Did ANY of Michelle Rhee’s promises actually work in DC?

Part One of Many

You may recall that Michelle Rhee promised that she would produce miracles in Washington DC’s public schools if she got the money from various foundations and the freedom to fire teachers as she pleased.

She and her hand-picked acolyte and successor, Kaya Henderson, certainly received all the money they asked for, and they stripped DCPS teachers of almost all protections from random firing.

But did those achievement gains actually work?

I’ll let you decide, by first letting you see the spreadsheet where Rhee et al. promised, in writing, what they would accomplish. Here is the link to the original, so you can see I’m not making this up. It’s on page 22.

That’s a lot of promises!!

Notice the very last goal: for DCPS to be in the top half of all urban districts whose scores are included in something called the NAEP TUDA by 2012-13. (National Assessment of Educational Progress, Trial Urban District Assessment).

For now, I’ll just give you the result for part of that last one — math, fourth grade, in graphic form, cut and pasted and put in order and labels added by me, direct from the NAEP TUDA web page.

I highlighted the average large city score, right in the middle, and also the District of Columbia. Anybody can see that no, DCPS is NOT in the top half. Atlanta scored at the median (in the middle of all of the cities’ scores), and DC was two cities below that.

We also need to look at math scores at the 8th grade as well as reading for both 4th and 8th grades to finish evaluating this one goal or promise.

What do you think: will Rhee/Henderson/Gray be shown to be successful in other parts of this long list of promises?

More posts will follow. Many thanks to my colleague Erich Martel for pointing all of this out and compiling it in some very dense spreadsheets.

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The saga so far:

1.  https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/did-any-of-michelle-rhees-promises-actually-work-in-dc/ (this one)
2. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/more-on-michelle-rhees-promises-concerning-dcps/
3. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/what-rhee-promised-to-the-billionaires-walton-gates-et-al-but-didnt-deliver/
4. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/two-more-promises-by-rhee-et-al-were-they-kept/
5. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/ten-more-promises-from-rhee-henderson-company-were-any-of-them-kept/
6. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/33-6-for-nearly-all-values-of-3-not-5/
7. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/5281/
8. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/more-failures-to-deliver-on-promises-by-michelle-rhee-and-her-acolytes/
9. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/another-day-another-bunch-of-failures-from-rhee-henderson/
10. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/even-more-missed-targets-dc-cas-proficiency-in-2010-and-2011/
11. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/rhees-failures-in-dc-the-continuing-saga-2012-dc-cas/
12. https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/the-long-list-of-failures-by-rhee-and-henderson-continued/

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I should credit my colleague Erich Martel for coming up with the idea of going back to the original 2010 promises and seeing if they were kept or not. Erich shared his findings with me. These calculations are generally my own, so if you find any mistakes, don’t blame him. Blame me.