Possible Causes for DC’s Widening Achievement Gap

In my opinion, there are two possible causes. I would like to pose and discuss both of them.

(1) The group of students being tested, scored, and counted in DCPS on the NAEP has changed in nature.

or

(2) There have been major changes in curriculum and/or instructional practices in DCPS.

Let’s consider #1.

We know that this is definitely part of the story,  case, since the NAEP TUDA report (which you can find at http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/math_2009_tudareport/ ) states that for 2009, TUDA no longer counted DC’s charter schools when giving detailed breakdowns of population groups, percentile ranks, and so on for DCPS. (I’ve tried to make this clearer by putting a note to this effect on every graph and table. )  They also point out in their technical notes that if they had also excluded the charter schools in 2007, then the average 8th grade math NAEP score for DCPS in 2007 would have been lower: 244, not 248. However, they do not provide us with enough information for us  to figure out what else would have changed. We are left with a good bit of speculation.

In spring 2009, according to my calculations, there were more 8th graders in regular DC public schools than in the DC charter schools ( 2531 to 1940). However,  higher percentages of students in the 8th grade charter schools scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the DC-CAS  in reading (56% as compared to 40%). So the actual numbers of students making AYP in the public and charter schools in reading in the 8th grade, according to my calculations, were 1,019 in the public and 1,093 in the charter schools – very close. We can infer from the NAEP technical note that in 2007, the 8th grade charter school students had again performed a bit better in math than the regular DCPS students. However, I don’t know off-hand the enrollment figures at that time for the two groups, and I also don’t know if NAEP does some sort of weighted average or not with different students or groups of students. So I really can’t extrapolate to say exactly what the average for regular DCPS students would have been in math for the 8th grade in 2007.

In the 4th grade, the situation is quite different. For one thing, NAEP does not inform us what the true 2007 4th grade regular-DCPS average math score would have been. However, I calculate that there were 3,303 students in the 4th grade  regular DC public schools in April 2009, of which about 48%, or 1,573  students, made AYP in reading on the DC-CAS (not the NAEP). In the charter schools, there were 1,254 students, of whom 492, or about 39%, made AYP in reading. So , unlike in the 8th grade, the 4th grade regular DCPS students did better than the 4th grade charter school students in reading. I think we can safely conclude that in 2007, the regular 4th grade DCPS students probably also did better in math.  If this conclusion is correct, then the regular DC public school students‘ average score in math for 4th grade in 2007 would have been somewhat higher than the 214 that is recorded for year 2007 on page 48 of the NAEP TUDA report.

Unfortunately, I have not done similar detailed breakdown calculations for every single grade level and subgroup at every single public or charter school for the math scores for 2009’s DC-CAS.  I only did them for reading. (And that, alone, took a huge amount of work.) I have done neither math nor reading for 2008, nor 2007, nor any other prior year’s DC-CAS scores.

As you probably know large percentages of students in DC are now attending charter schools, rather than regular public schools. I imagine that every time that DCPS administration does something stupid, then more parents probably decide to move their children to a charter school, hoping that they will do better there. (Despite the statistical evidence to the contrary.) And since there has been so much movement (and with record numbers under Rhee’s administration), the population of DCPS has been generally shrinking.

But why, and how, would this, all by itself, possibly make the achievement gap get larger? Let me try to explain by making up an example that has to do with space rocks.

Suppose a museum has a very large collection of meteorites (rocks from space). These rocks are quite expensive, and they are weighed (and priced) by the gram. One of the curators decides to put into a case a sub-collection, consisting of exactly one 1-gram space rock, one 2-gram space rock, one 3-gram rock, one 4-gram rock, and so on, all the way up to a single  100-gram meteorite. There are 100 rocks in the collection, as you can see below. The average weight of all of these rocks is the sum of all the weights, divided by the number of weights, or 5,050 grams divided by 100 rocks, or 50.5 grams per rock.

I have also shown where the 10th, 25th, 75th, and 90th percentile rocks are, which I will explain later.

Now, if you take out the ten smallest meteorites, the average will increase. Why? Because the total weight of all of the meteorites is now only 4995 grams, and the number of rocks is 90, and when you divide those you get an average of 55.5 grams per rock.  So, dropping the lowest ten rocks increases the average by 5 grams, and the locations of the 10th and 90th percentile rocks have moved as well, as you can see below.

What if the curator had taken out the 10 heaviest meteorites? The sum of all the rocks’ weights would now be 4,095 grams, and when we divide that by 90, we get an average of 45.5 grams per rock. So the average weight has dropped by 5 grams, as you see below, and the locations of the 10th and 90th percentiles have moved, also.

If we take out the 10 middle-sized rocks, that is, the ones from 46 through 55, then you would think that the average weight shouldn’t change. And you would be correct.  The sum of all the rocks’ weights is now 4,545 grams, and when you divide that by 90, you get 50.5 grams again.

But something definitely HAS changed – the middle has disappeared.

You might remember those graphs I made about percentile ranks in DCPS, the nation, and in other large cities. If not, you can look at some prior posts in this blog. Let’s agree that a thing is at the 90th percentile if it is greater than 90 percent of the other things in the group. If we are talking about heights of people, being at the 90th percentile probably doesn’t mean they are 90 inches tall! In fact, men who are about 6 feet, 2 inches are taller than 90% of all other men, so they are at about the 90th percentile.

However, in our example with the 100 original space rocks, the rock that weighs 91 grams has exactly 90 rocks that are lighter than it is, so I will say it’s at the 90th percentile. The rock that weighs 11 grams only has 10 rocks lighter than it is, so let’s agree that it’s at the 1oth percentile. The rock weighing 76 grams is at the 75th percentile, and the rock with a mass of 26 grams is at the 25th percentile.

Now let’s now take out the middle 40 rocks, much like charter schools have taken nearly 40% of the students in DCPS. So the remaining 60 rocks have masses of  1 gram through 30 grams, and then 71 grams through 100 grams. To find the rock that is at the 10th percentile, take 10% of 60. That’s 6. So for a rock to be at the 10th percentile, it only has to outweigh six rocks; those are the ones with masses of 1 g through 6 g. So the rock at the 10th percentile now weighs 7 grams. A rock at the 90th percentile has to have a mass greater than 90% of 60 rocks, which is 54 rocks. I get that  the rock weighing 95 grams is now the one at the 90th percentile. Similarly, I get that the rock weighing 16 grams is now the one at the 25th percentile, and that the rock at the 75th percentile is now the rock with a mass of 86 grams, as you see below.

In the original meteorite collection, as you can see in the first diagram I made, the gap in masses (or weights) between the 10th and 90th percentile was 91 grams minus 11 grams, or 80 grams. The gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is 76 minus 26, or 50 grams.

When we take out the middle 40% of the rocks, the average weight won’t change. But the gaps between the 10th and 90th percentiles HAVE changed: it’s 95 minus 7, or 88 grams, which is 8 grams larger than it used to be. And the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is now 86  g minus 16 g, or 70 grams, which is 20 grams wider than it used to be.

However, if we just took out the lightest 40% of the rocks, the average mass of the remaining rocks would go up, but the intervals between the 10^th and 90^th percentiles, or etween the 25^th and 75^th percentiles, would get smaller.

My conclusion from all of this is that the charter schools are probably *not* really taking the very highest-performing students from DCPS. Nor are they taking the very worst-performing students from DCPS. I think they are taking the ones that are in the middle of the road, so to speak.

Next time: changes in instructional practices…

Even more on the widening achievement gap!

Some folks have told me they don’t think the evidence so far of a widening of the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is statistically significant or even real.  I will let the readers make up their own mind, but the evidence so far definitely belies the boasting, everything-is-wonderful, I-fixed-DCPS propaganda of Michelle Rhee.

Here are two tables and graphs that show how the gap is widening when you compare students in DC public schools, all big cities, and the entire nation who are at the 25th percentile with those at the 75th percentile, in the 4th grade, and in the 8th grade.

(That is, we compare the scaled NAEP math scores of students who only score better than 1/4 of their peers, with the same scores students who score better than 3/4 of their peers. Students at the 25th percentile are also said to be at the first quartile, and are not very high achievers. Likewise, students at the 75th percentile are also said to be at the third quartile; they are relatively high achievers.)

First, the fourth graders:

As before, the green line is for DC public schools. The gap is not huge here, but we do see that the gap in DC public schools seems to be getting a bit larger over the past few years.

Now, the gap for 8th graders:

Here, the recent increase in the size of the gap for DCPS between the top quartile and bottom quartile is larger than in the 4th grade, and to my unsophisticated mind, appears more significant, especially since the ones for the rest of the country look pretty stable. And it’s sad that DCPS no longer beats the average for other large cities.

In the 8th grade, in Washington, DC public schools, there are simply not enough white students for NAEP to present any statistics at all, so I don’t have anything to show you, either.

However, we do have data on income levels, as shown by whether the child’s family is deemed to be eligible for the National School Lunch Program or not. If they are eligible, that generally means a lower family income level (especially per person) than if they are NOT eligible.  First, the data for both 4th and 8th grade students across the nation, in large cities, and in DC public schools, taken directly from the NAEP TUDA report. Remember again that in 2009, charter schools are NOT included.

and, now, a table and graph showing the actual gaps in match achievement at the 4th grade level between students eligible for the national school lunch program, and those who are not:

and, for the 8th graders:

Really remarkable, isn’t it? By race, by percentile ranking, and by income level, during the last 2 years, on every single measure, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” has dramatically increased. But this same trend is NOT found in the nation as a whole, nor in large cities as a whole. That is, it has happened only in DC public schools, ever since Michelle Rhee (and Adrian Fenty) took over.

How and exactly has this happened????

More on the widening achievement gap

Here are a few more graphs and charts that show how striking Michelle Rhee’s new achievement gap really is.

First, an overall table showing how black, white, and hispanic fourth-graders averaged on the NAEP in math in the nation as a whole, in all large cities, and in DCPS. Note that DCPS white students do very, very well in comparison to just about all other groups, and that DCPS black students do very poorly in comparison to all of the other groups listed here. DCPS latino students are, in fact, catching up to other hispanic students in other cities and across the nation.

Now let’s look at the differences between black and white students in all three regions, over this period of time. This time, it’s both a table and a graph:

Notice that until Michelle Rhee came to DC, we were actually starting to make some progress in closing the gap between the achievement of black and white students. But, since her arrival, the gap has widened again to what it used to be.

Now let’s look at the gaps between whites and hispanics on the same test, same locations, same time period:

Again, in DC we were starting to make significant progress in closing the gap – until Michelle Rhee was plucked from a richly-deserved obscurity to become the un-accountable Chancellor of DC Public Schools.

Why, and how, has Michelle Rhee enlarged the Achievement Gap in DC?

Bill Turque’s recent article in the Washington Post (12-13-09) points out that under Michelle Rhee (but not previously), the gaps between white and black; between poor and non-poor; and between high-achievers and low-achievers among DCPS students have gotten noticeably larger. Please permit me to show how striking Rhee’s enlarged gap is, and to compare it to the rest of the country.

In fact, I conclude that the enlargement of this gap is Michelle Rhee’s singular achievement so far as Chancellor of the DC public school system, since she has so far not succeeded in breaking the Washington Teachers’ Union, which was probably her main goal, and since scores on the NAEP and DC-CAS were going up pretty steadily before she arrived.

First of all, let’s compare 4th grade students’ scores in DCPS in math on the NAEP, or National Assessment of Educational Progress, over the time period 2003 – 2009, for various percentile ranks. (Students at the 90th percentile do better than 90% of their fellow students, or cohort, so they are probably very good at math, compared to their DCPS peers. If you are at the 75th percentile, you do better than 75% of your cohort. And so on. Naturally, the students in the 25th percentile  in 2003 are not the same students who were at the 25th percentile in 2009; however, both students were right in the middle of the bottom half of their class. The scores are whatever the scaled score was that they got on the NAEP. And no, I don’t quite know what that means either. But a higher score on the NAEP is most likely better than a lower score. It appears that NAEP scores can range from 0 to 500. All my data comes from the lengfthy PDF file on the NAEP TUDA report, which is at http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/math_2009_tudareport/ .

Notice that although all of the groups’ scores are generally increasing, the scores for the students at the 75th and 90th percentiles are going up a lot faster during the last 2 years. So the gap between the top and bottom students is widening in the 4th grade in DC, under Michelle Rhee’s watch.

Rhee’s defenders will probably object that this is happening everywhere in the country. But that is not true. Here is a table and graph of the exact same percentile ranks for the nation as a whole:

To make this a bit clearer, I also have made a table showing the gaps between the 90th and 10th percentiles in the nation as a whole, in all large cities, and in DCPS. Take a look at how much it has grown in DC in the past few years:

Next, let’s look at the 8th grade. The story is very similar, but there are differences. In 2009, the students in DCPS at the 25th and 10th percentiles actually did worse than their counterparts in 2007. And the gap widened.

What about the nation as a whole? Much like in 4th grade:

Now let’s compare gaps for 8th grade math in all big cities, the nation, and DC Public Schools:

Quite a disturbing pattern. Tomorrow: even more graphs and data, including the white-black gap and the poor-nonpoor gap!

Bill Turque’s article can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/12/AR2009121201276.html?nav=emailpage or http://tinyurl.com/turque12-13 .

Wall Street Likes Michelle Rhee. I don’t. You shouldn’t, either.

Today I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that said Obama and Duncan aren’t giving Michelle Rhee enough support. That was bad enough, but then I read the comments from the readers. They were downright scary; they sounded like Mussolini-style fascists. Here are some comments I will try to post:

I find it most ironic that a number of readers of the Wall Street Journal are calling public school teachers “selfish” because teachers are overwhelmingly against Rhee-type diktats, which mostly involve losing any form of due process for teachers, and  because teachers are not all that interested in potentially earning 6-figure salaries. If teachers were really interested in making lots of money, they would go work on Wall Street, or else become right-wing educational experts like Michelle Rhee. (Duh!)

It might sound old-fashioned, but most teachers would much rather have the satisfaction of knowing that they had actually taught their students well. They  would also prefer to hear kind words from their ex-students (and the parents and administrators) for their efforts, rather than spending their time on mindless test-prep activities and on competing with each other for gimmicks that might raise test scores to earn big bonuses. They also believe in fairness and telling the truth, neither of which are virtues exhibited by the current DCPS schools chief.

The public at large has vivid, recent memories of what a single-minded concentration on a single bottom-line number – like a standardized test score – might lead to. Wall Street traders, large banks, mortgage bankers, Enron and all the rest cheated and lied to produce a good, but fictional, bottom line, so they could get those big bonuses. And they nearly crashed the whole world economy along the way. Unfortunately, some school administrators and teachers have already been caught cheating on student test scores; others have probably gotten away with it. This is not the purpose for which most teachers went into the profession.

Let me point out a few other things:

1. To improve education in a school system, you need good teachers, and you need a good curriculum. Michelle Rhee has been in power for 2.5 years now, and hasn’t done boo about the curriculum – which needs a lot of work.
2. Rhee has fired a lot of principals and teachers, which might make most readers of the Wall Street Journal happy, but anybody who claims that the schools where she replaced principals are doing better is lying. See earlier blog entries for statistical details on this.
3. Test scores in DC public schools, both on the DC-CAS and the NAEP, have been rising steadily for many years. In the case of the NAEP, it’s been since the mid-1990’s. Rhee had no hand in any of that improvement, but she’s been trying to take the credit. Again, my blog has details.
4. Charter schools do absolutely no better than regular public schools, though in DC they get much more money per pupil and are helping to re-segregate our school system. CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE A FAILED EXPERIMENT! GIVE IT UP! FIX THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!
5. One very troubling new symptom of Rhee’s tenure in DCPS over the past TWO years is that the gap between kids at the 10^th and the 90^th percentiles, or between the 25^th and 75^th percentiles, or between the poor and the non-poor, or between white students and black students, have suddenly started to grow a lot, as shown on the NAEP. I’m not sure exactly why this is or how it’s happened, but I do know that it’s not happening in the nation as a whole or in any other big city. The only major change is Rhee and her single-minded insistence on control without accountability, elimination of due process for teachers, and substituting test prep for teaching. See Bill Turque’s excellent article in the Washington Post on 12/13/09.
6. If Mr. Obama continues praising Michelle Rhee in particular, and charter schools in general, it will be an extremely sad event for public education in America. I hope he comes to his senses, and replaces Arne Duncan, too.

Not everybody is Fooled by Chairman – oops, Chancellor Rhee

There are lots of people who think that Michelle Rhee is fundamentally on the wrong track.

I found this out tonight, to my great relief.

I was at a meeting to discuss math education in DC (and other big cities), and, in particular, the best way or ways to train new math teachers. The speaker, who has in the past held an important position at the MAA (Mathematical Association of America), said some interesting things, which I think bear repeating (or, rather, paraphrasing).

1. Everybody agrees that students, especially in the inner cities, need excellent teachers.  However, there is disagreement is over what that means.

2. Some think that excellent teachers do NOT need to know their subject matter (in other words, all they need is energy, youth, and enthusiasm – the Teach for America model). The speaker disagreed: he thinks teachers definitely DO need to understand their subject matter quite well. I agree with him.

3. Some think that excellent teachers don’t need to learn HOW to teach. This would mean, for example, that people who have learned lots of math by becoming aerospace engineers or accountants or physicists can immediately step into the urban secondary math classroom and be successful. As a former teacher himself, he disagrees: it takes time to learn HOW to become a good teacher. I found myself, again, agreeing with this speaker.

4. Some think that the way we can tell if somebody is a good teacher is by doing various complicated ‘value-added’ computations to see how the teachers’ students perform on standardized tests at the end of the year, compared to how they did the previous year. He disagrees: he thinks that a great teacher is one who inspires students to really be interested in learning, and that the effects of one teacher on standardized test scores are not going to be very large. Furthermore, he strongly implied that the things that are measured on those standardized tests are not really the important things we should value. Once again, I agreed. In fact, at the end of his short talk, I shook his hand.

Notice that the philosophy that he was disagreeing with is PRECISELY the position being taken by Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Before and after the talk, I spoke with several other people whose opinions I respected. One agreed that, at the very least, Rhee had wildly exaggerated her achievements on her resume. Another recounted yet another lie by Rhee, in which Rhee claimed that she couldn’t hire a certain highly-qualified person because the “union wouldn’t let her” – a total falsehood. The Washington Teachers’ Union has absolutely no say over qualifications for any teaching position!

When will the wool finally fall from the eyes of the few remaining Rhee supporters?

Increased scores in math in DCPS on NAEP

A recent report from NAEP shows that the scores of DCPS students in math are no longer at the bottom for all states and urban school districts. At the 4th grade, in math,  our kids are now significantly ahead of Cleveland, and essentially tied with Chicago and Los Angeles. This doesn’t terribly surprise me. After all, the problems that I see in inner-city Washington (my home town) are not that different from what I see in other big American cities that I have visited. And they are not going to be fixed by wholesale firing of veteran teachers.

Here is a table that I made from the graphs in the report. The yellow line is scores for the last 6 years in the entire nation in 4th grade math; the salmon-colored line is for all big cities; and the green line is for us here in DC – just regular DCPS students, not charter schools. (Although, if you look deeper, there is virtually no difference between the scores for the charter schools and the regular public schools. Even the NAEP admits that scores that are only 1 or 2 points apart are not “significantly different”.)

As usual, the press, especially the Washington Post, are eager to give all of the credit to Chancellor Rhee. That is a joke. As you can see in the following graph, which I made from publicly available data on national and DC averages, the trend in DC 4th grade math NAEP scores has been upward for quite some time – since the mid-1990’s, when Michelle Rhee was still trying to get her own act together teaching in Baltimore in a for-profit school that failed.

Note that this is from the publicly available data, so I am unable to separate out the charter schools. And note also how high the scores are for white DC fourth graders. In fact, theirs are the highest for any such subgroup in the entire nation. Looking even closer, we see that Rhee can take credit (if she wants) for the fact that 4th-grade White DCPS students gained twice as much under her watch as 4th-grade Black students!

On the other hand, nobody really knows what these numbers really mean. Do they mean that our students are doing better than 17 years ago? I don’t know. However, in my own experience over 30 years of teaching, incoming 7th graders seem to know a heck of a lot more math now than they did in 1978, which was back in the days of “Back to Basics”.

The entire NAEP is so long that no single student could ever possibly take the whole thing; instead, the students who do take it only take about a morning’s worth of it. By no means do all 4th and 8th graders take the NAEP, either. There is some formula for deciding which classrooms in which schools will be asked to take either part of the English NAEP or part of the Math NAEP. Many teachers of math and English may go their entire career without ever administering it to their own classes, especially if the teach neither 4th or 8th grade.

The latest report from NAEP concerning cities is at

http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/

I will have some more comments on this later.

What is the value of having a *SUPERSTAR* teacher?

That’s a very good question. How much is an individual superstar teacher worth, as opposed to systematic reform?

Let’s look at DC’s own superstar teacher, Jason Kamras. Or, former teacher. (He’s an administrator now.)

Mr. Kamras apparently worked such miracles at Sousa JHS/MS that he was named United States Teacher of the Year (USTOTY)  in 2005. After that he was given a year off with pay to tour the country and disseminate his wisdom. After that, he went into the DC public school system’s central office for  instructional support, and is now special assistant to Chancellor Michelle Rhee. There he has been trying to enact and implement IMPACT, the policy of  micro-managing all of us other lazy, ignorant teachers who didn’t go to Princeton, Harvard, or Cornell and don’t know how to teach.

So what impact did Mr. Kamras have at Sousa MS? His USTOTY bio claims that all of *his* students always met AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) under No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  I looked up got the AYP data for his school, Sousa, from the website http://www.nclb.osse.dc.gov.  Since Kamras won this award showing that he is a super-star teacher, one would think that:

(1) His contributions to teaching math (or other subjects) would already be legendary among other teachers in DCPS, and

(2) His influence at Sousa would be so profound that in 2005 – his last year – the AYP scores at Sousa should have peaked, especially since  only 142 students were tested at the entire school that year, which probably meant that he taught math to a very large fraction of them. (In earlier years there were over 380 students tested, and afterwards, the numbers were between 210 and 320 students.)

What are the facts, as measured by the (unreliable) SAT-9 and DC-CAS? (Sorry, but it’s all the data I have.)

Here is the test data:

or, if you prefer a graph,

The vertical line after the mark for 2005 is to show when Kamras stopped being a classroom teacher and essentially went into administration.

Hmm. In both reading and math, the scores at Sousa were mostly going down during his tenure. And the school definitely did NOT make AYP, despite what his bio says. In fact, only about 14% of the 143 students at Sousa scored Proficient or Advanced in math that year; that’s about 20 students. Were they all Kamras’ students? I don’t know. If he had 4 or 5 classes of 20 to 25 students each, which is a normal teaching load, then he had from 80 to 125 students.  Even if all of the ones who scored Proficient or Advanced were in Kamras’ classes, then 20 out of 80 is only 25% and 20 out of 125 is only 16%. Neither percentage would meet AYP in 2005. So, unless I am making some grave error, the claims being made about Kamras’ student’s AYP scores don’t measure up.

A couple of years after losing Mr. Kamras, the school finally rebounded, and now the percentage of students at Sousa scoring proficient appears to be … higher than ever.

So what exactly were Kamras’s contributions? Perhaps the other staff or parents at Sousa could help us out here. But what I see here doesn’t look so good for claim #2.

As for claim #1, I was totally surprised when I heard about his selection as USTOTY, because I often taught the same grade level and subject (Math 7) as he did, and to my knowledge, I had never met him at any of the meetings of the DC Council of Teachers of Mathematics (DCCTM), nor even heard his name. It also seemed that none of my math department colleagues had ever heard of him, either.

Kamras later spoke to the DCCTM and told us about why he was picked. You can read about them in his bio, as well. Here they are:

(A) He had re-arranged the math curriculum at his school because the one from DCPS didn’t make any sense. He is far from alone in thinking that the DCPS math curriculum needs serious revision (I strongly agree!), but usually lowly teachers get yelled at if they try revising it on their own – they don’t become USTOTY. But, if his plan was so wonderful, and if his (and Rhee’s) emphasis was on systematic reform, then after he became an administrator, his plan would have been shared with other math teachers, it would have been discussed two summers ago when this sort of realignment was going on at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and there would have been training on how to carry it out. But, to my knowledge, it has never been shared outside of Sousa.  So much for duplicating known successes (if it was in fact a success).

(B) He had an extra-curricular club after school, in digital photography, in which he showed connections to math; I presume he got funds from somewhere for cameras and other equipment. Not to be sarcastic, but lots of other teachers have done (and still do) clubs and activities like this, and they usually have to scrounge very hard for any supplies and equipment, or pay for them out of their own pocket. They don’t usually become USTOTY. What, exactly, made his contribution here so special? Rhee made the claim on PBS that it is the “union contract” that prevents her from funding such activities, which is simply not true. I know teachers who are right now finding that funding for other extracurricular activities are being cut out completely. Again, so much for systematic help in making learning fun and relevant.

(C) Kamras had somehow managed to obtain an LCD projector for his classroom computer; an interactive Smartboard; and an interactive remote polling device system which allows each student to immediately and remotely give feedback to the teacher, so that the teacher can instantly find out what every single person in the classroom does or doesn’t understand. These are all wonderful pieces of technology that can greatly improve teaching and learning, and I wish that I had had access to all of them when I was teaching. (I had one out of those three, which I got by winning a monetary math teaching award a few years ago; but I was supposed to share it with the rest of my department.)

Kamras says and writes that he thinks that having all three devices is the bare minimum amount of equipment each teacher should have. That might be right, and it certainly would be wonderful, but I don’t see any move on the part of the current DCPS administration to provide this “bare minimum” to classroom teachers. Instead, I hear accusations that there are more high-paid administrators in DCPS than ever, and so many new teachers were hired that the system was “forced” to lay off hundreds of employees.

Instead, Rhee (and Kamras) seem to think that reforming the public schools has practically nothing to do with improving the curriculum, nor providing better teaching equipment, nor providing real training for teachers, nor funding extra-curricular activities. Instead, the focus is all on the in-born qualities of individual teachers: are they a super-stars, or not? (Which probably means, did they go to the right college?) If they are, they will get huge bonuses. If not, then away with them!

So Rhee and Kamras have invested vast amounts of time and money into IMPACT, which is a way of evaluating every second of every teacher’s time each day, and using some complicated, unproved formula for measuring “value added” as measured by unreliable test scores. All of which simply serves to put more pressure on teachers to perform impossible, time-consuming tasks that may or may not have anything to do with student learning. (And many of us teachers feel that the single-minded devotion to publishers’ test scores is counter-productive in and of itself!)

Meanwhile, the charter school population keeps growing by leaps and bounds (even though they do no better than the public schools). DCPS teachers are liable to lose their job at any time, with no legal hearing whatsoever, and with unproven – and probably untrue -allegations on their competence being spread after the firing.  And my other posts show that nearly every claim that Rhee has made about her improving student test scores by mass firings is simply untrue.

If I were a mere mortal looking for a job teaching today, DCPS would be the very last place I would apply! And given Rhee’s incompetence and arrogance as a manager, and given the aspersions she has cast on DCPS teachers as a whole, I can understand why parents might prefer charter schools for their children.

I just hope that Rhee’s tenure doesn’t last too much longer, so that she won’t damage the educational paths of too many more children in DC and elsewhere. And that the myth that individual superstar teachers are the salvation of education is put safely to rest.

The Sum Total of Michelle Rhee’s Educational Accomplishments

There are two articles in the Hartford Courant that mention Michelle Rhee’s teaching experience in Baltimore. One of them is dated 6-6-94,and was written by a Liz Halloran. The article is quite critical of EAI and Tesseract, the companies that were trying to run Baltimore City Public Schools (and lost their bid). Here is the part that mentions Michelle Rhee:

“‘On a recent afternoon in Michelle Rhee’s second-grade classroom, four children sat at computers where they are to work independently using math and science software that tracks their progress.

‘Two worked steadily on spelling and mathematics lessons, another typed gibberish on the computer keyboard, and one sucked his thumb.

‘Two dozen youngsters gathered in the center of the room at tables of four or five and snapped together colored blocks during a lesson on how to put items in sequence.

‘A 2-year-old crawled from her mother’s lap and joined her older sister at a table. Some children watched as classroom intern Deonne Medley, a University of Maryland graduate, worked through the same sequencing problems on an overhead projector. Rhee, a child resting on her knee, leaned over the blocks.

‘Beans were sprouting in glass jars, student-made mobiles hung from the lights, and tubs of blocks and plastic forms were stacked on the shelves.

‘ “The classroom is still on the edge of control,” Rhee said later, her voice rising over the laughter and chatter. “In and out of control.”

‘But that is just about the way it’s supposed to be under the Tesseract model, which seeks to integrate a variety of teaching styles.

‘As in most elementary schools, Harlem Park has some classrooms that are more successful than others. Some teachers, such as Rhee, have devoted long hours and weekends to learning Tesseract and keeping up with the voluminous paperwork involved in tracking student progress.

‘Other teachers have been reluctant to move away from the traditional approach, with its blackboard work and textbook learning, school officials say. Most of them transferred to non-EAI schools in Baltimore’s 178-school system.

‘”Tesseract is . . . an idea of how schools should be run and how kids should learn,” said Rhee, who wears a watch that displays the Tesseract logo and counts herself among the model’s supporters. “It means hands-on learning. It means that kids should have more choices and ownership over their day — that they learn when they’re really involved.”

‘In place of the grade book, there are fat turquoise binders for each student. The binders are supposed to contain personal education plans as well as worksheets of personal and academic goals prepared by the teacher, the child and, ideally, a parent or guardian.

‘The binder also contains an analysis of whether the child learns better by seeing, hearing or doing, and periodic comments on student progress.

‘ “Many people have said to me that Tesseract is nothing new, that these techniques are well-known,” Rhee said. “And I agree, a lot of this is happening — but mostly in suburban classrooms.

‘”In Baltimore City, children were still learning the old-fashioned way,” Rhee said. “This is making Baltimore City get more on their toes.” ‘

OK, now, here is the second article, dated 3-20-94, by Chris Sheridan:

‘ “Talk to second-grade teacher Michelle Rhee, and hear of a classroom children have created. Students hang work where and how they want. They can gather on cushions or sit at tables – rigid rows of desks are absent.

‘Grades are gone, replaced by twice-annual narrative summary reports; parents are asked to come to school quarterly to set goals for their children.

‘Children also have a voice in how they learn. When young people study money, they might look at pictures on an overhead projector, handle the real thing, or read labels.

‘Teaching itself changes – a company representative says there has been a transition from “a sage on the stage to a guide by the side.” Rhee emphasizes a shift from lectures to learning in small groups.

‘”I’m able to work with the kids individually more,” Rhee said. “I’m able to see what they’re doing.”

……………..

‘But kindergarten teacher Cynthia Lewis decries the feel-good fuzziness embodied by the installation of a rocking chair in her room. She complains of instructional time lost to community- building activities such as daily morning gatherings. She scoffs at excessive paperwork and training that talked about students as customers, teachers as facilitators.

‘”You have a roving circus the whole time,” said Lewis, who transferred to a traditional school this year. “It’s not cracking down on the academics.”

‘Parent Margaretta Terry agrees. She feels her elder daughter is losing ground, but says the reporting system is so vague she can’t be sure.

‘”It’s really hard to tell how your child is doing,” she said.

‘The schism is even reflected in a citywide argument about aides. Education Alternatives transferred out aides – who the city union says average about 15 years experience – and replaced them with untrained college graduates paid about $7.50 an hour and given no benefits.

‘Lewis lost a partner she’d worked with for a few years, and found herself training not one, but three interns who came and went during the course of 1992-93.

‘Yet Rhee finds her colleague a perfect complement. And in an Education Alternatives school, she’s guaranteed the second set of hands; aides certainly don’t staff all of the rest of the city’s school classrooms.

‘”You have to trust the process,” Rhee said.

…………………………………………………………..

Judge all of that for yourself, while remembering  that EAI did so badly in Baltimore – on test scores, among other things – that they lost their contract.

Also remember that Michelle Rhee is famously opposed to collaboration, now that she’s in charge…

A search in the Wall Street Journal finds nothing whatsoever on Michelle Rhee from 1990 through 2000.

How did Washington, DC charter and public school students do, by grade?

Who wins this contest?

It depends on how you look at it, but it’s definitely NOT a slam-dunk for either side.

The results vary a lot by grade level.

At the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade levels, the regular public schools had higher percentages of students meeting AYP in reading in 2009 – and the advantage for the regular school students was especially large in the 3rd and 4th grades.

At the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade levels, the charter school students had higher percentages of students meeing AYP, and the difference is particularly large in the 7th and 8th grade.

At the 10th grade level, the charter school students have a slightly higher percentage of students meeting AYP in reading, but only by about 1.4 percentage points.

Here is the graph and the accompanying table:

In any case, this data definitely disproves the wide-spread lie that public schools always do worse than charter schools, therefore we need to close down public schools and open up more charter schools. However, it also shows that the District of Columbia public schools have a lot of improvement to do in 7th, 8th, and 10th grades.

Any thoughts?