Turtles and Hares in Modern School Reform

I ended my last post with a larger point about the problem of "disruption" in modern education reform:

"This is exactly what happens when you rush into big, 'disruptive' changes without thinking about them or fully understanding what you're doing. You break things that weren't already broken and you make messes."

This is not an original thought to me. For one, it's been said over and over again by many more knowledgeable about education than I am. For example, look at Larry Cuban's recent post about turning around urban schools and Paul Vallas, comparing wiser marathon turnaround superintendents to the more impetuous sprinters:

In many instances, sprinter superintendents follow a recipe: reorganize district administrators, take on teacher unions, and create new schools in their rush for better student achievement. They take dramatic and swift actions that will attract high media attention. But they also believe—here is where ideological myopia enters the picture—that low test scores and achievement gaps between whites and minorities are due in large part to reluctant (or inept) district bureaucrats, recalcitrant principals, and knuckle-dragging union leaders defending contracts that protect lousy teachers from pay-for-performance incentives. 

Such beliefs, however, seriously misread why urban district students fail to reach proficiency levels and graduate high school. As important as it is to reorganize district offices, alter salary schedules, get rid of incompetent teachers and intractable principals, such actions in of themselves will not turn around a broken district. While there is both research and experiential evidence to support each of these beliefs as factors in hindering students’ academic performance, what undercuts sprinter-driven reforms in these arenas is the simple fact that fast-moving CEOs fast-track their solutions to these problems, get spent from their exertions or create too much turmoil, and soon exit leaving the debris of their reforms next to the skid marks in the parking lot. Swift actions certainly garner attention but sprinters quickly lose steam after completing 100 meters.

Exactly. So where else did I come around to this way of thinking? Because, let me tell you, it does not come naturally to me.

1) I learned this from my parents. My father is a very cautious and thorough person who doesn't buy a toothbrush without researching it first in Consumer Reports. My mother has worked for thirty plus years as a civil rights lawyer and school finance expert in DC. She has witnessed change and disruption over and over again in the DC Public Schools--so much so that she's seen some of the same changes tried two times, sometimes by the same crop of people. It's not that some changes aren't needed, but first we must ask: How they might these changes work? Have they been tried before? If yes, to what effect? What do the affected communities think about these changes? People like her try to say:Yes, we tried that in nineteen such and such and it was a disaster. Um, yes, that needs to be changed but what are you going to change it with that hasn't been tried before? The school communities were really upset the last time that happened. The reformy response: History? Who needs it? Democracy is over-rated.

2) From the great school leaders I have worked for. This is why I don't argue when reformers (of any stripe) point out how much school leadership is crucial. The best principals and administrative leaders I worked for went about making changes carefully and deliberately with the input of their faculty and staff. I remember my first year at one high school was also the new principal's first year. The ESL teachers there (including me) were really pushing him to make some changes right away and he said, "No, I'm going to observe and learn about how things work already and then I'll see what needs to be changed." He was right. The next year he did make some changes. I didn't agree with all of them and they weren't immune to political considerations, but the transition was so much smoother than it would have been otherwise.

I remember when DC mayor Adrian Fenty came in and hastily replaced Clifford Janey with Rhee. The local community was jarred by the way Fenty did this (locking him out of his office, freezing his e-mail account, not getting input from the public or the City Council, etc.) but not one person said to me that it wasn't time for him to go. I remember saying, well, even so, shouldn't Fenty observe and see how things are working first before he makes such drastic changes? I was thinking of that school principal I had worked for.

3) I live in a very conservative area of Virginia. Sometimes, it's like a foreign country. There are many  things that don't jibe with me, but sometimes there are advantages. They are ssslllooooowww. Which means in education that they haven't instituted big changes without taking their time, though this is changing as the Tea Party slash and burn mentality is alive and well here right now. They didn't do whatever's trendy just to do it--they skipped the whole ed tech boom and invested in what has been thus far a very successful technical and trade high school instead (not that we don't desperately need updated technology and textbooks now, but that's a different story). They don't throw money at problems (although now they seem to be with-holding money at problems). All of this has prevented the hasty, "disruptive" thoughtlessness that pervades so much modern school reform, though as I said that is changing somewhat with the similarly minded "break everything" Tea Party presence.

Before I end, I do want to acknowledge that there is something invaluable in the urgency of a we-can't-wait-for-change-we-have-to-do-it-now modus operandi. There's certainly urgency to move, but just because you're not sprinting doesn't mean you're standing still. The problem is that in modern education reform, as with the Tea Party, there's not much slowing the sprinters down, especially when they are fueled by gobs of dollar bills.

Quick Thoughts on the Missing Memo & Erase to the Top

Some quick thoughts on the discovery of the "missing" memo (also see MSN coverage here) in DCPS/ Michelle Rhee cheating allegations:

a) Everyone and their mom, or should I say dad, knew there was something fishy going on. How does this one memo change anything? Rhee doesn't recall receiving the memo? Right. Rhee says all kinds of things all of the time: to reporters, to pundits, under oath, to investigators, on the StudentsFirst blog. How will this lie be different from any of the others?

b) Are DC, DCPS and the Federal Department of Education now going to announce new investigations? Wouldn't that be tantamount to admitting the their initial investigations were not of the rigor they should have been? But they've already said they were definitive. They weren't, at all. The question is why not.

c) People keep asking for indictments. You know what? I'm looking for a better system. I'm looking for an indictment of Rhee's impoverished vision of education. If Michelle Rhee goes to jail but the awful policies she endorses stay in place, who is that helping? In fact, who does it help that all those folks in Atlanta are going to jail? There need to be consequences but jail isn't the appropriate one. Then again, I don't think jail is appropriate for most non-violent crimes.

d) What's going to happen to all of the teachers and principals who got fired for teaching students with low test scores, especially those with low test scores after having high ones in a school that was marked for cheating. Lawsuits?

What a mess.

180 Days: Inspiration, Desperation, and Deselection

This spring break, I didn't read the three education books I was planning to. Instead, I spent a good chunk of time watching 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School. It's a documentary about DC Metropolitan High School, an alternative or "last chance" school that's part of DCPS.

It was well-done and compelling. I highly recommend it. On a personal level, it reminded me a lot of the DCPS high school where I taught in terms of the population we served and the dedication and humanity of the faculty and staff. It's a great portrait of what many poor students deal with outside of school and what their schools must consider when educating them. It also inspired me to think about returning to such work, although I realize that this is partly due to the dynamism of Principal Tanishia Williams-Minor.

But there were also some things that reminded me of the dark side of disruptive-style education reform efforts and test-based accountability schemes: test prep and destructive firings and lay-offs.

As in my own children's school, the adults at DC Met try their best to make testing the most humane and fun experience possible. Given the stakes and their good intentions, it would be harsh of me to judge them. But I can't help but shake my head in discouragement by the wasted time and effort. So much creativity, so much planning, so much anxiety goes into teaching test prep. Imagine how much more meaningfully and productively that effort could be channeled.

Former Principal Minor is right when she says that DC Met students should have the skills and knowledge to be able to pass such tests as the DC CAS. Even if they're unreliable and/or biased tests, which I concur that many of them are, it's undeniable that most middle and higher income kids will at least pass them. But the thing is, you can't cram or drill for such tests. Teachers should familiarize test-takers with the format, but that should only take an hour or so. Ultimately, practicing for such tests will not result in meaningful learning, career or college readiness, or alas, higher test scores (see here and here).

As for destruction, I was upset by the ending but then I thought about what Williams-Minor had said during the film on the subject and I read the gracious thoughts she shared after the filming, and I figured that, well, if she's not outraged then I guess I shouldn't be either. DCPS, however showed no such class. When asked for comment by the radio show Talk of the Nation, DCPS Superintendent for Alternative School Terry DeCarbo made this comment about the film:

180 Days accurately shows what we've long known at DCPS — many of our students face tremendous barriers well before the school day begins. It's why we work to ensure our schools are not only rigorous academics environments, but also supportive to meet our students' social and emotional needs. Schools like Washington Met, while not typical American high schools, were specifically designed to address these challenges. We believe there is a fascinating story to be told about the lives of students at Washington Met but unfortunately, even given unprecedented access, the movie fails to show the real role that the school plays in educating these students. Rather than focus on teaching and learning, the movie spends a significant amount of time on personnel matters on which DCPS does not comment. [Emphasis mine.]

Hahaha! Are you kidding me?!?! DCPS spends "a significant amount of time on personnel matters," not to mention commenting on it. "Personnel matters," aka teacher quality and principal quality, aka firing people is the central stated component to their education reform platform. Since when do they concern themselves much with teaching and learning, with pedagogy and curriculum? As for commenting on personnel matters, former Chancellor Michelle Rhee infamously handled a "personnel matter" on national television. Rhee also publicly and without any evidence accused 266 teachers she was letting go of sexual abuse, corporal punishment, and chronic absenteeism.

The documentary and Williams-Minor's approach is premised on the idea that a sense of community and solid relationships between educators and their students are key to the learning process, especially for students who want for healthy communities and relationships with adults outside of school. Unfortunately, DCPS and other reformy systems (see Chicago Public Schools) champion ideology that fosters the opposite.

Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress

This is a guest post by a DCPS teacher who wishes to remain anonymous due to fears of reprisal by administrators.

"Ssshhhh! Testing in Progress" 

These signs hang on every classroom door and throughout the hallways of the elementary school where I teach. Bulletin boards throughout the building are plastered with test-taking tips, countdown to testing days, and even testing-themed poetry. Teachers are feverishly reviewing the pages and pages of rules, regulations, and routines that will serve as a survival guide for the next two weeks. Administrators walk around inquiring about the happenings in each classroom, wanting to know how each lesson will contribute to the students' achievement on the upcoming standardized tests. Flyers are sent home describing the stress that will ensue in the following weeks and how we will cover up this anguish with a makeshift “spirit week.” Pajama day, crazy sock day, class color day. I momentarily found myself reminiscing about the days of high school homecoming, but this is no homecoming. Our school has become a den of bubble-sheet masters, nervous teachers, and strangers with clipboards, taking notes on every move made and the potential breaches of test security. 

I’m not sure what's worse, the testing itself or the preparation and anxiety built up beforehand. As I sat through a DC-CAS pep rally, the magnitude of this testing madness hit me like a freight train. This is what children are getting pumped up for? This is what teachers have been “working towards all year”? This is the “pinnacle” of our teaching? I felt like I was in some creepy twilight zone as I watched other teachers and administrators chant and watched the confused students cheer. To see the students get excited about their potential success on the test was not the point of contention for me. The fact that the students are subject to poorly-conceived, low-quality tests and used as pawns to determine educational funding, as well as the fate of their teachers, is not something worth cheering about. 

Other than the pep rally, teachers spent the week prior to the testing in meetings being lectured on the importance of test security, the protocols that would be our bible for the next two weeks, and on just exactly what would happen to us if these rules were not followed. The plans outlined what would happen from the moment the students entered the classroom until the last test was signed back into our testing coordinator. We were instructed to go over the plans, ask any questions we had and be prepared in the weeks to come. Due to the fact that our school was under scrutiny for previous allegations of cheating, we were warned that any negligence in conforming our classrooms and ourselves to these guidelines would result in an investigation and strict consequences.

I planned lessons throughout the meetings and graded papers in the background, only contributing my thoughts in areas which I found to be egregiously unreasonable or unjust. For example, lined paper for scrap paper, smiling at students (this is what they say is “coaching”), and allowing students to stand and stretch during testing would absolutely not be tolerated. As I listened to these rules, I pictured my bubbly bunch of eight year olds' faces. Then, the real bomb was dropped: Absolutely no bathroom breaks during testing unless the child was showing physical signs of distress. In addition, we also needed to prevent multiple bathroom trips by determining how badly each child had to use the restroom. Well, any teacher knows that once one student has “an emergency,” they all have emergencies. How am I to be the judge of the content of each child's bladder? To this I was told it would be easier to deal with angry parents of a child who had wet themselves, than to have to explain the situation to the monitors from central offices. 

I decided that I'd be escorted out by authorities before I let nervous eight year old test-takers wet themselves on my watch. Are we that afraid of losing our jobs that we relinquish our humanity? Are we that desperate to prove that we are not cheating on these  McTests that we deny children their basic needs? This is the “pinnacle” of insanity. This is the “pinnacle” of what an era of high-stakes testing is doing to our children and to our educators. 

As testing was underway I became more and more irritated with not only the rules, but the fact that teachers’ discretion was being undermined by outsiders claiming to be experts on data, but not on children. Who are these people moving chairs from place to place around my room to see my test administration from multiple angles? Why are these strangers writing pages of notes on the condition of my classroom and my position in the room? The thought crossed my mind of just throwing the pile of test booklets in the air and screaming of its insanity, but what good would that do? I wouldn’t be allowed to finish the year with my students who had to put their science projects on the back burner for the two-week testing period. I would never get to see how they turned out if I was punished for breaching test security. I had already been scolded for allowing children to read books after they finished the test, as well as for allowing them to go to the bathroom. I decided to not push any further.   

After being stalked throughout the building for two weeks in order to ensure that I would not change any test answers and spied on from just beyond my classroom door, my anxiety and disgust became overwhelming. After being witness to little children crying with anxiety and acting out in resistance and being forced to sit for hours completing endless assessments that they would most likely never see the results of, my faith in public education was diminishing. Why are teachers subject to this level of disrespect and distrust? Why are students subject to this much of a loss of real learning  time?

Every day, more and more evidence comes out that challenges the reliability and validity of test results and demonstrates the unfairness of using these results to evaluate teachers. But I will comply with the rules and regulations--if for nothing else than to see my students' science projects and to see how much more they will accomplish this year; I am committed to my students and their learning even as I am opposed to the insane high-stakes testing regime that has been imposed on them. I will not, however, allow my students or myself to be de-humanized in the process.

How much longer can we allow our schools to feed the high-stakes testing machine rather than feed students’ imperative to learn? How much longer can we let testing replace teaching and learning? And how much longer can we remain silent throughout it all? 

In which I nitpick on the subject of the opportunity/ achievement gap, charters, and Rhee's legacy in DC

With the release of the NAEP TUDA stats, there's been a lot of conversation swirling around achievement gaps and the efficacy of neo-liberal education reforms in urban districts. In particular, there's been some talk about how to judge Michelle Rhee's legacy, especially in light of the fact that that DC has the largest achievement gap between black and white students and one of the highest between poor and non-poor of all the cities featured in the report. Education journalists such as Alexander Russo weighed in here and Dana Goldstein offered some mostly solid analysis here.

Some folks are saying that Rhee's policies caused the gap. I don't agree with this. While Rhee's policies are no good, let's be honest: there were large educational opportunity and achievement gaps ways before Rhee came to town. Furthermore, DC has always had relatively large income inequality (but, yes, paralleling the national trend, it's gotten worse). The main industries in DC (government, lobbying, non-profits, etc) are such that the demographics in DC are unique. While there are service industry workers there are almost no blue collar workers. The middle and upper-middle class population in DC is not typical--its members are largely much more highly educated and well-traveled. I could go on--this is a very complex topic, an entire book could be written about it. But Rhee didn't cause this. She may symbolize it (the 1% making policy for the 99%, etc), but her policies didn't cause it.

One thing, though, that's been claimed by many, and implied by both Alexander Russo and Dana Goldstein is that Rhee deserves "credit" for the fact that charter school enrollment went up in the years she was there. Giving her "credit" for this makes no sense. Charter schools in DC are run completely separately from DCPS. She talked a lot about choice and charter schools but she didn't actually do anything for the charter schools while she was there. There's a lot more to the relationship between the two or the lack thereof, especially given the complex genesis and history of charter schools in DC, than has been covered.

Furthermore, I don't see how that makes Rhee et al look good if charter school enrollment went up. Did DCPS enrollment go up? Did it go up uniformly throughout the city and not just in the neighborhoods where test scores tend to be higher, where principals are left alone, and where the schools got renovated? If yes, give her credit for that. But saying that she deserves credit for charter school enrollment going up is like saying that the CEO of Coke deserves credit for more people purchasing Pepsi (and hence drinking more cola in general) because they're dis-satisfied with Coke. If the competition model (which I don't subscribe to, by the way) is supposed to make systems and schools compete for students than how can it be said that Rhee was successful on her and her similarly-minded reformers' own terms if she drove families away from DCPS and into charters. If that's the measure, then as head of DCPS, Rhee failed. She competed for and lost students.

Some might then counter, well, who cares if DCPS lost students under Rhee as long as options or "choice" expanded? As long as public schools overall, including traditional and charters, gained students? Well, okay, but then why should someone like Rhee, who is ambivalent about the existence of public, democratic institutions such as traditional public schools, be running them? How is getting someone who doesn't care in particular about neighborhood schools to run them going to help them improve?

Also, for the record, Rhee did not "streamline" the bureaucracy as Goldstein suggests in her post. As I discussed here and here, the bureaucracy actually got bigger and costlier under Rhee and Henderson. But I guess that's part of the Common Wisdom about Very Serious People that Very Serious Education Pundits are too busy and underpaid to shake themselves of. Or perhaps it's part of some misguided attempt to "balance" coverage. If the information is not accurate, if the coverage is based on assumptions rather than on facts and evidence, however, then that's not "balance," it's misinformation.

Yes, Michelle Rhee did lots wrong and surely she did some things right. But education reform skeptics, fans, and journalists alike should find out what those things actually are first and then examine them in light of the NAEP scores and other data and outcomes. Sheesh.

School "Reform" in DC: Is the Problem Choice or What Compels Families to Choose?

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia’s school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

I share Natalie Hopkinson’s frustration, as expressed in an op-ed in today's New York Times and have for a long time. Unfortunately, some of her facts are wrong (Has the New York Times now dispensed with fact checkers?) Furthermore, the larger problem in the District isn't choice per se, but why families feel compelled to exercise choice. 

To address some of the inaccuracies, what Congress has done is little compared to the work of DC's own elected officials. In 1995 Congress produced only the charter law and there was nothing about an option to transfer. The DC Council at the same time separately enacted a parallel law. Congress never did a choice policy for DC. Vouchers, which came later, were in fact, much to the chagrin of some of us, endorsed by our elected officials, including the Mayor, the Council Chair, and the President of the Board of Education. As for performance on tests, charter schools in DC on average have test scores somewhat higher than DCPS schools, though not by a lot. As to the closure of schools whose students struggle the most, the schools that then Chancellor Rhee closed on the whole actually had higher test scores than the schools to which their students were later sent; they were also more likely to have made Adequate Yearly Progress. And a reminder: Rhee was not appointed by Congress but by the popularly elected Mayor Fenty.

The argument about choice has been going on at least since I become involved in DCPS in the mid-1970s and probably before that. Many school activists from east of Rock Creek Park argued passionately against out-of-boundary placements, even when they were (allegedly) based on need. The assumption is that if the government forces people to stay in neighborhood schools, the parents will stay and make the schools be good. The result here has not been so felicitous--those with the means, or the moxie to get outside help, move to the suburbs or pay for low-cost independent or parochial schools. In fact, part of charter growth is from those schools, rather than from DCPS. I have watched over thirty years while determined parents tried to make their neighborhood schools better--and were mostly rebuffed or ignored. Even west of the Park, where my children attended DC Public Schools, we spent the majority of our efforts trying to neutralize the damage done by the DCPS administration. Still, we were more successful than those east of the Park. 

With the appointment of Michelle Rhee and the end of any avenue for meaningful parent involvement or influence, the situation is even worse. The schools west of the Park and some in gentrified Capitol Hill are favored, and DCPS administration is more authoritarian and unresponsive than ever to the rest. It is also elitist, and more uninformed, more unstable, more arbitrary, and less competent than before the mayoral takeover--a distinctly dubious achievement, since the situation was pretty bad before. That’s why so many people--both families and good staff--leave.

Now our elected officials and their appointees are threatening to close more neighborhood schools and bring in outside charter operators. Currently, charter schools in DC are city-wide by law and may not give preference to neighborhood children. Many current DC charter schools are local products, started by DCPS parents, teachers, principals, and social service providers who couldn’t take any more of DCPS. They’re going to be under threat too--because of the latest “reform” panacea, closing schools in order to bring in new operators and their programs with no little or no evidence of effectiveness, and new teachers and principals, many poorly prepared and foreign to communities here. I see the advent of charter school chains as trading a remote DCPS bureaucracy for a remote private bureaucracy located elsewhere in the country. 

In the old days there was a lot more out-of-boundary space in the schools west of the Park; in addition, though few people realized it, there was a lot of out-of-boundary placement within neighborhoods and wards. Now, due to demographic change and favorable treatment, there is not much out-of-boundary space in schools west of the Park, so we could get a test of the parents-can-make-their-neighborhood-schools-good proposition east of the Park. But only if the schools stay open and only if the parents stay. 

Beyond Erase to the Top: More on Rhee's Bureaucratic Legacy

It is widely reported by those both skeptical and credulous of Michelle Rhee's education reform accomplishments that she was a solid manager. Since Rhee has a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and founded The New Teacher Project, I can see why this might be accepted as conventional wisdom. The problem is, it's mostly not true.

In a previous post I demonstrated that the DCPS bureaucracy grew during the Rhee years, that less was done with with more. Even in the wake of Eraser-gate, people maintain that Rhee presided over improvements in the delivery of textbooks, in record keeping, and in the upkeep of school buildings.

The administration can't really be given credit for school building upkeep since, as I wrote here last November:

"Rhee has been credited with improvements to the physical conditions of school facilities, but since June 2007 all capital planning, construction, renovation, and major repairs of DCPS school buildings have been the responsibility of the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization (OPEFM), which is an agency that is completely separate from DCPS. Facilities maintenance was moved from DCPS to OPEFM in 2008. One of the reasons OPEFM has been able to make so many improvements to public school facilities is that Mayor Fenty and the Council have increased the schools' capital budget to amounts unheard of prior to the mayoral takeover."

As for record keeping, Mary Levy tells me it’s somewhat hard to tell its state because the system issues very little public data (see the problems the USA Today reporters had). The personnel record keeping has definitely improved, but, again, the independent Chief Financial Officer, and not Michelle Rhee, made the move to have DCPS join the PeopleSoft system used by the rest of the city. Otherwise, there was some cleanup. DCPS spent about $2 million when Rhee first arrived reorganizing and scanning the mess that was Human Resource’s paper files, and later some cleanup in preparation for going onto PeopleSoft. Finally, this report from the Council of the Great City Schools (Michael Casserly, the executive director, has been very sympathetic to Rhee) describes a rather parlous state of record keeping. The report found that as of spring 2009--two years into Rhee's tenure--there were no guidelines for systematic collection of student withdrawals (i.e., no reliable student dropout data). There was no standard way of recording attendance, tardiness, excused absences and early dismissals, so attendance data are unreliable. Finally, there was no central control over the assignment of student numbers and so no way to verify whether a student was shown as enrolled in more than one school. The report says the system needed standardized definitions and coding procures, as well as data validation rules and statistical checks, meaning there was little data quality control.

As for textbooks, maybe that's true. I did hear the administration cleaned the warehouse up, but there have been some complaints from parents and teachers at the high schools that there weren't enough textbooks, and there were complaints, for example, that textbooks arrived late to Wilson SHS (my alma mater).

All these seem like small details, I know. And again, some things improved bureaucratically speaking, especially when money was spent. I can certainly see why such matters would get much less scrutiny than, say, the mass firings, the ideology, and now the potential cheating scandal. Those items are controversial, interesting, and galvanizing. By contrast, bureaucratic computer software systems, data collection, textbook delivery runs, and facilities maintenance (don't fall asleep on me!) aren't exactly sexy. But I still don't understand where the general conventional wisdom comes from, given what I just cited and given the lack of concrete evidence to the contrary. Are there data or are there reports that journalists have that I don't? Do the true believers repeat this stuff to pad Rhee's record of accomplishments? Do those who are more critical of her accomplishments and ideology repeat it to "balance" their coverage? Or is this simply emblematic of the current state of journalism?

I still also have to think that in this case the conventional wisdom is based in part on perception rather than reality, on bias, the perception being that Ivy League Tiger Moms dressed in J.Crew run a tight, clean ship.

Beyond Erase to the Top: Under Rhee the Bureaucracy Grew

(This post has been specially created as a link for the previous post, which can be found here.)


Washington Post education beat reporter Bill Turque published this article about the expansion of the DCPS central office under Michelle Rhee. In it, DCPS responds to this circumstance:

"Peter Weber, deputy to DCPS chief of staff Lisa Ruda, said Levy and the school system seem to have definitional differences. 

Weber said the agency defines central office employees as those who don’t work directly with students, teachers or principals. There are other people carried on the central office budget, but who spend most of their time in schools, Weber said. These include “master educators” who conduct classroom observations for IMPACT, Head Start staff and mentor teachers. Weber also said that the $100,000 employees cited by Levy actually make that amount in salary and benefits combined. There are 402 DCPS employees at that level, and that 80 percent of them work in the schools, he said."

In response to Weber's claims, Mary Levy sent the following to Bill Turque (which so far he has not reported): 

1. DCPS is mistaken about the $100,000 number being a combination of salaries and benefits. All apart from the fact that the column in the PeopleSoft listing is clearly labeled Salary, I had checked numbers there against salary schedules. They are salaries, not salaries plus benefits.

 2. As of last October there were an additional 110 employees making over 100,000 who do work in the schools, all but 6 of them principals.

 3. About the amount of salaries plus benefits, it’s hard to say. DCPS has a long history of overestimating benefits (the overage is used to cover overspending elsewhere in the budget), and the payroll data I have don’t include any estimate or actual data on benefits. 

I think that transferring people elsewhere in the government doesn’t count as cutting them (come on!). Of the 925 central office people in 2007, 358 were performing functions subsequently transferred or contracted out. That’s why I went back to prior years and re-analyzed them to exclude people performing those functions. The remaining 626 included the professional development, mentor teachers, etc.

The definition of central office staff that I’ve used all these years, often  with the agreement of DCPS officials, is people who do not work directly with  children. This system was modeled in part on the In$ite education cost  accounting system developed some years ago by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and  Coopers & Lybrand, which made its main division between site-based and central. I expanded site-based to include some people who are not site-based but work directly with children, such as social workers, visiting teachers. But I haven’t counted people who work only with teachers and principals.

For example, there are 41 master educators who travel around from school to school observing and rating teachers, and I classify them as central office because they don’t work with children. For that matter they don’t have ongoing  relationships with teachers or principals, since they only observe each teacher  in their own subject area for 30 minutes twice a year. Likewise the central  office professional development staff. There are also about 100 instructional  coaches who belong to local schools, and relate to children as well as teachers, and I classify them as school-based. (How many of these people do we need?) I count the Head Start social services staff as school-based.

This is actually an in-between position. The National Center for Education  Statistics sorts school employees into two bins -- teachers and aides (classroom)  and everyone else; people then look at their numbers and call everything else  administration, which is misleading. The question I’ve been asked by parents and ommunity for 30 years is how many people are in the classroom? I tell them that many people not in the classroom work directly with students,  for example, librarians, counselors, speech therapists, etc., and that some people who work directly with children are paid from central accounts, but still, they work with children, in schools, and that’s the question that they really should be asking.

Beyond Erase to the Top: The Myth of Michelle Rhee Continues

Much to my surprise, USA Today produced a solid piece of investigative journalism reporting on the likely chance (not surprising) of widespread standardized test score fixing in DC Public Schools under the leadership of Michelle Rhee. I'm not going to expand on that piece because everyone and their mom are. Rather, me and my mom are going to address another myth of Rhee's reign that continues to be repeated: that she came in and fixed a "corrupt" and "dysfunctional" bureaucracy.

In this piece, based on this testimony by civil rights lawyer, school finance expert and longtime DCPS activist Mary Levy, Bill Turque reports that under Rhee, central office expenditures and staff increased. I have created this post with Levy's written response to the assertions made in Turque's article by DCPS Special Assistant to the Chancellor Peter Weber.

Around the time that Turque's piece came out, Richard Whitmire wrote a piece for the Huffington Post where he repeats the notion that Rhee came in and cleaned out a bloated central office full of black incompetents:

"For starters, race played a big role in explaining how the school's central office Rhee inherited was both bloated and poorly run. That dates back to former Mayor Marion Barry, who over the years padded the city payrolls with ever-more appointees, partly as a civil rights gesture for those who in the days of white-run Washington were frozen out of city jobs but also for political reasons. 'It was the political machine's way of hiring folks and securing votes,' one veteran school administrator told me. 

Not only was the central office crowded, but many appeared to have little guidance on how to do their jobs. When Rhee arrived and began trying to fire the worst of the central office staff, her initial legal advice was: here at DCPS, we don't fire people for incompetence."

For my hearty refutation of Whitmire's assertions and assumptions, see this previous post.(Also see UPDATE I below for what else Whitmire got wrong here.)

Soon after that, I read this thoughtful piece by Shani Hilton in DC's City Paper, "Confessions of a Black Gentrifier." Immediately after reading it, I had the thought that Hilton should have included more perspectives from those already living in the DC neighborhoods being gentrified. However, upon second thought, I realized that the piece was more of an essay, and I thought she did a great job exploring her and her peers' perspectives without speaking for those she didn't interview. I found it refreshing to read something about urban gentrification that didn't, on the one hand, pass judgment on the occurrence of gentrification itself or cast it as a purposeful policy, but, on the other hand, didn't take on the attitude that the gentrifiers were coming in and saving or civilizing the natives. This is in stark opposition to perspectives like Whitmire's (and it seems of Rhee herself) on the "reform" of the DC Public Schools.

Next, I read a post on Ta-Nehesi Coates's blog about the decline of the black population in DC in the context of DC Council member and infamous former mayor Marion Barry's comments on the topic. I participated in the comment thread after the post, not to disagree with Coates's thoughts and questions on the matter, but to question some of the other commenters' assumptions that life and governance in DC had "vastly improved" under Fenty's stewardship. I object to the narrative that posits that governance in DC was totally dysfunctional and corrupt under Barry and his predecessors, but competent and vastly improved under Fenty and Rhee.

I don't say that Barry wasn't corrupt, or that as a system DCPS wasn't at all dysfunctional (oh, let me count the ways--I attended and taught in DCPS). Some things in the city and schools are better, some are worse, some are unchanged. But as I argue in the comment thread, Marion Barry is not the big bad black political bogey man and the DCPS central office workers were not his big bad bogey people followers that many of their critics believe them to be. Acknowledging Barry's numerous shortcomings and misdeeds, he's not any more, or more straightforwardly, corrupt than most other corrupt urban machine politicians. However provincial and incompetent at least some of the DCPS central office staff were, they are not markedly different from any other employees of a poorly designed and run school district central office. How Barry and the DCPS central office workers seem to loom in the psyche of their critics is far more ominous and sinister than what they were in actuality.

In her usual comprehensive and thoughtful manner, education journalist Dana Goldstein offers her take on the Rhee testing scandal in DC. But even Goldstein, whose work I respect and admire, got this aspect of the story wrong. She says:

"Rhee deserves credit for . . . . . streamlining the system’s once-corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy."

Arrgghh! I expect Whitmire and the editorial staff of the snookered Washington Post to repeat this, but someone of Goldstein's professional caliber is the last person who should be.

Did Barry and some of his predecessors practice cronyism? Absolutely. Were there more people working in the central office than there should have been? Absolutely. Were some of them incompetent? Absolutely. Were there tremendous amounts of money and resources that didn't make it into classroom? Absolutely. However, replace "Fenty and Rhee" for "Barry and some of his predecessors," and I'll answer "absolutely" all over again. In fact, under Rhee, the central office got bigger and more expensive, with fewer resources going directly to classrooms and students. I don't doubt that it became more functional in some ways. But comprehensively more competent or less corrupt? In light of the vast sum of money the Rhee administration spent on outside consultants (see here and here), the number of non-experienced central office personnel hired, and the implications of the recent testing scandal (Rhee didn't investigate, but promoted the principal of Noyes whom many had suspected was cheating!), I don't think so.

The only real difference is that Rhee filled the central office (and the DCPS teaching corps) with less experienced, younger, whiter, more privileged, and fewer local people. The assumption that those characteristics automatically connote more competence and less corruption implies that the older, blacker, less privileged locals were inherently corrupt and dysfunctional. That is deeply, deeply troubling to me and should be to anyone who cares about the confluence of race, privilege, bias, and social justice.

UPDATE 1: After pointing out various copy-editing errors (thanks, Mom!), Mary Levy added to my critique of Whitmire:

"Barry didn’t have that much opportunity to pad the school payroll, because that was the territory of the school board members and an occasional superintendent."

UPDATE 2: I want to state clearly that I assume that Dana Goldstein's oversight is due to a lack of research and not because of any explicit or intentional cultural bias. For one, she was writing a column, not investigative journalism. The Washington Post has neglected to write about Rhee's tenure with any skepticism or rigor, and they are responsible for their irresponsible journalism. Covering this was and is their job; with the exception of Valerie Strauss and Bill Turque's work, they've failed miserably to do so.

Secondly, part of what I am getting at in this post and in the post in response to Whitmire is that it's not possible to look honestly at the recent education reform efforts, especially those in DC, and the analyses of those efforts, without considering the assumptions being made about race, class, gender, and privilege. Nor do I presume, given the work of Tim Wise and Shankar Vedantam, that I (or anyone else who is a creature of American culture) am immune to such bias.

The necessary struggle is to recognize those biases and to put them to rest using facts and reason.

Richard Whitmire Can't Dodge His Own Racism

When I first heard that someone named Richard Whitmire had published a hagiography of Michelle Rhee, that was funded by the same disaster capitalists who had purchased her disastrous education reform policies, I shrugged. There's already so much propaganda on this out there already, what's a little more?  It's probably nothing different from what members of Washington Post editorial staff had already written. What's another journalist taken in by Michelle Rhee? 

Then, I read that he had given a talk about The Bee Eater at the DC bookstore Politics & Prose where he insulted the attendees and refused to answer their questions. So tacky, I thought. That guy's got no class. 

Next, I read Richard Kahlenberg's sharp critique of the book in Slate. Whitmire responded rather huffily and defensively, regurgitating his questionable research. Kahlenberg responded to his response, and Whitmire again to Kahlenberg. What a Brainy Smurf this Whitmire is, I thought. Isn't this what happens when you get a book published--people read it and then write reviews? Why not just ignore them, as most other authors do? Whitmire must really be a true believer or too proud to admit to any mistakes in his work, I thought. When will Hefty come by and chuck him over towards the bushes?

Then, there was this whine-fest in Education Week where he trivialized Ms. Rhee's mistakes and called her critics "birthers." Birthers? I thought. Hahaha! This guy is getting desperate. What a dumb analogy!

Finally (or perhaps not, knowing Brainy), I came across this brazen (and I mean, b-ray-zen) piece on the Huffington Post. I stopped cringing and started seething. It is truly one of the most despicable things I've ever read about race and DC politics and DCPS. It's so awful, I could cry.

Whitmire wags his finger at education reformers, admonishing them not to "duck race issues." African American Washingtonians' "fears of experimentation" were justified. What's wrong with saying that? Well, it's not nearly the beginning or end of what he says. According to Whitmire, Rhee and Fenty should have paid heed to the "fears" of African Americans, but not because there were any actual race issues during Rhee's tenure. Racism in DC is all done now--all that racism and "experimentation" is history and happened 1960s and 1970s. According to Whitmire, black people in DC perceived racism under Rhee, but it was all in their over-sensitive, incompetent little heads.

According to Whitmire, Rhee inherited a "bloated and poorly run" central office filled with "people who had little guidance as to do their jobs." Michelle Rhee inherited all of  these "incompetent" African American "Barry appointees." Never mind that several mayors served between Barry and Fenty. Never mind that the numerous superintendents serving under those mayors also came in and went on similar firing sprees. Never mind that under Rhee, the number of central office employees rose by 20% (and they claim to be understaffed!) as direct services to students and overall enrollment fell . Never mind that at least 100 central office employees now make more than $100,000 a year. Never mind that most of the people Rhee hired to replace the vastly "incompetent" black employees were white and under the age of forty with little to no experience in education.


See, when Fenty spent vastly more money on facilities and playgrounds in the whiter and more affluent Ward 3 and when Michelle Rhee crowded central offices with underqualified and overpaid employees, it's "progress" and "courage", but under previous (black) mayors and superintendents, it's "incompetence," "a jobs program," and a way of "hiring people and securing votes." (And perhaps an understandable response to all of that nasty, isolated racism of the 1970s.)

Yes, according to Whitmire, white people saw Michelle Rhee's firings "based on principal recommendation" as, well, "logical," while misinformed black people saw them as "random." Furthermore, black Washingtonians couldn't handle that testing gains happened under Michelle Rhee, who is Korean-American, and not under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who is African American. Apparently, black residents in Washington, D.C., can't handle success happening to non-blacks. Whitmire is a hair away from crying "reverse racism!" here:

"The fact that Rhee was Korean American, and not African American as her predecessors had been, also proved to be racially troublesome, especially when the district began to show testing improvements. Rationalizing that awkward situation gave birth to a widespread belief among many black Washingtonians that the gains Rhee achieved were the fruits of the black schools chief, Clifford Janey, who preceded her"

Finally, the elections came and Fenty lost because, "the favoring-whites belief proved to be a significant wedge issue in the voting." Those silly black people with their "favoring whites beliefs" and Janey test gain "theories." 


There's so much more I could say about this vile piece. There's so much left that offends. (Please, read it for yourselves.) But mostly, it epitomizes what's wrong with the so-called education reformers' approach: that the problem in public education is not systemic or societal (or even more than one problem), but one of low quality people, in DC's case, mostly black people, who fail to teach poor children how to read. The parents of these kids are also too simple minded, too bound up in perverse race pride to recognize their saviors when they ride in on their broomsticks. When will they realize, as Michelle does, what's actually good for their own children, that what they really need is to bring in high-achieving Ivy Leaguers, so that they, too, don't become low quality people? Who cares if they don't know anything about education or teaching?

In the meantime, DC Mayor Vincent Gray has betrayed so many who worked so hard for him and appointed Interim DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson as permanent chancellor. A chancellor selection advisory panel was appointed, as mandated by a 2007 DC law, but apparently Gray and the panel members decided that democratic processes are one of those "sacred cows" that need to be slaughtered: the only candidate they ever considered was Ms. Henderson. Henderson certainly seems to be more conciliatory and thoughtful than Ms. Rhee was, which is a start, but I'm hearing that so far, that's mostly talk. The community and other stakeholders aren't being involved in decisions and there is still little to no transparency. Furthermore, Ms. Henderson continues to embrace the same wrong-headed policies that Ms. Rhee did.

Not to worry. I'm certain Richard Whitmire will soon write a piece assuring all that now that African-American Kaya Henderson is in charge, that over-sensitive and incompetent African American residents of DC will have no further complaints. According to Whitmire's logic, black folks in DC don't care about the quality of education their children receive, nor do they care about competence; they only care about blackness.

If Richard Whitmire is trying to deflect the negativity people feel from Michelle Rhee on to him (especially now that she and Fenty have stated their support for Scott Walker), he's doing a great job. If anything validates Courtland Milloy's post-election screed, this does.

As Tim Wise says,

"there are two types of racists, the overt racists, such as white supremacists, and the passive racists, who are the vast majority of us who silently collaborate with systemic racism. We don't consciously believe in racial superiority or inferiority, but we've become so used to the existing policies, practices, and procedures that we don't question them. To the extent we don't challenge this system of racism, we are collaborating with it. The second type of racist is actually more dangerous. The first type we can easily recognize, and it doesn't take much courage to condemn them. the second type is like an invisible gas: you don't know it's there until you've been lulled unconscious by it."

Which kind of racist would you say Mr. Whitmire is? I'd say he falls somewhere just between the two.

Is Michelle Rhee Truly Putting Students First?

Last week, Michelle Rhee took the next logical step of a bona fide revolutionary: she announced her new position as a lobbyist on "Oprah" and in Newsweek magazine.  Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post, Trip Gabriel of The New York Times, and Alan Gottlieb of Education News Colorado summarize well Rhee's intentions, but in brief, Students First, a non-profit political organization of parents, students, and teachers, will advocate for:

• taking on special interests, such as teachers' unions,
• "smart" spending on instructional programs,
• encouraging parental involvement,
• "excellent" schools for every child,
• getting talented teachers in every classroom,
• dismantling teacher tenure and seniority-based incentives,
• merit pay for teachers,
• vouchers,
• using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and
• firing the bottom five to ten percent of teachers.

These ideas are not novel ones and as I outline below, aren't likely to be successful in helping school children.

I should have known from her appearance on the "Colbert Report" the week before that Rhee was warming up for this blitz. I had rather hoped that she would fade into the woodwork of conservative think tanks and empty motivational speech giving, but no such luck. Rhee has always talked about how she wants what's best for children and how our current public education system is designed for what's best for the adults, but I don't see how her policies, which I detailed here and on The Washington Post website here, are best for school children. Also, don't fairly common instances of union ineptitude plus low pay and poor working conditions for many public school educators refute the claim that the system is currently working well for the adults?

One thing I neglected to add in my critique of her tenure at DCPS were the exceedingly high rates of teacher turnover and attrition, often caused by low morale, mass firings, and budget problems. For example, the RIF of October 2009 caused terrible disruptions and chaos. There were classrooms without teachers, students without necessary classes, and schools without counselors. Consolidating freshmen and seniors in the same English class, cancelling foreign language courses, and having elementary school students start over in October with a new or no teacher can hardly be good for those students or serve as an example of "smart" spending. Rhee was not known for her fiscal competence, to say the least.

Rhee claims that this is the first organization to advocate for children, but that's just not true, and saying as much is an insult to child advocates and parents everywhere. What about the work of organizations like Voices for America's Children and the Children's Defense Fund? And what of parents and parent groups? Does she think public school parents like me join the PTA to advocate for ourselves? Because we like to attend tedious meetings and peddle wrapping paper? Was Michelle Rhee active in the PTA at Harlem Park Elementary where she taught in Baltimore or at Oyster Elementary where her own children attend in DC?

Rhee says that she should have communicated and expressed herself better in DC, but as NYU education historian Diane Ravitch explains," it is hard to think of any figure in the world of American education who had as much media attention as she has had over the past three years. Certainly, she did not lack for opportunities to communicate." In fact, a famous Rhee-ism is that "collaboration and consensus are way over-rated." Her problem was not that she didn't communicate, but rather, that she does not collaborate. How can she engage parents in the process of education reform if she doesn't believe in collaborating with them?

When she talks about "excellent" schools for each child, what she is getting at is choice, which means charters and vouchers. I am still forming my opinions on charters, but for now I'll concede that while I prefer magnets, charters can be valuable, but only when they are community-based, feature rich and challenging curricula, are kept on a short leash, and don't supplant neighborhood-based options. More on this topic later, but for now these pieces in the New York Review of Books, Miller-McCune, and The Wall Street Journal show why charters are not the panacea Rhee thinks they are. As for vouchers, public money should not be funding religious and private schools. Period. Furthermore, the expansion of charters and vouchers will not be successful as a long-term strategy for reforming public education, especially if they move a public system in the direction of privatization. Why doesn't Rhee, instead, raise money to directly fund financial aid and scholarships for needy kids who want to attend private and religious schools? 

Michelle Rhee is a firm believer that talent and not practice makes the teacher. She stated that newly hired teachers are probably superior to veterans, because they'd be more innovative and creative. First of all, she's already stated that she doesn't value creativity; she once said, "Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job." Second of all, studies have shown that teachers from TFA, and this could probably extend to NTP teachers as well, are not more effective and that they're costly, particularly because they leave the profession so quickly. Finally, firing the bottom five to ten percent of teachers would be risky. How would the bottom five to ten percent be determined? By test scores? I don't agree with that. Would doing this actually lead to higher quality teaching and education? After reading this, I'm dubious we can fire our way to educational greatness.

As for Rhee's emphasis on standardized tests and improved evaluations of teachers, while teachers do need a fair and rigorous evaluation system, standardized test scores shouldn't be part of the equation, and should only be used to glean information about students. Merit pay based on test scores isn't fair and it doesn't work. The use of value-added measures doesn't matter--those are equally problematic.  Her own evaluation system, IMPACT, is flawed and statistically faulty. Finally, while seniority-based lay-offs are problematic, the alternatives she advocates for don't seem to be any less so.

Isn't it ironic that in order to take on these "heavily funded special interests," Rhee is creating one herself? (And I'm sorry but, "textbook companies"? I don't disagree with this on some level, but what of other bigger and better funded actors in the education marketplace? Or do they not count as special interests when they're headed by Rhee's mentor or align with her interests?) Michelle Rhee and her initiatives have the backing of some of the wealthiest people in the country.  I find it troubling that she feels the need to spin her initiatives via a PR firm, the same one that she used as DC schools chancellor. She is her own heavily-funded special interest! The last thing our children, our public schools, and our besieged democracy needs is yet another corporate-backed lobbying organization headed by a politically inept it girl with a stated disdain for democratic principles and processes. And where would the money raised by Students First go? To politicians and political campaigns, not to schools and not to children. As I have written about here, more big money in our political system is a problem, not a solution.

To her credit, I do think that Michelle Rhee believes that she is doing what's best for children, that she has good intentions. The problem is that she is not actually doing what's best for children. More and more, Michelle Rhee, seems to be suffering from a blinding and pathological narcissism, the kind that develops from excessive media attention and intensive rationalizing. As I study and observe Rhee, I am reminded of other ideologically-driven political leaders who in the face of a crisis do great wrong in the name of right. Especially instructive in understanding Michelle Rhee's cult of personality is Jeffrey Toobin's recent profile in The New Yorker of Rachel Yould, an extraordinarily bright and talented young woman who in her quest for fame and socially useful significance manages to con even the smartest and most altruistic of actors, not to mention herself, securing funding and resources for herself that would be better and more justly spent on the causes of those more sincerely and urgently in need of them. 

If Michelle Rhee truly wants to put students first then she should put aside her bankrupt ideology, her failing policies, and her monstrous ego and let the real needs of America's public school children come first. She would be my hero if she would change course and, quite simply, raise money that would go directly to helping poor children. As a former public school student and teacher and one of the public school parents she is trying to engage, I'm asking her to truly put our children, and the future of the communities they so desperately need, first.

What's the Matter with Rhee-form

Michelle Rhee's last day as Chancellor of DC Public Schools will be Monday, November 1st. The common wisdom is that the soon-to-be former DC mayor, Adrian Fenty, was defeated this past September because Rhee had become a political liability. Her policies were on target, and progress was made, but she didn't play well with others, and wasn't nice. In their own way, Fenty and Rhee admit as much here.


While I agree that she was abrasive, I disagree that the reforms were good policy in the first place. The criticism that she was too hard-charging, which stifled her own well-intentioned reforms, such as is made here misses the point. Her ideas about education reform were misinformed and ineffective. She was incompetent and ignorant of the history of the city and community she was supposed to serve. In short, she was charging hard in the wrong direction, or as NYU education historian Diane Ravitch has said, "It’s difficult to win a war when you’re firing on your own troops.”


Just prior to the election and now that she has resigned, various reviews of her tenure have been written. This well-written and comprehensive report by Leigh Dingerson in Rethinking Schools on Rhee's tenure proves my point that it wasn't just her tone that was wrong. "The Proving Grounds: School 'Rheeform' in Washington, D.C." carefully chronicles the history of DCPS, Rhee's belligerent approach to teachers, administrators, and parents, her connection to right-wing conservatives, the lack of attention given to curriculum and instruction, and the problems with her teacher-evaluation tool, IMPACT. Not all of Rhee's critics are liberal defenders of teachers unions; in this article in The American Spectator, Roger Kaplan makes several great points about problems with Rhee's reign. Finally, Bill Turque, the fantastic education beat reporter for the Metro section of the Washington Post, published this succinct summary detailing the Rhee administration's accomplishments and failures.


I remember well some events of her first few days--they were a disturbing harbinger of what was to come. Without any notice or thought to a smooth transition, Fenty fired the then current DCPS Superintendent Clifford Janey late at night and subsequently locked him out of his office and e-mail account. Fenty announced his succesor's appointment and everyone said, "Michelle who?" Shortly after coming to town, Rhee took a tour of the city and pronounced at a press conference something along the lines of, "I drove through Anacostia and it was a very emotional experience for me." (Anacostia is a historic neighborhood in DC that is majority African-American.) What's that supposed to mean? And what do her emotions have to do with this? I remember thinking it was an oddly narcissistic thing to say. 


Rhee met perfunctorily with the professionals and community leaders who had a long history of working to improve DC's schools and promptly decided she didn't have anything to learn from them. It was apparent then and it became even more apparent by the end of her tenure that Rhee knew little about the community she was supposed to serve. Rhee not only didn't understand DC's African-American community, but she didn't have any sense of the particular history of DC--of its history of political disenfranchisement, taxation without representation, and paternal federal control. DCPS was a source of empowerment, autonomy, and even pride, for that community. People's parents and extended families were educated and employed by DCPS. From Dingerson, 

"The vast public sector employment created by the federal government helped establish a significant black middle class that supported its public schools. Many African American parents and grandparents remember their schools as neighborhood institutions and gateways to success." 

While usurping more power from an already disempowered population of a powerless city, Rhee paid no respect to members of the community whose elders had helped to build the school system she was charged with leading. 


There is no denying that DCPS was a dysfunctional system when Rhee got there. Transformation, change, and improvement were needed on many fronts. I have yet to be convinced of the ultimate effectiveness of such a style, but perhaps the task could only be done by a ruthless, hard-charging, autonomous leader. Even so, if Rhee or whomever was appointed to the position had to have such an approach, such a leader should know something about education, instruction, curriculum, management, fiscal matters, and community relations. To be fair, again, that's not what Fenty hired her for. Rhee was hired to be Fenty's henchwoman-autocrat on education and that's what she was. The democratically elected DC Council had voted to give Fenty full power over the DC schools and then he turned around and gave Rhee the most powerful education position the city has ever had.  As Kaplan says,

". . . reformers have tended to think they understand the problems and challenges of educating undisciplined if lovable savages (children and teenagers) better than the people whose job it is to do it, and furthermore that they have a system for teaching math and reading that will work better than any other.. . . the simple truth of the matter is that if she is in charge, by virtue of commonly acknowledged rules, and she does not want someone, she should do exactly what she did. She was the boss."

A common refrain echoed by Fenty and his supporters is I know there were mistakes, but look at how Rhee has gotten people excited about urban public education. In the search for a silver lining, I thought something similar about the propagandistic Waiting for Superman and the bogus manifesto that was signed by Rhee and fifteen other school district chiefs: At least people are talking about public education and this is an opportunity to showcase the bankruptcy of the new education reformers' ideas. Then I realized that was kind of like saying that, on the positive side, John Yoo and his torture memos got people taking about the immorality and ineffectiveness of torturing detainees to get information. Michelle Rhee did get a lot of people to pay attention to public education, but who are these people? Mostly unelected billionaires and conservative ideologues without any education expertise who are looking to privatize the public school system. Finally, I'll concede that Rhee got people interested in the profession of teaching who may not have been otherwise, but, again, who are they? Inexperienced, recently graduated from highly selective-college amateurs who probably don't want to become professional teachers and who know very little about inner-city communities. Ultimately, Rhee attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people with the wrong kind of solutions.


Rhee has been credited with improvements to the physical conditions of school facilities, but since June 2007 all capital planning, construction, renovation, and major repairs of DCPS school buildings have been the responsibility of the Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization (OPEFM), which is an agency that is completely separate from DCPS. Facilities maintenance was moved from DCPS to OPEFM in 2008. One of the reasons OPEFM has been able to make so many improvements to public school facilities is that Mayor Fenty and the Council have increased the schools' capital budget to amounts unheard of prior to the mayoral takeover.

Rhee and Fenty and their supporters have also claimed that under her leadership test scores went up. Even some of her critics have credited her with this. First of all, standardized tests should only be used as one of many teaching tools, so test scores should certainly not be the only standard by which we measure student achievement or teacher effectiveness. Standardized tests tell you a lot about the students who are taking the test, but very little about who is teaching the students taking the test. Furthermore, an emphasis on standardized tests is problematic because standardized test-based content makes for lousy curricula. Or as Kaplan puts it,

". . . the substantive issue is whether it serves a useful educational purpose to turn schools into fill-the-bubble-test cram boxes instead of teaching content-rich courses."

Even if, in the interest of compromise, it is conceded that, okay, we can consider test scores as one factor of many in the evaluation of a school and a teacher, Rhee's reforms have thus far not proven themselves to be effective. Kaplan says,

"No one who has looked seriously at the way achievements in math and reading are assessed under the No Child Left Behind rules believes you can judge a district on the basis of scarcely a couple of years. The D.C. schools implemented reforms aimed at improving scores, anyway, in 2006, so at most Miss Rhee should claim credit for staying with them, notwithstanding her stated plan to break with business as usual."

Furthermore, according to Dingerson (and she has the data and analysis to back this up thanks to seven-year DCPS math teacher and 2010 finalist for DC Teacher of the Year, Chris Bergfalk):

"There have been dramatic drops in standardized assessment scores, and, on closer analysis, the highly touted increases in D.C. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are a reflection of the changing demographics of the schools, not the result of any real improvement in the quality of education provided to D.C.’s poorest and neediest students."

Finally, in this timeline of events that was developed from a series Washington Post articles and a July 2009 DCPS press release, former DCPS math teacher Guy Brandenburg shows that there were questions raised about possible cheating on the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DCCAS) tests, but that despite being asked to investigate by Deborah A. Gist, the State Superintendent of Education for the District of Columbia (OSSE), the Rhee administration failed to do so.


I will discuss this trend in education reform in a later post, but for now I will point out that Rhee spent her time emphasizing the people teaching over the practice of teaching. There was no focus on the quality of the teaching or what teachers were teaching. As Dingerson rightly notes, 

"It is worth noting that, as a so-called 'education reformer,' Rhee has not focused on content or pedagogy. There have been no initiatives to improve teacher induction or strengthen instructional practice. The focus has remained on management and staffing, and the tone has been judgmental rather than supportive."

Kaplan hits the nail on the head,

"The core of the matter is not this or that lapse of judgment or a clumsy manner with people. She is said to be abrasive, texts even while in the midst of formal meetings. Well, you can put that down to an American get-to-the-point spirit. However, Miss Rhee never bothered to explain just what all this reform and professional development and search for 'excellent' teachers is supposed to mean. She did not explain it to the parents. Or to anybody. And the reason she did not is that . . . she does not know or does not care. Should our kids be studying Latin and classical music? Should sports be compulsory; should ROTC? Should Shakespeare be on the finals and should a ninth grader be able to recite the Second Inaugural? Should every kid learn a trade as well as a foreign language? The distinct impression D.C. voters got was that Miss Rhee does not think about these things. Like her beloved, who is now mayor of Sacramento, and, frankly, like so much of the political-administrative leadership of our country today, these are unimportant questions because they do not matter to them. In the world they inhabit they do, of course matter. Michelle Rhee is surely concerned that her children . . . learn calculus and foreign languages and violin. . ."

Rhee herself shows her questionable knowledge of teaching practices in this stunningly inappropriate account told during a Welcome to Teachers address ( I highly recommend listening to this) of taping shut the mouths of her inner-city Baltimore students such that they bled. Rhee was having a classroom management crisis in her classroom and chose to respond in an unprofessional and crude way. Similarly, in responding to the perceived crisis in DCPS, she has chosen narrow and crude solutions. Her view, it seems, is that inner-city children and their teachers do not require a humane approach, let alone content-rich or arts-infused education. While I agree that all students, and not just middle class white ones like my own, should be able to acquire basic reading and math skills, that can be in conjunction with practical, content-rich, and creative curricula. In fact, it must be; teaching content, for example, is teaching reading.


Besides being unconcerned with the quality or the content of the teaching, Rhee also failed at the how of the teaching. Although IMPACT has been touted by some as "ground-breaking," it's a terribly flawed instrument. Valerie Strauss, a long-time education journalist at The Washington Post, discusses the flaws of IMPACT in this recent column. 

"IMPACT is actually a collection of 20 different evaluation systems for teachers in different capacities and other school personnel. In its first iteration, teachers were to be evaluated five times a year by principals and master teachers who went into the classroom unannounced for 30 minutes and scored the teacher on 22 different teaching elements. They were, for example, supposed to show that they could tailor instruction to at least three 'learning styles,' demonstrate that they were instilling student belief in success through "affirmation chants, poems and cheers," and a lot more. It was so nutty to think that any teacher would show all 22 elements in 30 minutes that officials modified it. Now the number is a still unrealistic 10 or so. Some teachers, fearing that their professional careers were being based on an unfair system, got someone in the front office to alert them to when the principal or master teacher was to show up, according to interviews with a number of teachers who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Then they would send difficult kids out of the classroom, and, in some cases, pull out a specially prepared lesson plan tailored to meet IMPACT requirements. Meanwhile, some teachers never got five evaluations, apparently because a number of master teachers hired to do the jobs quit, according to sources in the school system."

Furthermore, just as many of the educators that were fired during her tenure and RIFed in 2009 were strong teachers, many who were deemed "ineffective" were actually solid, experienced teachers, while others who were deemed "effective" were some of the weakest teachers in their schools. 


Michelle Rhee's tenure has been awash in allegations of dishonesty, corruption, and fraud. Some of these allegations may sound like conspiracy theory-type paranoia, and may later prove to be thus, but many of these instances have been well-documented by others or are even a matter of connecting the dots in public records. Brandenburg lists them in this post, "Why Michelle Rhee Had to Go."  Even if some of these instances, for example the budget problems, weren't intentionally dishonest or corrupt, they demonstrate at best grave incompetence.


While certain people, such as President Obama, who also has no background or experience with public schools, have seen "great progress" in DCPS in recent years, many of the people whose children are educated in the system, and who have worked in the system for decades (not just teachers but community activists) not only haven't seen improvement but see real harm being done to their institution and to their communities. It's not just a question of "liking" or "disliking" Rhee or of her being "nice" or "not nice." Rather, was she qualified to do the job she did? Did she have sound and informed ideas about curriculum, fiscal and personnel management, education, and the craft of teaching? Did her policies and reforms actually work? Were they effective? Did they actually improve the quality of public education in the District of Columbia? Did she adequately serve the communities and families she'd been hired to serve? The answer to all of those questions is "no." 


Vincent Gray, the victor in the democratic primary, asked Adrian Fenty to appoint Kaya Henderson, Rhee's right hand woman, as Interim Chancellor. Henderson is similarly inexperienced (a few years of teaching in TFA before going into administration) and holds carbon-copy ideas about education to her former boss. Rhee supporters have been pleased with the appointment, saying that she'll continue the reforms, but that she's nicer, more collaborative, and is more likely to seek consensus. 


Teacher Sabrina Stevens of Denver, Colorado, describes her experience with changes being proposed in Denver Public Schools and explains the significant difference between consensus and buy-in. Is Henderson actually going to collaborate, or is she going to be as nice as she can to get buy-in? Collaboration and consensus would mean that Henderson would actually have to compromise on some of the pieces of new school reform movement's platform, and that platform is inherently narrow, ideological, and inflexible. How can someone be collaborative while subscribing to an ideology that is inherently antithetical to the ideals of consensus and compromise? Is Ms. Henderson prepared to give up her ideology or will she continue along the same misinformed and bankrupt path as Rhee, but just be kinder about it? I, for one, am dubious that she'll be more collaborative or that her education reforms will be any less ineffective in transforming DC's public schools.


Rhee is the national face of the new education reformers; evaluation of her leadership is important not just for DC but for the democratic institution of American public education. With their unchecked power and vast amounts of money, the corporate patrons of the new education reformers won't stop at our cities. They are headed to our suburbs, towns, and rural areas. Just recently, Secretary of Education, Race to the Top architect, and general for the new education reform movement Arne Duncan, who is a "big fan" of Rhee's and who does not restrain himself from meddling in the education affairs of local governments, spoke in my state at the uber-conservative Virginia Governor McDonnell's Summit on Education. McDonnell has said that he and Duncan speak often about their shared vision of education. In the District of Columbia and in all fifty states, parents, educators, students, and local leaders must firmly say no to this uninformed, top-down, autocratic, ineffective, and anti-intellectual version of education reform that seeks to undermine and privatize one of our most cherished democratic institutions.




UPDATE: An edited-for-The-Washington-Post-website version of this post appeared in The Answer Sheet on November 2, 2010. Read it here.