More on Rhee’s Alleged Baltimore Miracle

An alert reader brought my attention to the US General Accounting Office report on the EAI charter school experiment in Baltimore during the mid-1990s. It tends to discredit Michelle Rhee’s claims of having brought 90% of her students from performing below the 20th percentile to performing above the 90th percentile. After all, given that her school, Harlem Park, wasn’t very large, such a jump would have had some sort of impact. Look for yourself:

Notice that I highlighted the line for Harlem Park. “Effect Size” means whether the school in question did better (positive) or worse (negative) than its comparison regular public school(s). Apparently, in reading, Harlem Park did significantly WORSE than its comparison school(s).

And here is the data for math:

8th Grade TUDA NAEP Reading Results Also Show No Miracles Under Rhee, Henderson et al.

This post concerns the 8th grade NAEP TUDA reading scores for DC and other large cities.  As you may recall, according to Michelle Rhee’s authorized biographer and friend, here is how Rhee claims she could tell if an applicant for a principal position was good enough:

“What’s good to Rhee? If they arrived at their previous school with 20 percent of students reading on grade level and when they left, the number was 70 percent.” (page 132 of The Bee Eater)

Also recall what Rhee claimed to have done in Baltimore: “Over a two-year period, moved students scoring at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

Keep that standard in mind when you see these graphs and tables.

First, where are DCPS students right now, after more than 4 years of Rhee/Henderson’s “radical reformist” regime? Way down near the bottom of the pack as measured by percentages of students “below basic”, according to NAEP:

But, you say, surely that pitiful figure of 54% of 8th graders reading on a “below basic” level has been getting better under Rhee and Henderson? Guess again, or else look at this graph for DCPS 8th grade reading results over time, and you will see that just the opposite is true, since it’s now worse than in 2002, 2003, 2007, or even 2009:

Now let’s look at those trends in DC again. As you can see, NAEP TUDA 8th grade reading scores are, in fact, slightly LOWER in 2011 than they have been AT ANY TIME while the TUDA study has been going on:

You can see also that while the scores for higher-income kids dropped in 2011, the gap between the richer and poorer students widened by quite a lot in 2009, and is unchanged in 2011 (in both years, it’s 31 points, as opposed to 15 to 21 points during the earlier years).

And let’s look at the gaps between scores of various ethnic groups in DC over time at the 8th grade reading level:

In the graph above, we lack a lot of scores for white students for many years, simply because there were not enough white DCPS students tested at those points in time to satisfy statistical reporting requirements. However, it is clear that the arrival of the protegees of Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg has NOT benefited any of the 8th grade groups shown: not Hispanic students, not Black students, and not White students.

You might be thinking, “Well, perhaps these gaps are bad in DC, but they are worse elsewhere?”

Pretty much, NO. There are only two cities with larger 8th grade reading achievement gaps between the rich and the poor on the NAEP: Austin and Fresno.

Now let’s look at the gap between scores of white and black 8th graders in various cities, below. As you can see, DC’s gap (circled) is by far the widest such gap: 58 points.

And for Hispanics and whites?

(/sarcasm on) We beat Fresno and Austin! Yippee! DC has the biggest gap! (/sarcasm off)

Here’s What I Posted on Michelle Rhee’s Blog at ‘StudentsFirst’

Someone else brought the 1995 study to my attention, and I went through it and tried to pick out the parts that compare the cohorts at Harlem Park when Rhee taught there, to those in other, similar schools. The original 1995 data is here: 

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED…

What I discovered is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of Michelle Rhee accomplishing the miracle that she has over and over claimed: raising students from well below the 20th percentile to having over 90 percent of them scoring above the 90th percentile.

As far as I can tell, it looks like there were only about two classes of third graders at Harlem Park during the year 1994-1995, the year that Rhee said that she and her team-mate brought two classes from the very bottom to the very top. And the scores for that third grade cohort at Harlem Park in both reading and math for 1994-1995 appear to be somewhere between the 40th and 55th percentile. At best.

You can also look at my blog,

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress…/
or
http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress…/

where I point out the exact pages in that long study where you can look for that information.

Only about 20% to 25% of the students were excluded from having their test scores processed for the study at Tesseract schools, so that doesn’t increase the number of students in the actual classes by very much.

What’s more, I find it extremely interesting and significant that the cohort of students that were in the 2nd grade at Harlem Park appears to have shrunk by nearly 50% by the time they got to the third grade, when Rhee made her so-far-still-unsubstantiated claims of this educational miracle. Exactly how that winnowing out, I can only guess.And my guesses are fueled by my suspicion of Rhee’s notoriously long track record of distorting data.

Care to respond to that, either Michelle Rhee or Mafara Hobson?

Guy Brandenburg

Were large numbers of students not tested in Baltimore?

Here is Mafara Hobson’s response to my criticism of Rhee’s claims of achieving a miracle in 1994-1995:

===================================

Our public schools are in crisis. Instead of talking about how to fix them, we’re getting unfounded attacks on Michelle. To get back to the debate about public schools, we want to address this misinformation head-on.

A blogger has posted some error-laden numbers, based on a 1995 study, claiming that Michelle was not an effective teacher. A couple of mainstream journalists have picked up and re-broadcast this storyline without reviewing the underlying analysis.

Here are the underlying facts about the 1995 study:

• This was not a study of Michelle’s students. It was a study of the school’s entire grade level, which had four teachers.
• There is no way to know if any of Michelle’s students were even included in this study. The study included only certain students at the school, and excluded large numbers from their sample.

Some have expressed surprise that credible journalists would swallow a blogger’s analysis without looking at the facts for themselves. We were quite frankly surprised ourselves. To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out.

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A few points:

I’m not the one making up stories about “Michelle Rhee’s miracles”. Unlike Hobson, I try to point to actual data so you, the reader, can check it for yourself.

The study states that basically all of the elementary students were administered the CTBS, but that the scores of  somewhere between 20 to 25% of the students were excluded because they enrolled after February 1, were absent on testing days, or were in certain levels of special education (see pages 25 and 109).  The average exclusion rate at the Tesseract schools in 1994-1995, the study claims, was 20%, up from 16% in 1991-2 (see pages 109 and 33), although the percentage of special education students had declined from about 8.6% to about 3%.

According to the tables later on (page 143), there were reading scores reported at Harlem Park in the 3rd grade in SY 1994-5 for 43 students. If this only represents 75 to 80% of the grade-level cohort for that year, then there were between 54 and 57 students in the third grade. That is not nearly enough students for four classes (14 students per class?!?!).

Also, on page 127, they report the number of students that they observed in the various classes at the various schools at various years. For grade 3 at Harlem Park in 1994-5, they report these numbers: 19 and 21, which I interpret to mean that in one classroom they saw 19 kids that day, and in the other class, they saw 21 kids. I presume some of the children were absent on that day. Which of the two classes was Rhee’s? I have no idea, nor does it matter.

Let us now look only at scores for “Two-Year” students who remained at Harlem Park from second grade in 1993-4 through the third grade in 1994-5, which you can find on pages 152 for math and 149 for reading. These are precisely the students on which Rhee has repeatedly claimed that she brought to the 90th percentile, because she had them for two years. In math, the 53 students (out of a total of 66 to 71, total) achieved an NCE [Normal Curve Equivalent] score average of 51, which is equivalent to either the 51st or 52nd percentile. Hmm. In reading, the 56 students for whom scores are reported (out of somewhere between 70 to 75 students, if we assume the same exclusion rates) reached an NCE score of 45, which is equivalent to the 40th percentile. Hmm again.

Not a miracle in sight.

It is deceptive for Hobson to claim that there is even a remote possibility that not a single one of Rhee’s students was tested. What — every single one of them was absent, or came in after February 1 of 1995, or was in a severe special education status? That defies belief.

Michelle Rhee’s own repeated interview statements speak of 70 students that were team-taught by her and her team-mate; she speaks of team-teaching with this other teacher and taking the same cohort of students from the second grade in 1993-4 through the 3rd grade in 1994-5. Well, it is certainly possible that there really were 70 students in the cohort in their two combined classes in the second grade, given the table on page 143, when the scores for 79 students were reported. With the exclusions added back in, that would be somewhere between 99 and 105 students, which is certainly enough for four classes. Perhaps that is what Hobson is referring to, in a statistical bait-and-switch?

Rhee never claimed, anywhere, that she did a super-fantastic job  while her team teacher’s students all scored in the cellar.  That’s the only way that Michelle Rhee or her spokesperson, Mafara Hobson, can have it that Rhee performed a miracle, given the aggregate scores for the whole cohort.

Are you ready to throw your fellow team-teacher-and-miracle-worker under the bus, Ms. Rhee?

Or is it more likely that you and she were responsible for the entire 3rd grade class, and that by winnowing out the lowest-scoring students, you were able to bring the test scores of the remaining ones up to about the 50th percentile in reading and math on a highly suspect standardized test of so-called basic skills?

=========================

Oh, and who exactly is going around attacking public schools?

A lot of people think that it’s YOU, Michelle Rhee, who are leading the charge.

How well does Rhee’s “Broom” work?

So how well does Rhee’s broom actually work? You know, the one she is supposedly using to get rid of incompetent, veteran* administrators and teachers? To hear her say it, her policy has been a smashing success. But the truth is quite different.

You might remember the 2008 TIME magazine cover with a photo of Michelle Rhee, frowning, dressed in black, holding a broom in a classroom. Some people simply thought it meant that Rhee was an old-fashioned witch, about to get on her broom and ride around. I understand that sentiment, but I suspect that the author of the article meant that Rhee planned to clean out the school system by getting rid of veteran teachers and administrators.

According to Rhee’s numerous public statements, the only thing that really matters is standardized test scores. (Though they are probably the LEAST important things in the lives of most students, and, it is very ironic that Rhee herself is unable to produce any test scores whatsoever backing up her mythical “Baltimore Miracle.”)

Taking this at face value (even though many people have shown that most standardized tests produce little data that is actually valuable), I have done a little bit of analysis to see whether the schools where Rhee fired or replaced the principals actually did better on the DC-CAS than the schools where the principals were not replaced. Recall that Rhee has claimed many times that her approach has been extremely successful. (I was about to say, “a sweeping victory.”)

What I found is that both groups of schools included ones where the scores went up a lot from SY 2007-8 to SY 2008-9, and both groups of schools had members where the scores dropped about as much. To me, using Rhee’s own yardstick, it’s hard to find any big difference between the two groups of schools .

Don’t believe me? Look at the graphs, below.

This first graph, with a light green background, shows the changes in the percentages of students scoring “proficient” or better on the MATH portion of the DC-CAS from SY 2007-8 to SY 2008-9 (that is, from the year before last to last year), at schools that had the same principals both years. Each bar represents a single school, but there was no room to label them all. This is for ALL DC public schools for which there is data for both school years – elementary and secondary, but not charter schools, since Rhee is not in charge of them. I have no way of tracking individual students’ scores. These graphs just give the changes in percentages of students “passing” the DC-CAS.

As you can see, one school increased its percentage of ‘passing’ students by about 43%. In fact, something like 2/3 of these schools showed an increase in the proportion of students passing in math. A couple of schools had declines of around 24% in the percentages of students ‘passing’ the math test.

Now let’s compare that graph with one that shows the progress (or lack thereof) of the counterparts to these schools —  the ones where Rhee put in a new principal for the second year (SY 2008-09, i.e. last school year).

I see three main differences between these two graphs:

• The second graph has a background that is light orange or the color of canned salmon.  The first one has a light green background. (I changed the colors so that you and I can tell them apart; otherwise, it’s pretty tough.)
• The second, light orange graph has fewer bars. That’s simply because more schools kept their principals than had them replaced by Rhee for SY 2008-9.
• One of the bars in the first graph is a lot longer than any of the other ones. That was Birney ES. (Questions were raised by the DC State Board of Education about those scores.)

Now, for the similarities:

• In both graphs, which means in both groups of schools,  somewhere near  1/3 of the schools showed declines from the first year to the second year, because the bars point downwards into negative territory. (Counting and using a calculator, I find that 12 out of 33, or 36% of the schools with NEW principals, had drops in scores; and 24 out of 70, or 34% of the schools that did NOT change principals, had drops in scores. Not a significant difference in my opinion, but if you think it maters, then it’s one that favors the schools that did NOT change principals.)
• The bars are generally very similar in length in the two graphs.
• In both graphs, the scale on the vertical axis is the same, so you can compare the graphs without bias.

So, not really much difference at all in the two groups of schools in terms of changes in math scores. Maybe reading tells a different story? Take a look.

First, changes in reading scores over the same period of time as the other two graphs, in schools that kept the SAME principal for both years:

That graph has sort of a blue-gray background. Notice that about half the schools improved, and a little more than half the schools did worse during the second year. I also estimate that at about 25% to 30% of the schools (the ones near the center), there was very, very little change.

Let’s now look at the changes in reading scores at schools where the principal was REPLACED:

Differences?

• This last graph has a bright yellow background, not a pale blue-gray.
• The bars on this second graph are significantly shorter, both in the positive and in negative directions.
• One bar on the gray graph is a lot taller than any of the other ones. (Guess which school that was!**)
• In the yellow graph, the fraction of schools that did worse the second year (i.e. the ones that have bars pointing downwards) is a bit under one-half, not a bit over one-half. (17 out of 45, or 38% of the schools with new principals had drops in reading scores, versus 37 out of 70, or 53%, for the schools which kept their principals.)
• The fraction of schools that made essentially no change at al, one way or the other, appears to be smaller in the yellow graph.

So, all in all, even on Rhee’s own terms (where the only important thing is standardized test scores) her broom has so far made very, very little difference.

Which is not so surprising. After all, a broom is rather a blunt instrument.

=========================

* To some people, the terms “veteran” and “incompetent” are synonymous.  I disagree. It takes several years for a teacher to begin to become competent. (I’ve had my differences with a lot of local school administrators, but they also need a lot of experience to begin to become competent.)

* *Yes, Birney again.

========================

My data came from two sources.

• Mary Levy had very carefully compiled a spreadsheet with all of the names of all of the principals in all of the DC public schools going back to at least 2002, and emailed that list to me. I spot-checked it to make sure it was accurate, ad found that it was. Mary’s compilation saved me many hours of labor.
  
• For the scores, I used the data that you can find for yourself for each school on the OSSE-NCLB-DCPS website, which gives, among other things, the percentages of students scoring at various levels on the DC-CAS and its predecessors at all of the various publicly-supported schools in DC. I cut-and-pasted the data on AYP scores for the past 8 years into the previous spreadsheet. Then I had the spreadsheet do a bit of subtraction (scores in 2009 minus the scores in 2008), some sorting (by whether the same principal was kept or not, followed by the change in scores), and finally a bit of bar-graphing. That’s all.

Michelle Rhee: Is She Merely A Liar, or is She Just Stupid? You Decide

I’m revisiting this because I hope that Michelle Rhee is investigated, indicted, put on trial, convicted, and sentenced. I also help that her appeals all get denied, that much of her wealth is confiscated, and that she ends up serving many years behind bars for educational and financial fraud. Along with a number of other present and former administrators in DCPS and the charter schools here.

Jay Matthews* of Class Struggle at WAPO wrote a few years ago that I was being too harsh on Michelle Rhee: it’s not a lie if she thought it was true, he implied; her defense was that she was just going by what her principal told her and she hadn’t written any of the numbers down.

Well, Jay, let’s assume you’re right for a moment: let’s assume Rhee really thought that she had taken on a class of (IIRC) 3rd graders that had 90% of them scoring at or below the 13th percentile, and in only two years Rhee had managed somehow to make it so that 90% of them were now … wait for it …. above the 90th percentile!

(If you didn’t know: Rhee and her team-teacher  ‘followed’ that class from one grade to the next so they had them for two years, back in the early 1990s. This was at Harlem Park Elementary, in a poor inner-city region of Baltimore, as part of a fairly well-controlled experiment to see if in fact a for-profit “charter-like” educational business could manage inner-city schools better than the traditional, public school system. Statistics were generated on many things, such as teacher and student attendance, grades on state tests, satisfaction, and so on. Both Baltimore Public Schools and Edison/Tesseract were given nine schools, which were measured by UMBC researchers for several years. I looked at the report, and so can you. If you can’t find it, I can send anybody an electronic copy (put a note in the comments). )

Why is this a miracle?

It’s like having a class of incoming, tiny, little second graders, all girls, who almost all weigh 46 pounds or less. Then in just two years you feed and strengthen them and somehow ensure that their bones grow as well, so that when they reach the age of ten, almost every single one of the girls now weighs 105 pounds or more. At age ten.

That sort of growth spurt is extremely rare in any single person. But a whole class? Give me a break. It doesn’t matter how much you feed them or how many pullups you have them do! Entire grade school classrooms of kids don’t ever change that much!

But – suppose this miracle had actually happened.

What would have been the results?

Well, anybody in education who heard of such a modern-day educational loaves-and-fishes miracle like this one would want to hear and know all about it. Word of mouth would have caused ENORMOUS amount of attention from educators all over. Every teacher in every inner school in the country would want to know what their secrets were, and they would be sitting on the floor, in rapt attention, trying to learn lessons from these undisputed master teachers. Their lesson plan files would have been nation-wide best sellers, and probably would have been translated into numerous foreign languages. Teachers from Finland, Singapore, Japan, Shanghai, Germany, and South Korea would have been making pilgrimages in order to discover these amazing American educational secrets.

Verily I say unto thee, their fame would have spread far and wide.

But back in the real world, nobody except Joel Klein and a few people at Teach for America had heard of Michelle Rhee until she was appointed Chancellor under DC Mayor Adrian Fenty as a total surprise to DC residents (including me). Neither Klein nor TFA was raving in public about those teachers’ amazing accomplishments. And while it took Rhee over a decade to reach fame and fortune (through this fraud and others, I would say), the other team teacher certainly never entered the public eye at all. Even I don’t recall her name.

When I read Rhee’s resume at the time she was appointed, I was thunderstruck. My jaw dropped — I think it literally hung open for a long time. Not figuratively. I looked up the references she gave about interviews she had given to various newspapers and found nothing about this miracle. (What’s more, one of the articles that supposedly extolled her teaching practices was allegedly in the Wall Street Journal. No such article on her from the 1990s in the WSJ exists.)

Now, if Rhee had really believed that she had accomplished moving 90% of a group of randomly selected kids moving from below the 13th to above 90th percentile, then she also would have gone to her employer (Edison/Tesseract), along with her principal, and all the data printouts from CTBS, proving that she had indeed performed this utter miracle. Tesseract then would have gone to the authorities in Baltimore and at UMBC and jumped up and down and demanded that their contract be continued, because they had this team of miracle-producing teachers in their successful, measured, experimental charter school, and they had beaten every expert everywhere and produced an educational miracle that had never been equaled, anywhere!

There would have been an enormous fuss. Rhee would have been world-famous, in the mid-90s, instead having to be plucked from obscurity by Joel Klein, Adrian Fenty, and a few billionaires, over a decade later. Her big mouth and anti-union and anti-teacher rhetoric made her very famous, which she certainly parlayed into great wealth — but it wasn’t that made-up miracle.

Instead, in the real world, Tesseract got closed down by Baltimore around 1995, because Edison cost a bit more money and got essentially the same or slightly worse results, while providing a slightly worse education overall, than the regular Baltimore public schools. Tesseract/Edison did protest, of course, but they lost. THEY NEVER SAID BOO about Rhee’s mythical miracle.

(I suspect that Rhee had not yet invented her miracle yet in 1995. It would be interesting to see when this 90-13-90-90 miracle began appearing on her resume over the years.

(Keep in mind: Rhee gave no fictitious credit to this almost-completely-unknown co-teacher. I can only wonder what kind of conversations she has had with her former colleague…)

So there are only two, not three choices. We know from the statistics that I unearthed and had confirmed by others, that there was no such miracle in Harlem Park under Michelle Rhee’s watch. Plus by this over evidence (like the ‘dog that didn’t bark in the night’) that I am adducing.

It’s clear that her numbers were made up by her — much the way Ronald Reagan and many politicians (like #45) do, because they sounded good.  Possibly, every time she told the story, the numbers became a little more miraculous. Was this self-delusion, or outright conscious lying?

In fact, my research does show that while there was some sort of a small increase in CTBS scores at her grade level. But there was also a very large decrease in the student population at her school, which could push the scores either up or down, depending on which kids leave or who replaces them. And there was a very high proportion of kids whose scores were so low that they weren’t counted — and that will necessarily and HUGELY improve a class’ average.

Either:

(1) Rhee is too mathematically illiterate to know how statistically impossible her made-up figures are. She also blinded herself to, or was too mathematically ignorant to realize, the likely effect of cutting out all the low-scoring students’ scores. If this is the case, then Michelle Rhee is too innumerate to hold any job in education. Ever.

or

(2) She understood the statistics just fine and decided to go with the lie because she knew that most people (that includes most reporters and politicians) don’t understand mathematics or statistics well enough and are intimidated by anybody who spouts numbersm and that she could gain a lot of fame, power, and wealth by doing so.

So —

Michelle Rhee is either hugely stupid or a big fat liar.

Which is it?

(PS: I don’t think she’s stupid at all. I can only guess what her personal fortune is now. Lying can be very, very profitable.)

I hope she gets her just deserts. And no desserts for her in prison.

============————–

• Jay’s wife helped expose a lot of the educational malfeasance in Atlanta and DC when she was at USAToday.  Disclosure: my wife tells me that she had one of Jay’s kids in her class many years ago, and that the ‘kid was a riot’.

 

FBI investigation into massive DCPS fraud?!?!

This is enormous.

Apparently the FBI is now beginning to look into the massive fraudulent scheme to make DC education officials and their “reform” effort look good.

“ThE Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Education and D.C. Office of the Inspector General are investigating the school system, with a focus on Ballou High School, where questions about graduation rates first emerged, according to a current and a former D.C. government employee familiar with the probe.

The FBI, the D.C. inspector general and the U.S. Department of Education all declined to comment. The FBI’s involvement in a matter involving graduation rates is unusual…”

Source:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-public-schools-were-once-a-success-story-are-they-now-an-embarrassment/2018/02/01/fb15dd4c-069d-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html?hpid=hp_local-news_dcschools-720am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.41fc591ca7f9

I and many others have been documenting these scams and others like this one for a longtime. Many of us (including Jeff Candy) have called for criminal investigations. I hope this one isn’t a complete whitewash — as a number of others have been.

(And I’m including a previous one by Alvarez & Marsal, but not so much this time… )

But the third hand, let’s recall that A&M and OSSE are precluded from doing any such thorough investigation into charter schools! So the public gets what somebody paid for: either a cover-up or a serious investigation. (A coverup can be written in a couple of afternoons, by two lawyers and an accountant. A real investigation takes months and months and a large team of trained and experienced investigators and forensic experts of all types (e.g. statisticians, computer analysts of all sorts, handwriting & paper examiners, etc, etc. I think I can figure out which one’s cheaper.

In Atlanta, Georgia, there was similar massive fraud some years ago involving changing test scores; some people got very large bonuses, by tampering with students answers; a number of Atlanta “educators” and their former superintendent, are now in prison for this after confessions, trials, convictions and sentencing and whatever appeals they may have tried. Big news and you can look it up.

I would say the educational fraud here in DC over the past decade is just as serious as that in Atlanta. Ive personally heard allegations of serious fraud from teachers here in DC, and But I don’t have any smoking gun memos from one Rheefirmist educrat to another, though I’ve showed that Rhee told complete bare-faced lies on her resume about an educational miracle she claimed to achieve in Baltimore.

Jay Matthews IIRC wrote that I was being too harsh on Michelle Rhee: it’s not a lie if she thought it was true, and she was just going by what her principal told her and she hadn’t written it down.

Well, Jay, let’s assume you’re right for a moment: let’s assume Rhee really thought that she had taken a class with 90% of them scoring at or below the 13th percentile, and in only two years (she followed the class and team taught with another teacher, so she had them for two years, back in the early 1990s in Harlem Park Elementary, an Edison Tesseract project, where they engaged in a controlled experiment to see if in fact a charter school could get better results on numerous measures of improvement) Rhee had managed somehow to make it so that 90% of them were now … wait for it …. above the 90th percentile!

If Rhee didn’t realize that accomplishment was itself beyond miraculous, then she’s too stupid regarding statistics to have a job in education. At all. Ever.

But if Rhee had really believed that she had really done that — an accomplishment (90% of a group of randomly selected kids moving from below the 13th to above 90th percentile!) then she would have gone to her employer (Edison/Tesseract), along with her principal, and all the data printouts from CTBS, proving that she had indeed performed this utter miracle. Tesseract then would have gone to the authorities in Baltimore and at UMBC and jumped up and down and demanded that their contract be continued, because they had this team of miracle-producing teachers in their successful, measured, experimental charter school, and they had beaten every expert everywhere and produced an educational miracle that had never been equaled, anywhere!

But Tesseract got closed down anyway by Baltimore, saying that Edison cost more money and got essentially the same or slightly worse results, while providing a slightly worse education overall. And nobody said boo about Rhee’s mythical miracle. Because it existed only in Rhee’s mind. (And notice: she gave no fictitious credit to this almost-completely-unknown co-teacher. If she had tried, her colleague would have told her, “No, that’s not what happened. What really happened was this…”

So there are only two, not three choices. We know from the statistics that I (with help) unearthed, that there was no such miracle in Harlem Park under Michelle Rhee’s watch.

It’s clear that her numbers were made up by her — much the way Ronald Reagan and many politicians (like #45) do. And most people have probably heard wild tales about family members; some of them are actually and literally true; some are downright lies meant to harm or amuse; and some of these stories get changed, gradually, as we retell them. And when we look at documentary evidence, sometimes we see we didn’t remember things quite the way they really were.

So, perhaps there was some sort of a small increase in CTBS scores at her grade level. But you have to ignore the very high rate of decline in the student population at her school (what effect did that have? It could vary) and the extremely high number of kids whose scores were so low that they weren’t counted (that will HUGELY improve a class’ average).

Either:

(1) Rhee is too mathematically illiterate to know how statistically impossible her made-up figures are and the effect of cutting out all the low-scoring students’ scores;

or

(2) She understood the statistics just fine and decided to go with the lie because she knew that most people (that includes most reporters and politicians) don’t understand mathematics or statistics well enough and are intimidated by anybody who spouts numbers.

So —

she’s either hugely stupid or a big fat liar.

Which is it?

 

 

The Lies by Which Saint Michelle Built Her Brand

Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler and ‘Jersey Jazzman’ have some analyses of the lies peddled by my former chancellor, Michelle Rhee. I recommend reading (or re-reading) them. Disclosure: I was one of the ones who looked at the original UMBC study and found that Rhee absolutely did NOT bring a class of up to 70 students from below the 13th percentile to over the 90th percentile.

Somerby on Rhee’s fraudulent claims of success in Baltimore:

1. part one  (at the bottom)
2. part two (at the bottom)
3. part three (at the bottom)
4. part four (at the bottom)
5. part five (as usual, at the bottom)

Jersey Jazzman on the same:

• http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2011/02/confessions-of-st-michele.html
• http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/02/rhee-on-stewart-final-thought.html

The fact that the Washington Post and other media and various billionaires continue promoting this serial liar (Rhee), and that interviewers like Jon Stewart don’t call her on those lies, is truly sad.

I’d like to quote the conclusion of Somerby’s part four:

In that telling of Rhee’s tale, you see the germ of the current idea of “educational reform” which has been pimped by our billionaire and “journalist” classes.

Note what Rhee said about the reason for her vast success. She didn’t engineer that miracle because she was super-smart. More specifically, she didn’t engineer that miracle because she was “a great teacher.” She didn’t succeed because “she found unconventional but effective ways to teach reading and math,” the explanation Jay Mathews offered when he told Rhee’s miracle tale one month later. Sorry! In the tale that was told to Thomas, Rhee had produced her astounding results because she was willing to work hard. The key to Rhee’s success was “sweat,” Thomas quoted her saying.

The inexperienced teacher had simply worked hard! She had stood in front of those children “every single day;” while there, she’d been willing to “teach them!” This of course implies the claim—the ugly, simple-minded, remarkable claim—which lies at the heart of Rhee’s “reform” ideas:

Why do lovely, deserving, low-income kids lag behind national norms in the classroom? It happens because their teachers are lazy—too lazy to stand up and teach them! Because their teachers—who are “shitty,” as Rhee told Mathews—refuse to do their jobs! (my emphasis – GFB)

Truly, that’s a remarkable claim, but the claim has a long provenance. For whatever reason, elites have always been drawn to this claim; this dates at least to the 1960s, when the nation’s movers and shakers began to wonder what could be done to improve inner-city schools. On Monday, we’ll offer a quick review of this history. For today, let’s reflect on the way this remarkable claim has affected ideas of “reform.”

Why don’t poverty children meet national norms? It’s because their teachers are lazy! This idea is remarkably simple-minded—but it makes life remarkably easy for a big public figure like Rhee. How sweet it is! As educational reformers, she and her colleagues don’t have to come up with “effective ways to teach reading and math;” they simply have to threaten the teachers! After all, those teachers would produce huge success if they’d simply get off their asses and teach, the way Rhee did, back in the day.

If public school teachers would just get to work, they’d produce miracles too!

What a life! Michelle Rhee’s simple-minded idea makes life easy for “educational experts” and for “education reformers.” The teachers already know what to do! All the “reformers” have to do is threaten them, fire and bribe them! This approach has lay at the heart of Rhee’s ministry, in which she has produced almost no ideas about how to succeed in the classroom.

America’s teachers just won’t do their jobs! Has a major movement ever been built on such a simple-minded idea? But Michelle Rhee’s simple-minded idea of reform has always been built on her miracle tale—a miracle tale in which she worked amazingly hard, a tale which never happened.

No, she didn’t produce those results. Why then have so many elites worked so hard to believe her?

DCPS Graduation Rates Artificially Inflated Under Rhee & Henderson

According to this article by Bill Turque, it appears that the Rhee and Henderson administrations have been shown to be falsifying data once again. They added an extra 20% margin to the actual, factual DCPS high school graduation rates, and proclaimed victory.

You should really read his article.

If I’m not mistaken, with this massive shrinkage of the fictitious DC graduation rates, the Deforming Duo (Rhee & Henderson) and their funders and out-of-touch acolytes have NOTHING LEFT about which they can actually claim success.

The last myth, that supposedly they increased DCPS graduation rates, is shown to be a chimera. A lie. Sorry, make that “use of an incorrect formula.” Well, there’s an entire book called “How to Lie With Statistics”; it’s by Daryl Huff (good book – look it up). Sounds to me that Rhee and Henderson could write several new chapters with up-to-date examples, using their own joint and several educational record.

Think of all the lies they have been caught up in.

(1) A lot of the DC-CAS score increases at certain schools are almost undoubtedly the result of massive cheating. A lot of that cheating was apparently done by a principal whom Rhee was very fond of promoting as her success story, but who has since been fired/quit since the news of the scandal spread.

(2) Even Rhee admitted to Jay Mathews that she had no idea what she was doing in hiring and firing principals based on her 3-minute gut reaction, and that many of her new hires utterly failed. Some of these principals (old and new) manage to have 300% turnover in teaching staff at their school over a very short period of time — and are yet able to collect millions of dollars in donations and to earn the very highest public educational awards for administrators. Those teachers that were hired, fired, or quit under stress were almost all eager, bright young (or not-so-young) things who were extremely highly motivated to do their best for the young people at their school. But they all failed and were humiliated under this insane regime.

(3) We have way larger numbers of teachers than ever before in DC with very little classroom experience, who either get fired or quit in droves because of the lack of support and insanely contradictory directives; any institutional memory or ties with neighborhood families are constantly being destroyed.

(4) IMPACT and all other VAM-style evaluation or bonus schemes(*) have been shown to be unreliable in practice, and to have negative consequences for motivating students or teachers. The middle-school experiment in bribing kids to do the right thing here in DC was a failure. Almost any psychologist who studies human motivation could have predicted that it wouldn’t work.

(5) There is no discernable difference in overall trends on NAEP scores under Rhee and Henderson on the one hand, and during the decade before them, except for some new declines in some grade levels after 2 full years of IMPACT. No victory to celebrate there, despite Rhee’s best attempt to bait-and-switch by comparing two entirely different categories when trying to brag of her “successes.”

(6) Population gains in DC public schools are mostly because of whole-scale marketing of all day kindergarten and pre-K classes. Meanwhile, the charter school numbers keep growing, which I don’t really see as an improvement. There is very little that most of the charter schools are doing that I can see that is experimental or better or really producing wonderful results.

(7) Charter school students for the most part get scores very similar to those in the regular DC public schools, with these two differences: The DC public schools have more kids at the very highest levels AND more kids at the very lowest levels on income and on test scores. The charter schools have more kids in the middle, fewer Hispanics and whites, and fewer children with disabilities or ESL kids. The situation might be quite different in other cities, or it might be just like ours. I have no idea, not having looked carefully enough even at Atlanta or NYC. However, a serious national study showed that if a student chose a charter school at random, then in 5 cases out of 6, they would do as well as, or worse than, if they were in a regular public school. In only 1 case out of 6 would they do better. 1/3 of the time, they do worse.

(8) There have been no cost savings anywhere. The amount of money that goes to contractors — some of them former TFA members who chose to make money and earn prestige, and to tell teachers what to do, rather than remaining in the classroom — is obscene. Central office is bigger than ever, and at wildly inflated salaries from what they used to be.

(9) And there’s the little matter of the numerous whoppers on Michelle Rhee’s resume – lies and exaggerations about the media coverage while she taught, and flat out making numbers up about a nonexistent educational miracle in her 3rd year of teaching, with what I conclude was the help of her Baltimore principal. (There was no other school anywhere in the UMBC study of the Tesseract schoolls and their regular BPS counterparts that had anything like the number of “1” scores. You probably say, “Who cares about ‘1’ scores? What’s that mean?” Well, it’s important. It means that the student scored SO LOW THAT THEY DON’T COUNT THEIR SCORE. It’s a great way to increase the apparent average of any group of things or scores or people — you just remove the low ones while you do the math, and secretly put them back when the computation is done. And that is apparently how they achieved somewhat of a bump in scores at Harlem Park. I think.

(10) Large numbers of DCPS teachers, to their credit, have refused to take the “poison-pill” bonuses that they earned on the numbers racket that is VAM and IMPACT. Good for them!

(11) Rhee’s foundation, Students First, is a joke of an “astroturf” organization funded by secret billionaires who don’t have to declare who they are or how much they have given. (I am told its a 501c4, not a 501c3 like several groups I belong to, and that they don’t have to disclose squat to the public. So far, I can’t find anything.) But we know that Rhee has a habit of palling around with the most outrageous right-wing extremists who want to repeal pretty much all of the New Deal, decertify labor unions, impose their own brand of religious restrictions on education and much more.

(12) There are probably quite a few more lies that various of us have exposed; I am proud to have contributed to some of this research. But I can’t think of any more without doing some research. Anybody want to add some more examples?

In any case, it seems to me that this should be the last straw.

We need to be indicting people, and they need to be pilloried (figuratively, that is) and removed from all positions of influence on education or anything else. They are complete and utter fakers and have no track record of success at all. I will name three people that need to go, in alphabetical order:

Arne Duncan.

Kaya Henderson.

Michelle Rhee.

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*Seems to me that bonuses mostly motivate folks who like money, and folks who really like money don’t go into teaching. There are banks and businesses and stock markets that they can embezzle from instead. Teachers? I mean, a teacher isn’t going to get rich even if he or she does steal all his or her students’ lunch or field trip money AND wins a $5,000 bonus by cheating and erasing answers on his or her class’ answer sheets. No, if a person wants to get really rich, you become a hedge fund manager if you want to do it semi-legally. If you don’t care whether it’s legal or not, there are lots of ways to embezzle money — but you can’t do it from the classroom.

The one study that seems to say that VAM has some success was based on data from the 1990’s, well before NCLB, when there were no high stakes put on scores on achievement tests; and the supposed benefit, using their unknown algorithm, of having an absolute superstar of a teacher (which is defined by … a teacher in whose classroom a significant number of kids had a higher-than-expected gain in test scores from the previous year, on a test with unknown relevance to anything at all) is … get ready for the drum roll … here it is … An extra few hundred dollars in income per year for the student, later on.

Whether any of those minuscule detected impacts would hold up under today’s high-stakes testing environment isn’t known. It might happen that students with suspiciously big jumps in test scores end up getting run over by cars more frequently. Or have better bowling averages. Or have higher scores on WII games. Or have less dandruff. Who knows? I wonder if there might be a correlation between the number of freckles on a teacher’s forearm and his or her students’ rates of having automobile accidents? If we look hard enough, we could probably find some small correlation to something.

(comments?)

“Michelle Rhee” is to “Data” as “Counterfeiter” is to “Dollar Bill”

There are very few public figures who have a looser connection with the truth, with facts, and with data, than Michelle Rhee.

(In plain English: I think she is a major liar and distorter. There is not an educational statistic that she won’t twist.)

But she’s coming to DC next week as a featured panel member of something called the Data Quality Campaign, along with Arne Duncan, another educational DEformer who is unfortunately head of the US Education Department. The event details are here: it takes place 1:30 to 5pm at the Renaissance Washington Hotel next Wednesday 1-18-2012 on the south edge of Mount Vernon Square here in DC. It appears that the panel will advocate national, multiple-choice testing for all students in all grade levels and for all subjects in all months of the year and firing and paying teachers and making all educational policy based on those results.

A dumber idea than that is hard to imagine. It also is a huge waste of many billions of dollars — money that will go to just a handful of enormous testing-and-publishing companies. These funds will be lost forever to local schools and school districts, parents, teachers, and students, and will instead go to enrich some of the 1% who run this country.

I think it would be a great thing if some folks went there and showed the public that there are a number of people who think that Rhee is a propagandist for untruth, and that there are few things less useful for teachers and students than making educational policy based on stupid, nationally-composed multiple-choice tests and being locked into a national curriculum. (Don’t laugh: they even just now came out with national standards for sex education. I am not making that up.)

Registration is free: use this link.

Rhee has an amazingly long history of distortions; where I first found my jaw dropping was when I read her resume, where she claimed to have been in the Wall Street Journal and on TV during the mid-1990’s when she was a TFA temporary teacher in a for-profit charter school experiment that failed in Baltimore. When she claimed that she took an entire elementary school class from below the 20th percentile to above the 90th percentile on a nationally-normed test, I simply could not believe it. Nobody in history has ever accomplished anything like that without some sort of fakery.

Sure enough, when I later found a careful study on that failed educational experiment, my suspicions were confirmed. No such miracle happened at all at Rhee’s school (Harlem Park ES) or in her grade. What happened instead was that Rhee’s grade instead had an inordinate number of kids who scored at a “1” level, meaning that their scores were so low that they simply weren’t counted. As a consequence, I conclude, the average of the scores of the remaining students had a modest increase. The lead analyst for the UMBC study agreed with the conclusions I drew. Rick Hess of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, a personal friend of Rhee, predictably disagreed.

As you also may have heard, Rhee promoted Wayne Ryan, the principal of Noyes, based on what proved to be utterly fallacious, doctored increases in student scores at that school. (Ryan was allowed or “encouraged” to quietly resign after the news of the cheating came out, but that was after Rhee quit when her patron, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, lost an election because she earned the hatred of most of the electorate in Washington, DC. You can see a good summary of much of Rhee’s record at RheeFirst. I uncovered a fair amount of her lies and distortions in the pages of this blog. (BTW thanks to WordPress, this blog has a pretty good search engine if you want to look stuff up; it’s at the upper right-hand corner of this page.)

Anybody interested in making a stink at this conference? Anybody else interested in pointing out that there is another way (or many other ways) of improving education in America?