- In D.C., Business and Public Charter Schools Work Together [Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS mentioned]
- D.C. officials may close Imagine Southeast charter school for poor performance [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
- Now that Imagine Southeast PCS is to be closed replacement should be found [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
- Charter schools and their expulsion policies
- Not enough progress in D.C. schools
- Catania: No plans to reinvestigate alleged cheating in DCPS
- D.C. schools pass yet another test
- Michelle Rhee, the education celebrity who rocketed from obscurity to Oprah
- Time for Michelle Rhee to probe test tampering
- Rhee had her flaws, but she wasn't a cheater
In D.C., Business and Public Charter Schools Work Together [Elsie Whitlow Stokes PCS mentioned]
The Washington Times
By Tom Nida and Linda Moore
January 14, 2013
Public education has changed dramatically in the District of Columbia since Congress temporarily awarded responsibility for it to a federal control board 16 years ago.
Today, 43 percent of all District students enrolled in public school attend independently run but publicly funded charter schools, outside of the control of District of Columbia Public Schools. Moreover, the District public school system has changed significantly since it became accountable to the mayor five years ago.
Washington’s 98 public charter school campuses are free to design their own educational programs, while being held accountable for improved student performance by the city's Public Charter School Board.
Innovation in the classroom has had to be accompanied by innovation across the entire range of operations that are necessary to run a successful school. Accordingly, new, mutually beneficial opportunities for partnerships between public charter schools and area businesses have opened up.
One such local business is Ritz-Carlton, which provides career education for sixth graders at a local public charter school. Through the Alliance, Ritz-Carlton began working with the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, located in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast D.C. As part of the company’s Community Footprints Program, Ritz-Carlton afforded the school’s sixth graders the opportunity to see firsthand how jobs such as chefs, engineers and human resource professionals are connected to their studies. The students participate in an “introduction to the hospitality industry” day at an area hotel. The partnership also extends to employees hosting students at classes in etiquette, teaching food safety at the school and judging their science fair.
Part of the Stokes’ school mission is community service, and Ritz-Carlton’s partnership supports this. Ritz-Carlton joined the school’s students and staff when they volunteered to plant trees on the Anacostia waterfront. The hospitality chain also provided the school a $1,000 grant to fund the school’s work, which included planting more than 100 trees in the area.
Ritz-Carlton also assisted when students prepared food at D.C. Central Kitchen, which provides meals for low-income adults and at-risk neighbors. They also support Stokes’ community service work through a formal grant and donated a new school playground.
As a public charter school, Stokes is free to enter into such partnerships without having to ask permission from the city, or comply with the school system’s plan, as city-run schools are required to do. Charters’ freedom to set their own school curriculum and culture create opportunities for area business collaboration, enabling schools to connect unique aspects of their program with relevant local corporate partners.
Stokes runs an acclaimed wellness program, which aims to introduce healthy living habits to its students. The program is rooted in the school’s decision to prepare and serve in-house low-sodium, low-fat meals using locally sourced, made-from-scratch ingredients, many of which are grown and harvested in the school’s on-site organic garden and prepared by the school’s French-trained chef. The school also operates an after-school fitness program.
In creating this program, the school was significantly assisted by its partnership with the local Whole Foods on P Street in Northwest. Whole Foods donated cookware, making it easier to prepare food at school, and fresh fruit and vegetables. When the school decided to serve fresh, sustainably farmed fish, the store donated tilapia for a month, and Whole Foods fishmongers spoke to students about sustainable fishing. The school also was included in a Whole Foods program whereby the store donates 5 percent of its profits to its nonprofit partners for one day.
Stokes teaches its pre-Kindergarten through sixth-grade students to speak, write and think in three languages — French, Spanish and English — and serves three meals a day to students, 3 in 4 of whom are eligible for federal lunch subsidies. Still, the students score 16 percentage points higher on D.C.’s standardized reading and math tests than their peers in the city-run school system.
These rewarding business partnerships help the school to provide a high-quality public education to many low-income students. More area businesses should consider them.
Tom Nida is regional vice president of United Bank for D.C. and Maryland. Linda Moore is founder and executive director of Elsie Whitlow Stokes Public Charter School.
D.C. officials may close Imagine Southeast charter school for poor performance [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 11, 2013
District officials have taken the first step toward closing Imagine Southeast, a Ward 8 public charter school, citing its failure to meet academic achievement expectations and other goals set forth in its charter agreement.
“The students in the school are not being well served,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which at its Thursday meeting voted to begin revoking Imagine Southeast’s charter.
The decision drew passionate objections from more than a hundred parents, students and school employees, who showed up to defend the school and plead that it be allowed to stay open.
“My children have wonderful teachers,” said Jaime Mills, the mother of two students at the school. “I’m scared if the school closes that they won’t have that attention, that they will get lost in another school.”
Other parents praised the school’s single-gender classes, saying that their children have thrived at Imagine Southeast after struggling elsewhere.
“We don’t see the deficiencies that you guys see,” said Yolanda Smith, vice president of the Parent Teacher Organization.
The board will hold a public hearing within 45 days before making a final decision. If it votes in favor of closure, Imagine Southeast would be shuttered this spring.
The city’s charter school board reviews each school’s performance every five years and can close any school that fails to meet agreed-upon expectations or violates laws. Since 2000, 28 charter schools have had their charters revoked or closed on their own.
Imagine Southeast serves more than 600 elementary and middle-school students. It opened in 2008 and has since failed to meet four of the five goals laid out in its charter agreement, according to charter board staff.
Among the problems cited was “dismally low” academic achievement, according to board staff.
Although students’ reading performance at Imagine Southeast has improved in the past two years, the proficiency rate on standardized tests is about 37 percent, below the city average of 46 percent, according to the revocation proposal.
The school’s math proficiency rate, 33 percent, is also lower than the city average of around 49 percent.
Attendance rates at Imagine are among the lowest in Ward 8, and reenrollment rates have never risen above 70 percent — a sign that parents are not satisfied with the school, according to the charter board.
Leaders of Imagine Southeast said they are well aware of the need for improvement and have already begun making changes. They said they were shocked to learn that the school is in danger of closing and that they deserve more time to show progress.
“We feel a little bit like the carpet’s being pulled out from under us in the middle of what’s going to take a little more time,” Matt Engel, vice chairman of Imagine Southeast’s board, said in an interview.
The city charter board also said that Imagine Southeast has violated several laws, including those governing the education of students with disabilities.
School leaders said they could not immediately comment on the allegations.
Imagine Southeast is part of a network operated by Arlington County-based Imagine Schools, a for-profit company that with an affiliate nonprofit operates about 70 schools in 12 states and the District, according to its Web site.
In the District, more than a dozen charter school campuses are ranked lower than Imagine Southeast, according to the charter board’s annual report cards, which grade schools on student academic growth and other measures. Pearson, the board’s executive director, said all schools can expect that their performance will be scrutinized as they come up for review.
Now that Imagine Southeast PCS is to be closed replacement should be found [Imagine Southeast PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
January 14, 2013
We concluded last week with a vote by the D.C. Public Charter School Board to begin the revocation process for Imagine Southeast Public Charter School. We also learned the rational behind this facility being focused on for closure rather than those that comprise the list of Performance Management Framework Tier 3 schools. It turns out that Imagine Southeast had gone through its five year review which highlighted the charter's extremely low academic achievement and student attendance rates, among other serious issues.
The leaders of Imagine Southeast said they were surprised by PCSB move. I sincerely hope this was not the case and that there was close communication between PCSB staff and the school's board and administrators letting them know of the pending action.
I also wish that the board will not wait for a five year or annual review before investigating whether the schools on the Tier 3 list should no longer be operating.
Imagine Southeast currently enrolls 601 students in grades Pre-K 3 to 7. Now that it looks that this site will be shuttered the PCSB should act responsibly by finding a high performing charter to take its place. This will minimize disruption and provide a needed hand to the children of Ward 8.
Charter schools and their expulsion policies
The Washington Post
Letter
January 11, 2013
Regarding the Jan. 6 front-page article “Expulsion rate higher for charter students”:
Discipline policies must be reexamined and overhauled. Charter schools don’t expel too many students; public schools expel too few.
Students who wish to learn ought to have the right to do so free from the distraction of unruly peers. Both our laws and school policies over the past 30 to 40 years and the penchant of parents and groups protecting “student rights” to litigate have forced school administrators to accommodate problem students.
Our schools should provide an environment conducive to learning. We should commit additional resources to care for students behaving badly. Yet we need also to temper our compassion with common sense.
The failure to expel students wastes our most precious resource: time. Time for teachers to teach and students to learn.
Mike Doherty, Takoma Park
●
Ramona Edelin, executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, commented that charter leaders should consider working together to establish an alternative school for students who have been expelled from charters. That is a reminder of past debates.
Ideas for providing an alternative to expulsion by creating a program for temporary placement for students in need of intensive support were presented on numerous occasions to the D.C. Public Charter School Board when I was its executive director. But the conversations never went beyond an acknowledgment that there was a need for such a program, as additional human and capital resources would be required from the D.C. government and charter school operators.
In order for students to learn, they need to be in school. Perhaps this article will spur some much-needed action.
Josephine C. Baker, Washington
The writer was executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board from 2002 to 2011.
●
The District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education enrollment audits and the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reports and graduation reports show that charter high schools take advantage of their freedom from responsibility for educating challenging students by quietly transferring many more students than they expel. This may also help explain why charter lobbyists are opposed to charters becoming neighborhood schools [Mark Schneider and Robert Cane, “Why charters shouldn’t be ‘neighborhood schools,’ ” Local Opinions, Dec. 30].
In its Jan. 6 article on expulsions, The Post described a mother withdrawing her daughter Elsie to avoid having an expulsion appear on Elsie’s record and, unsaid, on Thurgood Marshall Academy’s. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Elsie’s ninth-grade class numbered 138; by April 2010 (18 months later), the 10th grade testing cohort was 87 (28 boys; 59 girls!). Sixty-three students graduated in June 2012, 46 percent of the original ninth-grade class. Fifty-seven of the 75 missing students were removed from Thurgood Marshall’s reponsibility by transfer — presumably to traditional public schools — it claimed a graduation rate of 78 percent, higher test scores and the acclaim of being “high-achieving.”
Between the October 2010 and 2011 enrollment audits, D.C. charter high schools’ ninth, 10th and 11th grade cohorts transferred more than 1,350 students, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. It’s time for a serious investigation of this practice.
Erich Martel, Washington
The writer taught in D.C. public schools from 1969 to 2011.
Not enough progress in D.C. schools
The Washington Post
Letter
January 12, 2013
Regarding the Jan. 7 Metro article “TV show looks at Rhee’s legacy”:
Given questions about the validity of scores on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System standardized test, the federal government’s independently administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides an objective yardstick to measure D.C. students’ progress while Michelle A. Rhee was schools chancellor. The NAEP data show that, while students indeed made gains from 2007 to 2011, all of the meaningful gains were among students not from low-income families (those ineligible for the school lunch program) rather than among the economically neediest D.C. students, whom Ms. Rhee often emphasizes publicly.
Compare the NAEP results for that period for eighth-graders in D.C. public schools:
●In 2011, only 6 percent of low-income students were at least proficient in mathematics. While this was up from 2 percent in 2007, it remained in the single digits, a level that Ms. Rhee dismissed as dismal when she took over. Similarly, for the 2011 NAEP reading scores, the proportion of low-income students who were at least proficient was also a single-digit 7 percent, up only 3 percentage points from 2007.
●By contrast, 35 percent of students from middle- and upper-class families were at least proficient in mathematics in 2011, up 18 percentage points from 2007. In reading, 34 percent of these students were at least proficient in 2011, up 11 percentage points from 2007.
The achievement gains under Ms. Rhee amounted to a tale of two cities: one of near-stagnation for the District’s low-income students, at the bottom of the achievement ladder, and another of progress for everyone else.
Alan Ginsburg, Washington
The writer was director of policy and program studies at the U.S. Education Department from 2002 to 2010.
Catania: No plans to reinvestigate alleged cheating in DCPS
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
January 11, 2013
D.C. Council Member David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the newly reconstituted education committee, said Friday that he has no plans to investigate allegations that staff in some District schools cheated on standardized tests between 2008 and 2010.
Speaking on WAMU-FM’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, Catania pointed to a series of investigations — including by inspectors general for the city and the U.S. Education Department — that have cleared the DCPS of widespread cheating.
“We’ve had a number of sets of eyes on this issue,” he said, adding that he does plan to examine test-security protocols in city schools.
D.C. public schools came under scrutiny for alleged cheating in 2011, when USA Today published an investigation showing an unusually high number of wrong-to-right erasures on answer sheets in more than 100 schools.
Some of the schools with the highest erasure rates showed dramatic gains until test security was tightened, and then they showed dramatic decreases. Teachers and principals at schools with big gains stood to win thousands of dollars in cash bonuses during the tenure of former chancellor Michelle Rhee.
Cheating allegations resurfaced this week when PBS aired a “Frontline” television documentary in which the former principal of an award-winning D.C. school alleged that shortly after the administration of a mid-year practice exam, she walked into a room where three teachers were holding erasers and surrounded by hundreds of test booklets.
Adell Cothorne, the principal of Noyes Education Campus in 2010-11, said that after she tightened security, end-of-year test scores dropped more than 25 percentage points from the year before.
Cothorne’s account was the first such direct and public testimony about cheating in D.C. schools.
Before appearing on Frontline, Cothorne had filed a whistleblower complaint alleging “systemic” cheating in D.C. schools. That 2011 complaint triggered an investigation by the U.S. Education Department’s office of the inspector general, which this week said it had found no evidence of widespread cheating and would not pursue action against DCPS.
Cothorne told “Frontline” that she had not been interviewed by the city inspector general, which said in August that it had found no evidence of widespread cheating.
The federal IG and the U.S. Attorney’s Office did interview Cothorne in July 2011, however, and they shared their findings from that conversation with the D.C. inspector general, according to Marta Erceg of the U.S. Education Department. Cothorne’s allegations do not appear in the report that the city inspector general released in August.
D.C. schools pass yet another test
The Washington Post
January 11, 2013
ADD THE Education Department and the District’s U.S. Attorney to the list of those who have found no evidence that D.C. school officials engaged in widespread cheating on state exams. Their findings support the conclusion that emerged from previous investigations: There is no reason to think that systematic cheating was responsible for the improvements in student test scores recorded during the tenure of Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.
The Education Department’s Office of Inspector General said Monday that its investigation, conducted in tandem with an inquiry by the D.C. inspector general, found no large-scale cheating on standardized tests from 2008 to 2010. Federal officials focused on whether, as alleged by a former school principal in a whistleblower complaint filed under seal in May 2011, results from tampered student tests affected the award of U.S. education dollars. “Unable to substantiate” was the judgment of federal investigators into charges by former Noyes Education Campus principal Adell Cothorne. She said that she interrupted three staff members fiddling with student results on practice tests in November 2010, shortly after Ms. Rhee’s departure, and that her reports to administration officials were ignored.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson called the claims, repeated this week by Ms. Cothorne in a PBS “Frontline” documentary about Ms. Rhee, “fictitious.” There is no record of the incident having been reported, and school officials named in the account have denied being told about it, Ms. Henderson said in a statement. The legal action filed under the False Claims Act — which both school and PBS officials said they were unaware of until this week — could have benefited Ms. Cothorne, since she would have been entitled to a share of any recovered damages.
Officials question why Ms. Cothorne did not mention the incident to independent investigators probing test integrity when they interviewed her on March 17, 2011, or to investigators from the D.C. Inspector General’s Office who visited the school as part of a 17-month investigation prompted by reports in USA Today about suspect test results. “Do you know how scary the situation is. . . . I didn’t trust anyone,” she told us. She said she didn’t recall being interviewed by the private test-security firm hired by the school system, and even after the heightened attention caused by the USA Today reports, she said she didn’t think anyone would be interested in her story. That strains credulity.
At the same time, questions remain about the higher-than-normal erasure marks at Noyes and the troubling drop in test scores after security was tightened. Cheating could explain both. Even though there have been previous investigations, it’s good that the school system plans to conduct its own examination into the specifics of Ms. Cothorne’s charge. Its conclusions should be made public.
Questions about Noyes and the state test don’t change the larger story about Ms. Rhee’s record. D.C. students made significant progress during her tenure as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test on which no one has alleged cheating.
Still, those who believe in measuring student success, as we do, have to recognize that as the importance of testing grows, so does the incentive to cheat. If the answer were to eliminate high-stakes testing, there would be no SATs or professional licensing exams. We believe the vast majority of educators would never stoop to tampering with tests. But cheating allegations have to be taken seriously and security protocols put in place. D.C. officials say they have done both, and there is still no evidence to the contrary.
Michelle Rhee, the education celebrity who rocketed from obscurity to Oprah
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
January 12, 2013
In camera-ready red, Michelle Rhee started the week on the set of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” The next night, she was the subject of an hour-long documentary on “Frontline.” In several weeks, she’ll tour the country to promote her new memoir, “Radical.”
In the two years since her short and stormy tenure as chancellor of the District’s public schools, Rhee has transformed herself into an education celebrity, the likes of which the country hasn’t seen before.
“There is no one else in this space who can command attention like she can,” said Andrew J. Rotherham, a former Clinton administration official who now runs Bellwether Education, a nonprofit group that works to improve education for low-income students. “She has star power. People in the business call it a Q score. . . . For an issue like education, definitely a second-tier issue, that’s no small thing.”
Rhee has created a political organization, StudentsFirst, that gives her a national platform. In just six years, she has rocketed from obscurity to the kind of fame that turns heads at the airport.
“Michelle has accomplished becoming a celebrity,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and Rhee’s frequent nemesis. “She spends a lot of time trying to show that she’s very important.”
And the division she inspired in the District — where she was condemned by some, lionized by others — has followed her to the national stage.
Rhee embodies one extreme in the debate over public education. She believes that every child can achieve, regardless of conditions such as poverty, broken homes, underfunded schools. In her view, the main obstacles are weak teachers, bloated bureaucracies, union contracts. She is driven by data, convinced that learning and teaching can be measured with as much certainty as a dieter tracks progress on a bathroom scale.
Her agenda has provoked aggressive push-back from teachers unions and many progressives, who say that social factors have a profound impact on children and that Rhee’s policies unfairly scapegoat teachers. They say the worship of test data has created a “drill and kill” culture that has narrowed curriculum, sucked the joy out of the classroom and, in extreme cases, resulted in test scandals in Atlanta, the District and elsewhere.
The AFT maintains a Web site, RheeFirst, that carries an image of Rhee wearing a cartoon crown. A “Where is Rhee?” map tracks her appearances across the country, and a “RheeTweet” section scrolls 140-character blasts of snark from Rhee-haters across the Web.
Conservative groups and many leading Republicans adore Rhee. She frequently appears with tea-party-backed governors, schmoozes billionaire donors, and collects awards from right-leaning think tanks and organizations dedicated to shifting tax dollars to private schools.
Some high-profile Democrats also embrace her. “Michelle is a fearless advocate, fully determined to put the focus back where it belongs — on kids,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a onetime organizer for the teachers union who now says the union is an obstacle to better education in his state.
Rhee, 43, aims to spread the kind of change she promoted in the District: closing failing schools, evaluating teachers based in part on how well their students perform, firing weak teachers and paying bonuses to successful ones. She also supports private-school vouchers for low-income children and says parents should be able to shut down weak schools through “parent trigger” laws.
In Rhee’s world view, if a student isn’t learning, adults — in the form of bureaucracy — are to blame.
“There’s no shortage of highly effective educators, of innovators,” Rhee said in an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday. “The problem is that the kids and educators have to operate in an insane bureaucracy.”
After her boss, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), lost his bid for reelection in 2010 — due in part to political fallout from Rhee’s teacher firings and school closures — Rhee mapped out her next move.
Convinced that Fenty’s defeat came at the hands of the teachers union, Rhee believed that the nation needed a political counterweight to the unions in debates over education that were taking place nationwide.
With help from her husband, Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who is the Democratic mayor of Sacramento, Rhee created StudentsFirst to push her agenda in state capitals, where most education policy is set.
“There hasn’t been a national group advocating on behalf of kids,” she said. “The unions have a 30-year start on us. But we’re creating that balance. Putting pressure on legislatures to make decisions in the best interest of kids.”
She communicates that idea in ways that grab attention — by wielding a broom on the cover of Time magazine as if she is sweeping out bad teachers or by unflinchingly firing a principal as a television camera rolls, with little regard for his dignity.
‘A very simple message’
“She’s got a very simple message that is highly seductive because it appears to give an answer to our difficult education problems,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal-leaning research group.
It would be great if her ideas translated into good results for kids, Kahlenberg said.
“But, in fact, we’ve got two grand experiments of her theory,” he said. “The first is the American South, where teachers unions are weak and the schools are not lighting the world on fire. The other is charter schools, which are 88 percent non-unionized. In charters, you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do — fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre results.”
So Rhee’s premise is faulty, he said. “But it’s a simple idea, and in the media, it’s powerful to have heroes and villains,” Kahlenberg said. “The fact that evidence doesn’t back her up doesn’t seem to prevent her from getting wide notoriety.”
Rhee notes that her brand of education reform is increasingly gaining traction. The idea of using student test scores to evaluate teachers, for example, began in the District in 2009 under Rhee. Today, 38 states have implemented similar systems or plan to do so.
“Things that five years ago people never would have said were possible are happening at a large-scale level nationally,” she said.
Rhee announced the creation of StudentsFirst two years ago from the best perch possible: Oprah Winfrey’s couch. She declared the birth of a national movement, pledged to raise $1 billion in five years and got a hug from Oprah.
But StudentsFirst has a long way to go.
From its founding in October 2010 through July 2011, the organization raised $7.6 million, the most recent federal tax filings show. Kahlil Byrd, who became president of the group in November, said donors have pledged $150 million by 2016.
Rhee, as the chief executive of StudentsFirst, which employs 124 and is based in Sacramento, earns an annual salary of $61,000, according to federal tax filings.
But she can make almost as much as that through a single speaking engagement. According to Creative Artists Agency, Rhee Enterprises LLC charged $50,000 per speech in 2011 and required first-class travel arrangements, including a chauffeured town car for travel between her appearances and the airport. But a spokeswoman has said that Rhee often reduces that fee for organizations she favors.
StudentsFirst is not required to disclose its backers, but several, including the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, have reported donations to Rhee’s group.
“She can reach wealthy donors that I don’t think anyone in the school-reform movement has been able to,” said Michael Petrilli of the right-leaning Fordham Institute. “For a long time, reformers were fighting union political donations with white papers. She has leveled the playing field in terms of political campaign contributions, in terms of savvy.”
In the 2012 general election, StudentsFirst contributed to 105 candidates in eight states. Most of those candidates — more than 80 percent — won their races. And the vast majority were Republicans.
In California, StudentsFirst spent $2 million on two State Assembly races. In both cases, the candidates were Democrats. One won; the other lost.
It also spent $500,000 in Michigan to defeat a ballot initiative that would have enshrined collective bargaining rights into the state constitution. The measure, which turned out to be a classic fight between business and labor, was defeated by voters.
The organization pumped $452,000 into Tennessee in 2011 and 2012, where Rhee’s ex-husband, Kevin Huffman, serves as state education commissioner.
Rhee has appeared at the side of Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who tried to weaken collective bargaining rights in his state, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who succeeded on that front. She served on the transition team for Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), while New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) wanted to appoint her state education commissioner.
Rhee, who calls herself a liberal Democrat, says StudentsFirst is bipartisan.
“The unions want to frame us up as right-wing Republicans,” she said. “The reality is the landscape is shifting now, the Democratic Party is shifting. The policies on our agenda — the vast majority are things that [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan and President Obama have made priorities. We’re not right-wing crazies.”
‘A force for change’
Indeed, when Rhee left the District, Duncan saluted her as “a pivotal leader in the school-
reform movement” and predicted that she would be a “force for change wherever she goes.”
Rhee named a string of Democratic politicians, including Villaraigosa, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, who support many of the same policies promoted by StudentsFirst.
And yet some prefer to keep their distance.
In Connecticut in March, while Malloy was lobbying the legislature to pass a package of education-policy changes that he had carefully negotiated with teachers unions, he was supposed to attend a rally on the statehouse steps.
Rhee, who supported the deal as a “good first step” but wanted to see the labor provisions further weakened, also planned to attend.
When Malloy learned that Rhee was going to share the stage, he stayed away.
In a statement at the time, Malloy’s spokesman said, “As much as the governor respects people’s rights to be a part of the education dialogue, Ms. Rhee has at times been a divisive figure. And the governor is determined to try and have this discussion about education reform in a way that’s not divisive.”
At least five high-profile employees, all Democrats, resigned from StudentsFirst late last year. According to one source with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the staffers were uncomfortable with some of the bonds Rhee was forging with Republicans.
Rhee dismisses such talk. She said the defectors were all Democrats because “98 percent of our staff are Democrats. The vast majority of our staff. That’s why the churn is mostly Democrats.”
As state legislatures reconvened last week, StudentsFirst issued its first “Report Cards” that graded each state according to whether they embrace the policies of StudentsFirst. The group, Byrd said, has staff in 17 states and is aiming to pass laws and run candidates in 2016.
Meanwhile, new questions were raised by the “Frontline” documentary about D.C. students’ test score gains during Rhee’s three years as chancellor and whether teachers — offered hefty bonuses by Rhee for academic gains — changed scores. Although D.C. public schools officials have said that the allegations were investigated thoroughly and that there was no evidence of widespread tampering, the claims have lingered, casting a shadow over Rhee’s tenure.
Still, Rhee deftly navigates the national debate over the best way to educate children, seemingly unfazed.
It’s hard to say what kind of impact, if any, Rhee will ultimately have.
“As long as StudentsFirst is seen as Michelle Rhee’s group, its impact will be limited,” Rotherham said. “There’s a half-life to these things. The tacit deal with the media is, if you behave outrageously enough, you get airtime. But the staying power is around the substance. That’s where you have to go as a group, as an organization, if you want to last.”
Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.
Time for Michelle Rhee to probe test tampering
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
January 11, 2013
Why do I still have hopes for Michelle Rhee, the leading symbol of education reform in America? It’s because of a call from her two years ago telling me she had said something stupid.
In March 2011, USA Today reported startling numbers of wrong-to-right erasures on the annual D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests in the three years Rhee served as D.C. schools chancellor. The evidence suggested educators had tampered with the answer sheets to inflate student proficiency rates, a crucial measure of school success under Rhee.
On the Tavis Smiley talk show that day, Rhee said the story meant “the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue . . . there is no way test scores could have improved . . . unless someone cheated.” My cell phone rang at 7:30 a.m. two days later. “What I said was stupid,” Rhee said. She said she was glad the possible cheating was being investigated by her successor, Kaya Henderson. I thought it was a brave move, a reflection of Rhee’s candor, flexibility and commitment to kids.
But in her new role as head of Students First, a movement to improve schools through political action, she has taken a wrong turn. She has dismissed a mountain of evidence in Atlanta, Baltimore, the District and other cities that some principals and teachers are faking achievement test results.
Last week, she released a statement concluding there was “no evidence of widespread cheating” on D.C. tests from 2008 to 2010. Her proof? A series of superficial investigations, the parameters controlled by D.C. school brass, that never called on the expertise of psychometricians, never dug into the data, and lacked any reasonable explanations of how such erasures could have been made by anyone but adults.
Rhee is known for being tough-minded. So why not insist that investigators go deep even if it tarnishes her reputation or Henderson’s a bit? Rhee could have, but did not, congratulate Adell Cotherne, a D.C. principal she hired in the summer of 2010, for revealing signs of large-scale tampering at Noyes Education Campus.
On a PBS Frontline documentary, Rhee conceded there might be isolated cases of cheating in D.C., “but I can point to dozens and dozens of schools where they saw very steady gains over the course of the years we were there or even saw some dramatic gains that were maintained.” That’s not true. I examined the year-by-year test results at 115 D.C. schools from 2008 to 2012 and found only 13 with gains like that.
In 1997, Rhee created a nonprofit organization now called TNTP that among other things studied major school districts. She noted that more than 90 percent of teachers in some school systems were rated satisfactory while fewer than 40 percent of their students were proficient in reading and math. But in D.C., where fraudulently high test scores have kept students from getting the extra classroom help they need, she is backing adults trying to save their jobs over children who need her support.
Why not do the kind of studies she did at TNTP? She could turn to the experts who examined tampering in Atlanta, where 178 educators were found to have cheated. They could analyze financial incentives like the TEAM awards that Rhee sponsored as chancellor but have been so misapplied that five of the winning schools are now among the 40 lowest-achieving schools in city. One of them was Noyes. The school’s reading proficiency rate fell more than 50 percentage points from its peak after Cothorne changed the locks on the office where answer sheets were scored so staffers could no longer erase the kids’ answers.
Smart corrections of dumb moves were once a Rhee trademark. She still has a chance to help give the D.C. students she loves the honest educators they need.
Rhee had her flaws, but she wasn't a cheater
The Washington Post
By Richard Whitmire
January 11, 2013
Last week, PBS’s “Frontline” broadcast “The Education of Michelle Rhee,” which sifted through old controversies and raised new issues. Was cheating in the D.C. schools worse than what was admitted during Rhee’s tenure as schools chancellor, and was that cheating triggered by her reforms?
Important questions, and worthy of another look at her legacy. Will Rhee be remembered as a cheat?
That would be the case if any investigators — news reporters, the Education Department, D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent or the firm hired to investigate the cheating — had found that Rhee or top deputies encouraged cheating. That happened in Atlanta. But to date, that has not been found in the District.
More likely, Rhee wasn’t aggressive enough in investigating cheating. But think back to the Rhee years. Her biggest controversies arose from being too tough on teachers. Would her detractors have applauded yet another attack on teachers — this time for cheating? Not likely.
Those trying to make the sins of some teachers into the sins of Rhee merely illustrate how polarizing Rhee was — and still is. There are plenty of reasons to judge her harshly for her time in the District, but cheating doesn’t even make the top 10.
Most of the media coverage over cheating ignores something fundamental: The controversy is over cheating on the D.C. CAS (Comprehensive Assessment System), the local exam whose results are used to reward or punish teachers and principals.
This test has nothing to do with the federal exam used to compare achievement by D.C. students to similar urban students around the country. That test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is the so-called “gold standard” of testing, and it showed that D.C. students made unique progress during the Rhee years.
It is almost impossible to cheat on the NAEP, which is administered by the federal government. In fact, there has never been any evidence of cheating on that test. Besides, there is no motive to cheat on the NAEP: No jobs are at stake.
That’s not to say that Rhee did nothing wrong during her time at the helm of the D.C. schools. She did several things wrong. Actually, more than several.
Rhee and former mayor Adrian Fenty failed to get buy-in for her reforms from African American parents. She failed to give teachers the tools they needed to succeed, such as online lesson plans proven effective by master teachers. She succumbed to the lure of the national spotlight, which bred resentment locally, especially with local news coverage that turned against her. She picked fights that backfired, such as trying to force changes at Hardy Middle School, a school that middle-class African American families had picked out as their turf. The list goes on.
But was holding teachers accountable for their students’ education (which, as the theory goes, encouraged cheating) one of her mistakes? To weigh that question, let’s translate this into a journalistic equivalent. Imagine an aggressive editor launching a new magazine. The editor relentlessly presses her young writers to produce unique articles on a crazy-fast deadline. One day, a writer gets exposed for taking a shortcut via plagiarism. Who’s at fault, the cheating writer or the aggressive editor?
In the real world, the writer gets blamed. It’s insulting to teachers to suggest that a whiff of accountability turns them into cheaters. Even fry cooks at McDonald’s face accountability.
This rush to diminish Rhee’s legacy sidesteps the question of how that legacy should be defined. I decided to write a book about Rhee because I thought her reforms might answer this question: Is it possible to take an urban school district designed almost solely for adults and refocus the system on kids?
At first, Rhee’s reforms appeared to be working. Low-income black students really did start to do better. As it turns out, the many D.C. teachers who for years blamed the shortcomings of their students entirely on their impoverished home lives were only partly right. Schools, at least those that know how to promote effective teaching, can make a difference.
That “difference” may not come close to overcoming the entire impact of poverty, but it is important enough to register on the only index that truly matters — more students graduating from high school ready for some kind of post-secondary education or training.
But in the end, the pushback against the Rhee reforms was too much. Rhee helped drag Adrian Fenty into defeat, which in turn led to her ejection. Does that mean Rhee lost the wrestling match? Not necessarily. The refocus on kids continues under Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
The more urgent question about D.C. schools involves speed. Can the Rhee-Henderson improvements keep up with a D.C. charter district better equipped to ramp up quality quickly? I used to think D.C. schools could hold their own. These days, I’m not so sure.
Richard Whitmire is the author of “The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District.”