Remember those hanging chads? There’s a fresh political battle raging that involves eraser marks.
No kidding — nope.
On Thursday, the Huffington Post carried a piece by Michelle Rhee in which the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor attempted to address a controversy that has divided the education world. Auditors, she wrote, found erasure marks on student tests during her tenure to be within normal ranges.
Who cares? Stick with me a moment, because lots of people do.
Rhee, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, rose to prominence as the swashbuckling change agent who tried to overhaul schools in the nation’s capital. During her three years on the job, outsider Rhee fired more than 400 teachers, closed failing schools and became a darling of a broad swath of the education reform community.
The founder of The New Teacher Project, which recruits and places nontraditional candidates in classrooms, Rhee was credited with raising test scores in the long-struggling district.
Her brash, take-no-prisoners style earned her a starring role in last year’s “Waiting for Superman,” as well as her share of enemies. A few weeks after the film’s release last fall, her chancellorship went down in flames. Then-Mayor Adrian Fenty’s support of her is thought to have cost him his bid for re-election.
After expressing her regrets about mistakes made along the way, Rhee went on to start a reform advocacy group, Students First. Since that time, her lightning-rod role in the debate has only grown in magnitude, with a full-on biography now on bookstore shelves (the title of “The Bee Eater” is taken from an episode in which she silences an unruly class by eating an actual bee) and legions of critics trying to pick apart her record in D.C.
Last month, USA Today published an article questioning whether the rise in academic performance during Rhee’s tenure was in fact the product of chicanery involving standardized testing. The paper resurrected a 2009 “Erasuregate” controversy in which the district paid an outside firm $100,000 to investigate whether an unusually high number of tests had eraser marks that could indicate tampering. The firm found no reason to suspect cheating.
From the tenor, you’d think that we were talking about hanging chads.
The Washington Post has come down on Rhee’s side, noting that unquestioned national tests show the district made real strides during her tenure, but the controversy refuses to die down.
Summarily fire hundreds of teachers and threaten to evaluate the rest based on test scores and you’re going to see high rates of erasure, critics charge. If you can’t quash the message, Rhee’s supporters counter, tarnish the messenger.
Me, I weep to think what the $100,000 a year D.C. now spends defending its tests — which, let’s be honest, are a political tool and not an educational one — could do for actual kids in actual classrooms and, by extension, the teachers trying to engage them.
If you are the least bit interested in Rhee-oriented Kremlinology, these have been a banner couple of weeks for chewy reportage. An annotated list of the highlights:
• A lengthy but frustrating New York magazine story that manages to paint Rhee both as a tool of conservative politicians and of liberal reformers.
• A critical piece by respected education scholar Richard Kahlenberg.
• A commentary by Rhee biographer Richard Whitmire, onetime president of the Education Writers Association, in which he volunteers his thoughts on why she remains so controversial.
• An excerpt (PDF) from “The Bee Eater” itself.
More like this
- Michelle Rhee keeps the beehive buzzing in Minneapolis speech
- Michelle Rhee's Newsweek essay: a great read, with particular relevance to Twin Cities schools
- On Michelle Rhee: Two studies, a dissection of them -- and varying conclusions
- At long last, Michelle Rhee's funders revealed
- Battle over education: Michelle Rhee, Tim Pawlenty and teacher unions
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Comments (13)
As the initial USA Today story points out, the explanation that the changed answers were not the product of cheating is less likely than winning the lottery. Kids change answers, and probably do change more answers when encouraged to review answers by teachers. The results from the changed answers in D.C. - a huge percentage of wrong answers being changed to correct ones - is nearly statistically impossible. Rhee's claim that the outside investigation ruled out cheating is false.
Under Rhee's education "reform" in D.C. teachers who cheated (or were the benficiaries of cheating) got big raises. Teachers who didn't cheat got fired. D.C. has already had to pay out millions of dollars in back pay to teachers wrongfully fired by Rhee, and this is going to lead to more of the same.
If you haven't done it yet find a local http://redbox.com spend $1. (you will get a code for another free movie if a new user so technically it is free).
Rent "Waiting for Superman" for $1 (You blue-blood "lake-front liberals" can rent it in blu-ray for $1.50 . Try to watch it first in the regular way and a second time with the directors commentary. The commentary was done by the director of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" which nearly every school child in the USA has been forced to watch up to five times.
The teacher's union has been trying to discredit everyone connected with "Waiting for Superman" but wouldn't you know it? The teacher's union seems to have somehow had an "epiphany" that gosh darned virtually no teachers are fired due to union contract provisions and gosh darned! the union want to suddenly set up an expedited plan to fire incompetent teachers.
Many billions of dollars of education research failed to note this problem before now. Gosh darned! I'll bet it is just a coincidence that the unions sudden interest and acknowledgement of this "just happened" to coincide with the release of "Waiting for Superman".
What a coincidence!
Beth,
I think you dismissing the controversy a little too quickly. The USA today article clearly demonstrates that "independent" audit you claim found nothing was very limited in scope. Furthermore problems have been found by the district's own investigations, the results of which are being kept secret for the most part.
USA today didn't "resurrect" a defunct story, they went back and examined the controversy. Given the huge education battles currently underway nationwide it's no surprise this is still a hot issue. MN Republicans want to deploy Rhee's model here in MN (after they bust the teachers union). Obviously the true nature of Rhee's results is more than a little important.
I would point out that one could easily resolve this by re-testing a sample of the kids with either an independent tester or an observer. If you were serious about figuring this out that would be the easiest way to do it, and it would probably cost less than $100,000.
Dan, Paul;
I haven't dismissed Erasuregate so much as I am fascinated about how deeply entrenched the two sides have become and how few people seem to be sitting in the middle trying to discern what's worth learning from Rhee's tenure and what's overblown. I'd love to have the opportunity someday to follow her around for awhile just to see whether her day-to-day interactions with people elicit such polarized responses. My guess: Her, um, filter-free communication style probably makes her one of those people who can be impossible to work for--especially when she's right.
I am interested in how those of you who do suspect tests were altered to increase scores address the argument that D.C. students' scores on NEAP exams, which have not been questioned, rose commensurately during the same time period.
I'd also note that I at least don't know enough about the tests in question to know what I think, bottom line, about the relevance of what they might reveal and about Erasuregate. Were they the equivalent of the MCAs? Were they value-added tests capable of revealing how well each child did during a year and, arguably, by extension, how much value their teacher added? If they are the former, then arguably that $100,000 would be better spent equipping teachers to do frequent formative assessments to determine whether every child in every classroom is keeping up. The latter? Then perhaps Rhee's crowning failure was not creating a culture in which teams of teachers used data collaboratively and not punitively.
I mean to lay in a copy of "Bee Eater" over the weekend, but right now I am reading the memoir of another controversial reformer, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. I am struck, particularly in light of how polarized the alternative certification debate has been in Minnesota, over how often and how thoughtfully she reminds readers there are no silver bullets--TFA included--and no silver scapegoats. That education will be overhauled in this country only by employing a combination of many, many solutions, and revisiting and tweaking it.
Mr. Lang -- Teachers unions do evaluate their members and try to help them improve. If their aid is not successful, they support letting them go.
Yeah, if we could only get the educational system to run as good "Windows"... that would be something.
For a little Kryptonite to go with your Superman video rental, I'd recommend Diane Ravitch's review of the film:
The Myth of Charter Schools
New York Review of Books
http://bit.ly/9WN0yP
This review is full of inconvenient truths like:
"Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic."
and:
"The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false."
and finally, for knee-jerk union bashers:
"It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts."
Finland's school teachers are unionized.
To respond to your comment (#4), Beth:
"I am interested in how those of you who do suspect tests were altered to increase scores address the argument that D.C. students' scores on NEAP exams, which have not been questioned, rose commensurately during the same time period."
First, it is not just that people "suspect that tests were altered to increase scores." There is conclusive evidence that it happened. The problem is that the evidence is statistical - that is, it statistically impossible that the changes were not the result of cheating - and most people can't understand that kind of evidence. So when Michelle Rhee comes out and lies about the claims being not credible, a lot of people believe those lies.
As for the other results, while I don't have the same conclusive evidence, I do have reason to "suspect" ANY results involving Michelle Rhee are not accurate. Rhee got her job with D.C. by means of a fraudulent resume. She claimed that while working as a teacher in Baltimore that she:
"Over a two-year period, moved students scoring at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher."
The problem with quoting specific statistics is that they can be checked. And while D.C. did not check them initially, others did later and found that lo and behold, Rhee was lying about improved test scores.
As critics of Rhee point out, there is a long list of verifiable lies she has told. For example after firing hundreds of teachers, she claimed that the teachers had abused children and committed other offenses, which again was a lie. In fact, former teachers in D.C. were recently awarded 7.5 million in back pay because they were fired for seemingly no reason (other than Rhee's whims) and therefore illegally. The irony of Rhee falsely accusing teachers of sexual abuse is that she helped cover up sexual abuse of schoolchildren by her own fiancee, Kevin Johnson, when he was running a school. That is Michelle Rhee's character in a nutshell - falsely accusing people of sexually abusing children, while covering up actual, verifiable (Johnson paid significant settlements) sexual abuse by her fiancee.
Unfortunately, Rhee is able to get by with her lies because she is seen as this heroic reformer, with supporters on the left and the right, and she can pass off criticism as sour grapes by teachers' unions. The good news is that people are starting to catch on. The national reaction to D.C. voters turning out Mayor Fenty because of Rhee was shock. I expect that those voters saw what was happening up close and realized that Fenty had appointed a crook to run their schools.
So going back to your question about how to explain the rise of scores that are not being questioned now, I liken that to asking about the businesses of Tom Petters and Denny Hecker that were not shown to be crooked. Its like asking about all the good things that Rod Blagojevich did as governor. Maybe some improvement did occur under Rhee, but based on the fraud that is known, and her consistent pattern of lies and cover-ups, I don't think you take anything that happened during her tenure at face value until it has all been investigated. And I certainly wouldn't make policy decisions anywhere else based on what happened under Rhee in D.C.
The problem I have always had with Michelle Rhee is that she claims to be a miracle worker and has panaceas to sell. I just don't believe that positive changes in our schools come quickly or easily. And results that do suggest that, to my mind, are always suspect. In the movie "Stand and Deliver", I would have been one of the faithless and nasty bureaucrats insisting on a re-test, one of the villains of the piece.
And Ms. Rhee has provided examples of this in her own life. While the nature of results she achieved in Washington D.C. are disputable, what probably isn't disputable is the claims she made for her own early career as a teacher, were pretty much fabricated.
Teaching is hard, and the gains are slow and incremental. But the fact is that they are there, here in Minnesota, and also incidentally, in the District of Columbia. But from where I sit, what is needed is hard work, and continuity. We need to try different things, find out what works, and what doesn't. We need people who will work in the communities they serve to build the respect for schools and teachers, that I believe is essential for success. What we don't need are self appointed martyrs who use their failure as a way to avoid the difficult, miserable, and incredibly important and rewarding job of actually running an urban school district in America.
I don't know why my comment about this post was censored, but I'll say it again: Beth Hawkins seems to not want to understand the reality of the education deformers.
First, gains by students under Rhee were no greater than those achieved under her two predecessors. Second, the demographics of the students in the district changed under Rhee - fewer minorities and students of poverty.
I anxiously await the next Hawkins credulous review of an education deformer, then all the comments pointing out how the things written by the deformer, and Hawkins, are proven to be distortions or outright lies. Rinse, then repeat.
So much of what is wrong with Rhee's approach to educational reform, and I think, with Ms. Rhee herself, is captured by the bee eating metaphor. First, the notion that we can have a school full of teachers willing to eat bees on command is simply not a viable business model. Second, it's a pretty dumb thing to eat a bee anyway. And thirdly, along with many of the tales Ms. Rhee has shared with us concerning her brief stint as a teacher, this one, in all likelihood is untrue.
Beth Hawkins writes:
"I am interested in how those of you who do suspect tests were altered to increase scores address the argument that D.C. students' scores on NEAP exams, which have not been questioned, rose commensurately during the same time period."
As I wrote in an earlier comment, increases in test scores were no more than under her predecessors, and the student demographics had changed.
I found those facts by googling for about one minute. How is it that Beth Hawkins couldn't do that?
Rob, I agree with you on Rhee and education "reform" but I think you are being a little hard on Beth here. There are so many people on the left who have bought into this bulls**t, including President Obama and his education secretary, and so much misinformation out there, that its hard to get to the truth. Beth wrote a story about Erasuregate, and discussed (and linked to) criticisms of Michelle Rhee, so you have to give her credit for that. A lot of people just want to ignore any criticism of Rhee and her ilk.