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Published on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Rheehire the Teachers, Rheetire the Chancellor
What I learned teaching in the D.C. Public Schools
"We are going to impose the new evaluation tools regardless" [of the outcome of talks with the union]. "We are going to be moving people out who are not performing." -District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, March 2, 2009In a culmination of her three years as head of the D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee acted on her union-busting pledge, firing 241 teachers, 5 percent of the district's total. All but a few of those dismissed received the lowest rating under a new evaluation system, dubbed “IMPACT,” which ties students' standardized test scores to teacher evaluations. An additional 737 employees were put on notice that they had been rated "minimally effective," the second-lowest category, and would have one year to improve their performance or also be fired.
A closer look at the IMPACT evaluation method, however, reveals its ineffectiveness as a tool to judge teacher performance—while simultaneously exposing its true purpose: a smoke screen to obscure the real factors necessary to provide a quality education.
Under IMPACT, all teachers are supposed to receive five 30-minute classroom observations during the school year that account for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, three by a school administrator and two by an outside "master educator" with a background in the instructor’s subject. However, some teachers never received the full five evaluations because some of the master teachers hired to do those jobs quit. Moreover, educators have questioned the scoring criteria for the evaluations of teachers. During the 30-minute observation, usually unannounced, a teacher is supposed to demonstrate 22 different specified teaching elements. As Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss pointed out, “What teacher demonstrates 22 teaching elements – some of which are not particularly related – in 30 minutes? Suppose a teacher takes 30 minutes to introduce new material and doesn’t have time to show... Oh well. Bad evaluation.”
Another 50 percent of the teacher’s IMPACT score is calculated—in a process designed to turn students into a commodity with a specific worth on the education market—by what they actually call “value added” improvement in scores on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System, or DC CAS. As Strauss astutely notes, “Judging teachers on the test scores of their students is all the rage in school reform these days – thanks so much, Education Secretary Arne Duncan – but, frankly, this is unconscionable for several reasons, not the least of which is that DC CAS wasn’t designed to evaluate teachers. That’s a basic violation of testing law. Ask any evaluation expert.”
From 2001 through 2004 I taught in a public elementary school in South East Washington, D.C.—an area sectioned off from the city both geographically, by the Potomac River, and socially, by its dearth of everything from jobs to grocery stores. And to borrow from the great educator and author Jonathan Kozol, the schools there are savagely unequal.
The elementary school at which I taught was almost completely segregated, serving 100 percent African American students—until my third year when one white student entered kindergarten. Directly across from the entrance of the school was a decrepit building with vegetation growing out through the windows. Around the corner lay a pile of cars that had been stripped and incinerated. Our school offered neither a grass field nor a basketball hoop for the kids to use at recess. The library’s book collection was more appropriate for an archeological study than a source for topical information. Our textbooks were woefully out of date and we seldom had enough for every student. Police roamed the halls of our elementary school looking for mouthy kids to jack up against the wall.
But to fully capture the ambience, you would want to enter my classroom. I had one hole in the middle of the chalkboard and another hole in the ceiling. The first time I noticed the opening in the ceiling was a Monday morning, when I came back to school after a rainy weekend and found standing water on the floor and all of my students’ U.S. history poster-board projects waterlogged. After the second flooding of my room, I got smart and put an industrial sized garbage can under the hole.
One lasting memory of my teaching experience in D.C. came on my third day of standing before these sixth graders. I had asked the students to bring a meaningful object from home for a show-and-tell activity. We gathered in a circle in the back of the room that Friday morning and the kids sat eagerly with paper bags on their laps that concealed their autobiographical mementos. One after another, each and every hand came out of those crumpled brown lunch sacs clutching a photo of a close family member—usually a dad or an uncle—that was either dead or in jail. By the time it got to me, all I could do was stare stupidly at the baseball I had pulled out and pick nervously at the red stitches as I mumbled something about how I had played in college.
Only a few days after this lesson, the tragic attacks of 9/11 were carried out, closely followed by the government’s launching of the war on Afghanistan. I received a higher degree in education theory that year as I witnessed the cynicism of our nation’s ability to bomb children halfway around the world but not able care for them in the shadow of the White House. Soon too, it became apparent in all of the No Child Left Behind rhetoric about accountability that I was being asked, from inside of the classroom, to correct for all of the mistaken priorities of the politicians.
As much as my youthful energy and ambition helped reach many of my students that year, it became painfully obvious that so many factors shaping my students’ lives and educations were beyond my control: homelessness, a prison industrial complex that had torn so many of the families apart, the lack of jobs for even the better-educated parents, the war budget that necessarily left so many students behind.
Now, nearly a decade later, official Black unemployment in Washington, D.C. has reached 20.4 percent, many of my students no doubt have been sucked into the school-to-prison-pipeline, and the war in Afghanistan rages on with a price tag of over $345 billion, more than 1,200 American casualties, and thousands of Afghan deaths.
Crying, “Money for war, not for schools!” the U.S. Senate recently voted to drop $20 billion in aid for the public schools—money intended to prevent the elimination of some 200,000 teacher jobs projected to be cut nationally in the next year—from a spending bill that provides $59 billion for President Barack Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan.
Michelle Rhee once said, “I know success stories where parents didn’t change, home life didn’t change, tough-streets life didn’t change. What changed was the adult in front of them every day in the classroom. These external factors don’t have to define achievement for our kids. If a prospective teacher wants to come up with a laundry list of why kids are failing because no one is reading to them at night, they can go teach in Fairfax County.”
The problem with Rhee’s thinking is that our goal should not be to discover “success stories” of kids who were able to transcend the deplorable conditions of life that make it so hard for so many to succeed, but rather to change those conditions in the first place. As a landmark 2009 study from Arizona State University demonstrates, we have to look at youth holistically and understand how our society, how the “external factors,” affect every aspect of a child’s life—from mental healthcare and nutrition to housing and support at home—if we want to give more than trendy slogans and instead provide a quality education for every student.
One of the criteria for judging teachers in the IMPACT evaluation asserts that the lowest possible score for the section will be given to teachers who “Deliver information with at least one mistake that leaves students with a misunderstanding at the end of the lesson.” When Michele Rhee announced the firing of the D.C. teachers she made a profoundly inaccurate statement that put her in jeopardy of failing her own evaluation. In her partially correct, but ultimately truth-obscuring declaration, she said, "Every child in a District of Columbia public school has a right to a highly effective teacher - in every classroom, of every school, of every neighborhood, of every ward, in this city."
The truth is, every student deserves much more than that.
Every Student deserves, too, an effective teacher who is supported—not scapegoated—by the school district, a class size that allows the teacher to provide the individualized attention each child deserves, a curriculum that addresses the culture and the needs of his or her community, and government that spends more to build schools than to bomb them.
Re-hire the D.C. teachers. Retire the Chancellor.
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59 Comments so far
Show AllTeacher effectiveness has always been a subjective assesment, and always will be.
The teachers are often at the mercy of supervisors, who are under pressure to bend results one way or another. The whole thing is rigged.
When you make your agenda of effectiveness everything, it really only stands for one thing - disposable workers.
And look around you. It is not just the school system that this is happening to. It is happening everywhere - you are basically robots for the management, decommissioned at any time of their liking.
Love
Zero
After working 35 years in the NYC public system, I went to work for the next five years as an outside "master educator" and found that Bloomberg's chancellor Joel Klein allowed a degree of freedom to schools that would evidently be abhorrent to Rhee - but this may have been a transient accomplishment due to cuts in funding. Klein,to his credit, dismantled the old system in which superintendents dictated curriculum and gave schools the option of designing their own assessments. He also sought out young principals from a variety of backgrounds.
The result was mixed since some principals opted to buy readymade tests and harassed teachers in the Rhee style, or signed on with a test prep outfit like Kaplan. However, some principals used the new freedom to work with teachers (and outside people like me) in developing programs of collaborative planning and assessment. The most successful schools used the philosophy of the Coalition of Essential Schools and focused assessments on close study of ongoing student work throughout the year rather than relying on corporate tests. But this takes a huge amount of time and requires the kind of teachers willing to devote a lot of their own time without being paid for it. New, young teachers could often do this but those with families and other responsibilities were less willing to meet on weekends. On the plus side, Bloomberg pushed through wage increases that allowed some older teachers to drop second jobs and devote their full attention to the profession they love.
Unfortunately, recent budget cuts will increase class size and reduce teacher planning time during the school day - which may well undo Klein's accomplishments. The temptation to fall back on the "easy" way of operating and basing everything on mass testing will grow stronger.
One other important difference with the DC situation: Much of the old South Bronx tenement area was burned down in the 1980s and replaced with a far less dense array of two and three family homes. Latin American and Asian immigrants have also made the Bronx more multiracial, and this is even truer in Brooklyn and Queens. Another key difference is that charter schools were restricted in number and did not draw off more motivated families. This, however, will change as NY state competes for the "Race to the Top" money and charters are always test-crazy since it is the cheapest way to demonstrate (or fake) results and justify profits.
Excellent comment.
Great article.
I know success stories where parents didn’t change, home life didn’t change, tough-streets life didn’t change. What changed was the adult in front of them every day in the classroom. These external factors don’t have to define achievement for our kids. If a prospective teacher wants to come up with a laundry list of why kids are failing because no one is reading to them at night, they can go teach in Fairfax County."
This quote is completely deplorable. I believe in the ability of teachers to make a difference in the lives of his or her students. But to deny the importance of social realities is blind. It asks individuals to overcome social injustices. But social injustices aren't an individual problem; they are by definition SOCIAL problems. This leads to a worldview that blames the victim for not transcending deeply rooted problems.
This is more like it:
Every Student deserves, too, an effective teacher who is supported—not scapegoated—by the school district, a class size that allows the teacher to provide the individualized attention each child deserves, a curriculum that addresses the culture and the needs of his or her community, and government that spends more to build schools than to bomb them.
A couple really good points here:
1. Teachers should be seen as the most natural allies of students and parents. Instead the media and politicians think they're totally incompetent and the basis of our failing schools. Certainly there are bad teachers just as there are bad lawyers, bad doctors, and bad politicians. Teachers should be held accountable just as lawyers, doctors and politicians should be held accountable. But in today's world accountability seems to equal scapegoating. The education system is top heavy and anti-democratic. I believe that schools should be under the control of teachers, parents, and the surrounding community-- not by bureaucrats and politicians who have spent little time in the classroom.
2. School must be relevant to the surrounding culture not to high-stakes testing.
3. The war on the people of Afghanistan (et. al) is also a war on the people of the United States who need jobs and good educations.
Bravo, well said.
So where is the union here?
Even barring the wrongheadedness of IMPACT, it can't be legal to fire these teachers if they didn't even receive full evaluations.
I wondered about this, too, SP08. Mr. Hagopian, do you know if there are any lawsuits filed?
you're assuming Mr. Hagopian reads the comments; why not ask him directly? jessedhagopian@gmail.com
I completely agree with Valatius, I have been a teacher in the South Bronx for 10 years and counting and there have been many positive changes that have been made under Bloomberg such as teacher recruitment and higher teacher compensation. However, I fear that the effort to privatize the school system, the current systems in place to attract new teachers, combined with a teacher freeze will undermine any progress made. Most new teachers in NY city are not as interested in improving their pedagogy but in promotional opportunities which not only hinders student progress but also undermines the union. Furthermore, cuts in funding will increase class sizes which will inevitably lead to more teacher scapegoating, higher teacher turnover and less experienced teachers remaining in the public school system. I fear that this vicious cycle will cripple public education in NYC for generations to come and will increase the economic gap between the haves and have-not. However I never thought I would catch my self saying this but Rhee just made Klein look really good.
Excellent comment.
I grew up in a home where there was so much domestic violence that I was unable to sleep 4 or 5 nights out of every week. I had to be on constant alert to protect my mother and sisters.
School for me became a sanctuary, a place where I could escape from the shouting, screaming violence and the constant threat of violence. School was also a place where I could catch a short nap, since I was unable to sleep at home.
Police and neighbors knew what was going on in our home, and they passed that information on to my teachers and coaches. They understood that learning was a low priority in a home where survival was the major issue.
Those teachers and coaches provided the kind of support and encouragement I needed, even though I seldom did homework or turned in assignments. I tested high on aptitude tests, but my grades were less than average.
Under Rhee's/Duncan's/Obama's standards, I would have been part of the reason why my teachers were fired. However, those teachers are the reason I was able to rise above the domestic violence of my youth and eventually live a productive life. I suspect that many of the D. C. teachers Rhee fired were playing similar roles in the lives of their students.
Once I was able to leave home and get away from the violence, I went on to earn a doctorate at a major university. After receiving that degree, I went back home and thanked those teachers and coaches for doing what they did for me. I also apologized to them for not doing better in their classes. They understood.
Teaching is the planting of seeds, not the harvesting of a crop.
Oldguy,
Do you mind if I use your saying of "Teaching is the planting of seeds, not the harvesting of a crop."? That is an excellent little aphorism.
OYE
Hey, Old Guy!
nice one:
Teaching is the planting of seeds, not the harvesting of a crop.
Another one of the many reasons why student test scores are inadequate to "judge the teacher".
Thank you for sharing your compelling story.
OLD GUY: Inspiring post!
I wonder if a website should publish testimonials like the one you shared in this forum? If hundreds of people related similar experiences, maybe it could create a groundswell that could push the wave of these ridiculous uniform codes back on the lamebrains who dreamt them up mostly so they could profit at others' considerable expense!
we all like a hard ass supervisor to "clean things up"
until we get one for our own supervisor
ms rhee is being inhumane
I'm a high school social studies teacher in Oakland, California and bare witness to the savage inequalities within the public school system. From teacher pay to classroom size to the physical school environment, class and race matters greatly. Sure we can pick out the superstars that rise up out of their situations, but they just show the herculean efforts needed to do so. The Milwaukee Brewers may win the World Series, but you can bet that the Yankees will be in the playoffs.
Bad teachers need to go. Absolutely. No one disagrees with that. However, basing teacher evaluations on student tests scores is ridiculous. Check out www.fairtest.org for a more in-depth critique of standardized tests.
peripatetic.dave,
Fairtest.org is a good place to start for those who have not looked into standardized testing and standards. The study to which I continually refer that destroys "standards" and standardized testing is Noel Wilson's "Eucation Standards and the Problem of Error"--abstract and links to whole study @ http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577 . I have yet to see a rebuttal to this study. It is too "dangerous" to the powers that be in education to even discuss it. There is no rebuttal--it destroys almost all upon which NCLB and RTTT are based. Until we as educators read, learn and understand this study and can use it to attack the insanities that currently pass as "education reform" we will fight a losing battle. Wilson's study is the starting point and main argument to counter those seeking to destroy public education through "data driven" dialogue, metric based analysis.
OYE
Thanks for these links. Anyone opposing the kind of destructive education policies favored by the Bush and Obama administrations has the responsibility to become familiar in great detail with the tests on which people like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan base their ideology. The Coalition for Essential Schools ( http://www.essentialschools.org/ ) is also a great resource in this struggle.
Although I've never taught young kids, I have spent nearly 30 years teaching at the university level. I'm a psychologist, with a background in topics relevant to education, including cognitive development, motivation, learning, personality differences, attentional differences, and so on.
I just want to say that following your earlier advice, I read Wilson's "Education Standards and the Problem of Error". I'm sorry to say that I didn't understand much of it. So I read it a second time, and still, it made no sense to me. I don't mean to embarrass or discourage you, but just to point out that for someone with my particular background, Wilson's article is incomprehensible. We can of course blame that on shortcomings in my background or shortcomings in Wilson's study (which is really an opinion piece rather than a study).
In the university, we were evaluated in terms of student evaluations (which are quite quantitative) and occasional visitations by other faculty (who wrote a qualitative letter). These were not perfect measures, but together they were generally effective in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of teachers. I got better information from the student than faculty evaluations, primarily because the faculty (one person) was more likely to be biased (for or against). Similar bias would arise using Rhee's evaluation technique, not to mention the impossibility of observing 22 different teaching skills.
DougD,
I understand your difficulty in reading this study. I have read it at least 10 times and continue to find things that I missed during the prior readings. It was his doctoral dissertation. It does not fall under the realms of either quantitative or qualitative studies as those are utilized these days at the university level. To me it is understandable why you might be having difficulty with it since it does not take a "standard" format of, at least, American dissertations. To me it shows just how "acclimated" we get to certain discourses/manners of reading & writing.
However, it is not an "opinion piece". What Wilson does is to use the language/discourse of standards/standardized testing as it is used in the educational realm and turns that "logic" and discourse on itself to show the inner contradictions of what is said and the actual practices and then how those practices harm/terrorize those who are subjected to these testing regimes-the students. It is what my doctoral advisor termed a "critical enquiry" which was meant to distinguish it from "critical inquiry" as understood in a more philosophical fashion.
Personally, I survey my students at the end of each year to find out what they think and I have adjusted a number of practices over the years because of what the students have said. Much more so than making changes from what a principal discussed during my evaluations. The students' comments have also reinforced many things that I do in a classroom.
OYE
Oye,
Thanks, this was very helpful. I'll give the Wilson approach another try (or two). It's true, as you say, that we are horribly constrained by our conventional methodologies (e.g., quantitative in my case). But at the same time, I have developed a lot respect for the "scientific method", though I must admit it took me a long time before I really understood and appreciated it. So I can understand it's going to take a lot of work to really comprehend another approach.
When I first started teaching, we were able to use these student evaluations which consisted of 10 general questions (e.g., "Is the instructor clear?". It also came with a "menu" of 200 more specific questions out of which you could choose another 10 to go with the 10 general questions. These were questions like "does instructor write large enough", "is instructor's accent hard to understand", "does instructor make good use of analogies", and so on. These may sound trivial but they were actually quite helpful because if you were worried about some part of your teaching you could focus on it through these menu questions and see if it's really a problem. In those days, teacher evaluations were intended to be developmental - to help you improve. Nowadays, the menu options are long gone, and the evaluations seem intended to rank people for purposes of merit pay, promotion, and tenure.
DougD,
As you reread Wilson's work please keep in mind what he is attempting to do--to "destroy" the concepts of standards and standardized testing as currently being used in education. As a former head of one of Australia's state's/territory's educational testing departments he is quite familiar with the whole process of making standardized tests and the results of said testing regimes.
One of his basic premises is that it is logically impossible to "quantify" a "quality". Teaching and learning are qualities that individuals accrue over time and that vary in scope over time. As you read the study please feel free to contact me with any questions--I may or may not be able to help but I think I pretty much have synthesized in my own brain what he says/writes. Contact me at dswacker@centurytel.net . I'd be more than happy to help as it always helps me to clarify my thinking by helping someone clarify theirs.
It sounds like you have been reading "quantitative" studies for many years now. An interesting thing about "quantitative" studies in the educational realm is that most deal with correlations of various factors that may or may not influence "X" behavior. And although the various statistical manipulations in educational studies data such as chi square, t-distributions, etc. . . appear to be "scientific" they really only have a "veneer" of science to them. Are they mathematical models? Yes. But what do they really say about the variables being studied? That is where part of the problem lies.
In the education world a study that shows a .3 or .4 correlation coefficient is considered a good correlation. And unfortunately most people don't understand the difference between a correlation and causation using correlation as causation when they shouldn't. But to take even a "high" correlation coefficient (for educational studies) of .4, it doesn't say much at all about the relationship between the variable and outcome. In reality a .4 correlation coefficient means that that variable had a 16% chance (a little more than 1 out of 10) of causing the outcome. I'm certainly not going to the boats (gambling) with those kinds of odds stacked against me. In the "scientific" realm any correlation coefficient less than 1 has to be treated as suspect. So right off the bat most of the studies you are accustomed to reading may have a basic flaw to start with or they are presented in such a fashion to hide said flaws.
Generally speaking I would concur with you that a "scientific" approach can be one of the best--but only within the realms/discourses where that type of approach is appropriate. And "evaluations"/"assessments" in the educational realm dealing with learning and teaching are not logically appropriate realms in which to use this type of "scientific" discourse, i.e., it is logically impossible to quantify a quality.
Good luck on your reading(s) of Wilson's study and please feel free to contact me if you wish.
OYE
OYE: Great post! Love the part that makes a distinction between causality and correlation. Your insights are good ones.
And thanks for catching my humor, particularly with respect to borrowing Shakepeare's use of "the rub."
I appreciate your comment, peripatetic.dave.
But the militant grammar-monitors here will not look kindly on a high-school teacher-- even a social studies teacher-- who writes a phrase like "bare witness".
Just a word of warning for future reference. ;)
O.S: Of course bare witnesses might make for more interesting forms of engagement, not to mention interrogation. And therein lies the rub. (LOL)
I hope you're not another from the forum, given the detail you evidently use in defining your statements, who champions "the right to spell" in any manner imaginable? Once again, I think standards DO mean something.
If I walk into someone's home and it's a mess (or filthy) I would not want to eat dinner there. If I meet a medical professional who smokes, has alcohol on his/her breath, or is grossly overweight, I would not take them seriously when it came to their perspective on genuine health. I don't think the big banks, given their appalling lack of economic fair play, are in ANY position to designate the credit scores of people who do pay their bills on time. And the list goes on... if we don't require quality, we won't get it.
Siouxrose,
"O.S: Of course bare witnesses might make for more interesting forms of engagement, not to mention interrogation. And therein lies the rub. (LOL)"
That's a good one!!!!
OYE
Bring America Back !!!!
**Sounds like most of the CD bloggers just want Chancellor Rhee to do nothing about these marginal at best teachers, just let them cruise into their senior status mode when they can't be fired !?
**Ms Rhee had to do something, DC is the Federal Enclave of the Nation, for god's sake !
we live in a world maintained by force...
as adults, are we to teach the young to be unaware of these forces (ignorance), to work their lives and health away within the forced system (resignation), or to counter the force and establish a better system (determination)?
Outrageous, and hopefully, illegal, as Rhee's action was, nevertheless we as teachers must take on the accountability issue in a serious way, or we will never win the battle for public opinion in the current climate. It's no longer enough to say it's all subjective, or the school district and administrators must follow through on procedures already in place, or it's just that resources are insufficient. We need teacher-led accountability and evaluation.
We must open our doors, literally and figuratively, to our colleagues to observe each other, discuss our practice, and improve our skills. It's a huge and hard, but necessary, shift in teacher culture. We must do this not only to deflect often mean-spirited criticism, but to help the neediest of our students and to uplift our profession. Are we up to the challenge?
Steve Leigh:
Excellent article! The politicians and corporations who hope to make money off of privatizing education don't want to put the resources into education rather than war. Instead, they want to scapegoat teachers and teachers' unions. The unions need to take a much firmer stand in defending teachers , opposing Race to the Top, Merit Pay, unfair evaluations and demanding that resources go into education, health care, housing etc. instead of war. For an analysis of the recent AFT convention and how the unions should be addressing Race to the Top and school "reform" see:
http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/22/wrong-partner-for-our-schools
If we lived in a sane or humane society, Jesse Hagopian would replace Ms. Rhee...
This is a powerful article. The details of teaching in an inner-city school are heartbreaking. Imagine if all the nations being told how great America is, and how it's committed to spreading freedom and democracy actually got to witness the priorities on full poignant display here at home? Lives are about to become trashed by these industrial standards applied to children and teachers. In the name of efficiency (which is now based on profits for the "ownership caste"), a great many aspects of modern American life are being modeled after mono-culture. UNI-formity leads to a drab, lifeless society. What a sickening model.
/One of the criteria for judging teachers... information with at least one mistake that leaves students with a misunderstanding at the end of the lesson.”/
Which brings us back to the issue of resume padding (some call it lying) before she got the chancellor job.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/jun/29/
council-checks-rhees-resume/print/
On her resume, she claimed that students rose from the 13th percentile to the 90th percentile as a result of being in her class. She had no documentation of this. HOWEVER, documentation which a nearby University had from research on this school contradicts her assertion by a long shot! And she claims she didn't see the scores herself back then... but SURELY she should know NOW not to use undocumented hearsay on a resume 10 years later!
I think it's sad that she got the chancellor position despite this degree of professional dishonesty.
And her current firing of teachers based on scores is rather ironic, given this quote from the article about Rhee's performance as evidenced by available test data "Mr. Gray said he examined Harlem Park test scores from Mrs. Rhee's tenure — which coincided with an experiment by the Baltimore school system to let a private company manage the school — from which he concluded that her students showed little progress."
(edited to get complete url in)
Peachy,
Thanks for the information regarding Ms. Rhee's supposed success in the classroom. When I read that 13th to 90th percentile increase I said BFS (bovine intercourse excrement). Knew it was a lie on the face of it. And yes it is sad that no one in the hiring process even questioned such utter (udder???) BS. But that is how these types of people operate. Lie early and often, repeat process, continue process, end process with more lies and prevarications. Ms. Rhee is not an educator but a self serving lying wench.
OYE
Ms. Rhee cannot change the rate of unemployment in DC. She can't change the budget to allocate more resources to help pull kids out of the cycle of poverty. However, she can fire teachers who, for instance, impregnate special needs kids, or teachers who hit kids or who simply don't show up because it's a nice day. Yet even for the extreme example of the teacher who impregnated a special needs kid, the union protested. Unions are there to protect the rights of workers - not to protect abusive or incompetent workers from losing their jobs even when it's obvious they're not doing work. Rhee has only tried to bring accountability back into the equation and raise student reading scores - which she did. This attack on her is misplaced and idiotic.
Excuse me, jbr, there is a difference between 'attack' and 'criticism'. If you criticize a person's professional performance, are you attacking the person, professionally or personally? No. And that is not open to debate. We now live in times in which if you call someone on their rudeness, it is you who is labelled as rude, instead of the person initially rude acknowledging and being accountable for their rudeness. this is something one sees everywhere in North America now, and it is a disease that needs to be overcome before real growth in ccompassionate human terms can happen in society. But given the mess the U.S. is in, and the gradually dawning awareness among the public of this mess, the actual deep emergency they're in, and the reality that their country is declining, and that very serious social decline and concomitant pressures will become facts of life in America, there seems little chance that the disease will be dealt with soon.
Rhee is a puppet for a political agenda - that is clear from the article. It is also clear that a systemic and abiding problem which is at the root of American public education being among the worst, if not THE worst in the industrialized world, is the enormous faults in the country's systems, the betrayal of the social matrix by government and corporate interests, and the ignorance deliberately cultivated in a society fetishized, victimized by war and money.
Read John Taylor Gatto on the subject of American public schooling, for Christ's sake.
.
I respectfully disagree, Chancellor Rhee has started a very difficult job, if not impossible job; of turning the DC School District around for the sake of the DC children.
When you assign blame around, you left out the Mighty Teachers Union, why ?????
I applaude Ms. Rhee's professional efforts.
/
I'd have to disagree on the criticism vs attack point, Barry. I live in the area and have seen the anti-rhee protests and screeds that are occurring every month. Local elections are hinging upon whether you're for Rhee or against her. I think she's doing the best she can and this constant wave of personal attacks against her just is making it harder for her to do her job. The crumbling infrastructure, the kleptocracy based upon wars and insiders with the defense department, etc is a different issue. This article is about whether Rhee should be forced out and in my opinion, she should not be.
This is not an attack on Rhee, it is a question of standardization and the business model in our schools which Rhee represents. It is a wrongheaded, blame the victim type approach and it is, frankly, anti-democratic.
.
All I hear is raving and ranting, about these 241 teachers being "scapgoats", and the Teachers Union being "busted".
For over forty years the Teachers Unions have become politically powerful across the nation. Correspondently, the children of the large urban school districts have been short-changed. In recent years, inter-city children have been denied both competent teachers, proper & secure educational facilities, and up-todate academic materials.
The DC School District has made recent investiments to improve its services to the children. A major effort has been to identify incompetent/non-productive teachers.
These 241 teachers and their union must own-up to their guilt. Instead of fighting Chancellor Rhee,,,,,,the union would serve both their membership, and the DC children,,,, by working to improving the performance of the 737 teachers who were put on a one year notice.
Across the land our children deserve the very best educational opportunities to prepare to become productive citizens. This is one war we cannot afford to lose. Everyone must sacrifice, incuding teachers and their unions.
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Hey Encino and Creepy Billy D.,
Here's another one for ya!
Rundown schools,outdated books,crowded classrooms,inferior nutrition, lack of humanities and athletic programs in our public school systems all create the perfect environment in which to raise the malleable young adults needed by the ruling class to serve in their armies and unquestionably accept the status quo. Like lemmings, they will jump off the cliff on command.
Michelle Rhee is a lot like Obama, a person who has learned to somehow quiet the gear-grinding noise in her brain resulting from all the glaringly obvious contradictions in her way of thinking and between her stated intentions and actions. This trait now appears to be an important predictor of "success" in the lost world that stands where the USA used to be, in the vacuous, shouting match arena where there used to be an ethosphere, in the glib, facile sloganeering "free market/consumer economy", where there used to be a society.
It doesn't matter if you don't speak the truth or if you are incoherent or if you knowingly take issues and measurements out of context. It only matters if you do these things with "conviction". It only matters if you know how to "perform", i.e., spot the "trend" and please the big boys who stand to gain therefrom. Rhee is expendable. She probably knows that even as she fires other "expendables". She's an errand girl for privatization. When the "trend" changes Rhee will become "quaint", "obsolete". By then, if she is as smart as she appears, she'll have a cushy seat on a corporate board or two or an industry-funded chair at a major graduate education school...or both. Pretty good for essentially no classroom experience on your resume.
JAREILLY: Excellent characterization. T.S. Elliot, or was it Auden, termed these types of person, the hollow men (and women). They are perfect for a society that has lost its moral compass. Amoral, they are to the corporate world what the chameleon is to nature. Those from their ilk applaud their capacity for adaptation...
Nice observation. It is the facile corporate ladder-climbing mentality that has replaced vision and ethics.
Joe
Some of you have asked if you can use the aphorism, "Teaching is the planting of seeds, not the harvesting of a crop," in your own comments or writings. By all means, feel free to use it. I am much more interested in drawing attention to the many roles teachers play in our lives than I am in getting credit for anything.
Siouxrose suggested, "I wonder if a website should publish testimonials like the one you [Old Guy] shared in this forum?"
Perhaps someone with a little more computer savy than I have could use that aphorism as the title (or subtitle) for Siouxrose's suggested website. I would love to read other stories from former students whose teachers planted a "seed" that would not show up on standardized tests--but later made a significant difference in a young person's life.
Undoubtedly, many of those "seeds" led to substantial economic, social, medical or other breakthroughs from students who might not have performed spectacularly on standardized tests or in the classroom, but who remembered something a teacher did or said years later when they "harvested" the fruit of those seeds.
I am sure there are thousands of those stories out there, many much more compelling than mine.
Best!
Old Guy
OLD GUY: I lack the technical skills to set up such a website, but I wonder if you posed the idea (and your own testimonial) to a teachers' group that's working to oppose these authoritarian standards, if you might not find some interest in or through that venue? Just an idea. And by the way, your humility is touching. I really believe in education as the path to improving lives (as opposed to the current U.S. brand, intent upon holding captive minds hostage).
RE: The problem with Rhee’s thinking is that our goal should not be to discover “success stories” of kids who were able to transcend the deplorable conditions of life that make it so hard for so many to succeed, but rather to change those conditions in the first place.
That should be our goal! Great article!
Sorry kids but schools are failing and homeschooling is inevitable. Get ready to educate your kids if you can't afford private school.
And the kids who don't have homes or parents can go to McDonalds and play all day in the McPlayground. What a wonderful country! Something for everyone.