 days.

Actually, it was a family tradition. There were three older siblings and over the years they all missed at least one day a week on average. Donnie was the last of the line, and the year I had him in 7th grade he was absent 51.5 days first semester. (Maybe he would have come to school more often if I was just smarter.) I did a bit of checking and discovered that in previous years he had missed 39, 43, 45, 49 and 67.5 days.

The year he was in seventh grade we had a fantastic young counselor in our building, and she would often go out to the boy's house and pick him up and get him to school or he would have spent even more time out of class.

We also took his parents to court four times, but the courts couldn't help much either.

Probably not a Teach for America judge.

If education is really all about teachers, then we don't just need smarter teachers. We need teachers with telepathic powers, who can reach kids sitting at home.

I mean, seriously.  Rhee is supposed to be a smart lady. She isn't supposed to miss obvious truths. In 2009, when she was on her way to fixing the Washington, D. C. schools, the average daily student attendance was 88%. That means the average kid was staying home 21.6 days every year.

Imagine the attacks on teachers' unions and all the dumb teachers we'd see in the press (and hear from Ms. Rhee) if the average teacher stayed home that often.


P. S.  Remember the Chicago Public Schools--where U. S. Secretary of Education really made his name?  You know:  the schools he fixed so well? 

In 2010 the average CPS student missed 26 days of class.

Michelle Rhee: Reformer with a Broom

Is the knife more powerful than the broom?

I'm sorry.  But there are times when the sight of Michelle Rhee makes me gag.  She's an attractive young lady.  That's not it.  She probably looks good in a bikini.

It's what she's been saying, and repeating for years now, and the pathetic way pundits and politicians lap up her "wisdom" that makes me reach for the closest wastebasket. 

You probably don't recall, but Rhee first attracted national attention when Time magazine ran a December 8, 2008 story about her “dynamic leadership” of the troubled Washington, D. C. schools. The cover showed her dressed in black, a broom clutched firmly in one hand.  A caption to the left:  “How to Fix America’s Schools.”  And a caption to the right:  “Michelle Rhee is head of Washington, D. C., schools.  Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.”

The title of the story inside was: “Can She Save Our Schools?”  

I taught for 33 years--eleven times longer than the Lady with the Broom--and figured I already knew the answer, but I read the article anyway.           

According to reporters, it was an incident involving Allante Rhodes, a junior at Anacostia High, one of the worst schools in Rhee’s district, that typified the bold leadership the chancellor brought to the task of transforming American education. Rhodes discovered one day that more than half the computers in the school lab were broken. Frustrated, he e-mailed Rhee for help and she answered immediately. (Rhee does everything immediately, and claims to respond to 95,000 e-mails a year.) Soon after, the two sat down for a chat. Rhodes came away impressed. A group of Anacostia kids began meeting with the chancellor to discuss ways to improve the school.

And who could possibly doubt that improvements were needed? 

According to Time students in D. C. were less likely to graduate in 2008 than parents a generation ago. “This is an issue that is warping the nation’s economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with   U. S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.”  

Rhee promised then (and promises now) to address the problem head on, with a “relentless focus on finding—and rewarding—strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom.” 

It was bad enough that Rhee believed everything came down to problems at the front of the class. But it was a surprise reporters didn't notice.

First of all, the idea that we had some growing dropout crisis was nonsense. According to the New York Times (October 30, 2009) the high school graduation rate for Americans, ages 18-24, was 80.7% in 1973, and a quarter of 18-24-year-olds were in college. By 2009 the graduation rate was 84.9% and 39.6% were attending college.

The Department of Education broke the dropout rate numbers down like this:

% of Dropouts (16-24 year olds; all students)[1]:   1980  (14.1); 2008  (8.0)

Whites: 1980  (11.4); by 2008  (4.8)

Blacks:  1980  (19.1), dropping in eighteen years to (9.9)
Hispanics:  1980  (35.2), dropping to (18.3)

Asian/Pacific Islanders:  first categorized in 1990 (4. 9), by 2008 (4.4)

American Indian/Alaskan Native:  1990 (16.4); 2008 (14.6)

Look at those numbers carefully. If it’s all teachers, or tenure, what are the chances that all our worst tenured educators end up on Indian reservations?  Isn't it bad enough we stole all their land?
 
And wait:  Can a teacher MAKE a student drop out? 

Well, no matter. 

The Time article continued:  “In the view of Rhee and reformers like her, the struggle to fix America’s failing school system comes down to a simple question:  How do you get the best teachers and principals to work in the worst schools?” Rhee insisted that the answer was tying teacher pay to test results. “The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher,” reporters noted. “But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few.”

If you were a teacher you read that line and had the sinking feeling that Rhee was deluding herself—that Time was deluding readers—and that experts then, and now, were too arrogant to see they didn't really offer viable solutions. 

Thanks to Rhee, under a new principal Anacostia High was said to be running smoothly. Kids wore uniforms or ended up getting sent home from school. Reporters noted that halls were clear when classes were in session and now the computers all worked. On closer examination, however, it turned out Rhodes and the rest of the Anacostia student body had to be evacuated only weeks before Time ran the story, after fights erupted in the hall and three young men were stabbed. Rhodes told reporters—bad teachers and broom work aside—that he still didn't use the school restrooms which were filthy and unsafe. He waited until he returned “to his grandmothers’ house, where he lives.”

So, if you were a teacher, you rubbed your eyes and wanted to back up a moment. What was the biggest problem in our schools? Wasn’t it “ineffective teachers?” 

Isn’t that what decades of research show? 

Were “ineffective teachers” vandalizing computers before Rhee stepped in to save the day? 

Were they knifing pupils after she did?

Were bad teachers lurking in bathrooms, making them filthy and unsafe? 

And where were Allante’s parents?

If you’re a teacher you wondered why Rhee didn’t use her broom and whack the knives out of the hands of the criminal element and protect the good kids at Anacostia High. In fact, you wondered how test scores could be “a relatively objective measure” of success when students were spilling their blood in the halls outside the classroom door. 

Some day reformers are going to have to face up to the truth and admit that many problems in American education boil down to the stabber vs. stabbed. It’s never a problem to work with kids like Allante Rhodes. He’s motivated and wants to learn. So, I suspect, are most of his peers. Still, we cannot ignore the truth that students were being stabbed at Anacostia High.

This, then, is one of the unanswered questions in education, a question ignored by Rhee and never addressed by voucher advocates nor in landmark legislation like No Child Left Behind.  You can write all the national standards your little reforming hearts desire.

If the question is REALLY teachers, who's going to educate the stabbers and how? 

---

[1] This is the “status dropout rate:”   the percentage of young adults, ages 16-24, who are not enrolled in school and have not earned a high school degree.

Grading School Reformers: Michelle Rhee and the Miracle of Rising Test Scores

THE BIG BUZZ, OR IS IT THE BIG PILE OF B.S. in education reform today is accountability. We are going to hold teachers accountable. We are going to hold their feet to the flames and maybe their grading hands and make them raise standards.

We are going to test students until they're dizzy. And we are going to fire the bad teachers if pupils score low for any reason whatsoever. Then everything wrong in education and in the lives of children will miraculously go away.

That may sound simplistic but that's pretty much the message today. Arne Duncan is for standardized testing and tying teacher pay to test results.Michelle Rhee is for it. President George W. Bush was for it. President Obama thinks it will help. Ohio Governor John Kasich is emphatically for testing-tied-to-merit pay. In fact, it's hard to find a great mind in education reform now who isn't sure testing is The Cure.

Everyone seems to feel that we need to hold teachers accountable for everything. Low test scores. Childhood obesity. The increase in teen pregnancy.

Yeah:  and don't forget the sinking of the Titanic.

Then again, maybe we should start holding our reformers accountable. Let's start with Michelle Rhee, a woman who has become a brand name in education reform. There are times when it seems she's all show and no substance, a fraud really, akin to a shill who pushes penis enhancement pills on late-night tv. Rhee has made grandiose claims about her own success in a classroom but abandoned the classroom after three years to climb the bureaucratic ladder. Eventually she rose high enough to run the Washington, D. C. schools.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE THREE YEARS she ran the city's schools? Well:  she fired a lot of teachers. Hundreds. Yet, getting rid of those "rejects" at the front of the room proved no magic fix. Attendance rates for students fell from 91% in 2006-07 to 88% by 2008-09. Or, put another way, the average D. C. student was staying home 21.6 days per year.

Graduation rates did rise; but SAT scores fell from 1217 (the D. C. web page had a mistake and said 1271) to 1196 in those years. It was decline across the boards:  down 9 points in reading to 405, down 7 in math to 392, down 5 in writing to 399. Apparently, the penis-enhancement pills weren't working.

Then again:  maybe they were. While Rhee ran the schools standardized test scores, so beloved by reformers, soared. Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from 10% of students "proficient" or "advanced" in math in 2006 to 58% in two years. Amazing success!!! Way to go, Michelle Rhee!!! In 2009, Noyes was one of 264 schools across the country to win a prestigious National Blue Ribbon School award.

Naturally, Rhee was thrilled and made the school Exhibit A in her campaign for reform. Twice, in 2008 and 2010, she awarded teachers at Noyes (which serves preschoolers through eighth grade) $8,000 bonuses. Wayne Ryan, the principal at the school was awarded $10,000 both times.

Unfortunately, these stunning improvements were more "saw-the-lady-in-the-box-in-half" trickery than actual progress. An investigation by USA Today revealed that many 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 Rhee's district. And in 2009, seventh-graders in one class at Noyes averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures on the reading test when the average, citywide, was less than 1.

That's penis-enhancement-type success, and while teachers who were fired for low test scores looked for new careers, Rhee was busy touting her success and calling for greater reforming zeal. 

So what happened in the meantime? The D. C. schools won another $75 million in the "Race to the Top" program run by Arne Duncan, because Duncan loves testing measures. Ryan has been featured in recruitment advertisements by Rhee's old district, calling him "one of the shining stars of DCPS" and a man known for his "unapologetic focus on instruction."  Applicants for administrative posts are asked:  "Are you the next Wayne Ryan?"

SOON THE OFFICE OF THE STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF EDUCATION began to catch a whiff of something fishy and recommended investigation. Top D. C. school officials balked and dragged their 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 were paid out. McGraw-Hill found that three award-winning schools had wrong-to-right erasure rates that raised red flags about cheating in 85% of classrooms. After 2009 the district hired an outside investigator to examine eight schools, including Noyes, and test scores plunged. A second investigation, after tests were completed in 2010 found 41 schools, including Noyes again, had at least one classroom with unusually high numbers of erasures.

Even parents were getting suspicious.

The head of the teachers' union called Rhee's push for testing and linking scores and teacher pay an academic Ponzi scheme. Mary Lord, a member of a board which has only power to advise the D. C. schools, puts it succinctly:  "You've handed out these big bonuses. What are you going to do? Take them back? It's a bombshell. It's embarrassing."

Ryan declined to speak with reporters for the story but has since been promoted to instructional superintendent in the D. C. schools.

WHEN RHEE WAS REACHED BY PHONE she told the USA Today reporter she was no longer chancellor of the D. C. schools and passed on a chance to comment.

If you follow Rhee's career you know what a rarity that is. Normally Michelle Rhee loves to talk. In fact, her favorite topic is Michelle Rhee.

D. C. officials also refused comment. They refused to let reporters visit the schools or talk to principals, including Adell Cothorne, the new leader at Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus.

As for Rhee, she's still a leading voice in the charge for education reform. She's still an advocate of testing. She still believes teachers should be held accountable and fired if scores are low.

She's still selling penis-enhancement pills.