Answers to the Latest Quiz on the Baltimore-Rhee “Miracle”

Here are the answers:

(1) There is not a single Baltimore Edison/EAI/Tesseract school at which students in math jumped from the 13th percentile to above the 90th percentile, in either CTBS reading or math, at any grade level, during the period 1992 through 1995.

(2) The school where Michelle Rhee taught was school O (with a yellow background).

(3) The ones that were run by Tesseract/EAI/Edison were schools J, L, O, R, and S. The regular Baltimore public schools were schools K, M, N, P, and Q.

If you group the two sets of schools, results appear to be about a wash.

This study is pretty conclusive evidence that Michelle Rhee was flat-out lying in her resume, in her testimony about her resume, and in her interview last month in the Washingtonian magazine.

Here are the graphs again, with the names of the schools written in:

If we were to use the criteria of Jason Kamras, Eric Hanushek, and Michelle Rhee, then Rhee should have been fired after the first year or two.

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Why does this resume flap still matter?

Simply because this person, who is proven to be a repeated liar, continues to nearly dominate the national discussion about “reforming” public education. (read: destroying public education) She has absolutely no shame about lying to the public with an absolutely convincing demeanor. Perhaps she believes her own lies. If that was the only problem, nobody would care. But there is a problem: she is succeeding in demonizing teachers in general and in steering the public away from the real changes that need to happen in the American public educational system, and towards changes sought by the same billionaires who are plundering the entire planet, widening the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, and who recently threw millions of Americans out of work.

PS: here is my data source.

Now a Quiz on the Baltimore Rhee CTBS Math Miracle

You have another quiz, this time to see if you can deduce what school Michelle Rhee performed her Baltimore CTBS mathematics miracle in. As I have pointed out in previous posts, Rhee claims that she took her students from the 13th percentile (extremely low) to above the 90th percentile (you can’t go higher than 99th percentile) on national standardized tests in “academics” – so that, presumably, includes mathematics.

I randomly chose 5 of the seven Tesseract/EAI/Edison schools, and also five of the eight comparison-group regular public schools. For each school, I converted the NCE scores to percentile ranks for the 2nd grade in years 1992, 1993, and 1994, and for the 3rd grade in 1995. Finally, I again used a random-number generator to scramble up the order of the schools.

So, you have two challenges:

1. In which of schools J-S did Michelle Rhee work this miracle? (Remember, there were only two third grade sections during her final year teaching, and she was team teaching [perhaps with the other third-grade teacher] so the jump should be extreme!)
2. Which ones were regular public schools, and which ones were run by the for-profit EAI/Tesseract/Edison corporation? (Five are in one group, and five in the other.)

Here is the data (which I double-checked this time):

Small technical note: you cannot add, subtract, divide, multiply or take averages on percentiles. You can do all of that with NCEs, but NCEs are a lot harder to understand for most people than percentiles are. Rhee gave her results in terms of percentiles, so I am following suit.

I have a puzzle for you: Can You Spot the Baltimore-Rhee Miracle of 1993-1995?

Is Michelle Rhee a liar, or is she honest? You decide.

You remember that Michelle Rhee said that when she taught for three years in Baltimore, after a bit of a rough spot during her first year, she brought her students from the very bottom to the very top, right? If that’s true, then it should be really easy to spot those scores, especially since there were exactly TWO third-grade classes at her Baltimore school during her final year, and she says that she team-taught with the other second-grade, later third-grade, teacher during those last two years. (Or maybe there were two teachers in her class – I can’t tell from her account.) But no matter. A jump that large should be really, really obvious.

In last month’s Washingtonian Magazine, she told an interviewer:

“In my second year of teaching, we took them from the bottom to the top on academics, and what I learned from that experience was these kids were getting screwed because people wanted to blame their low achievement levels on the single-parent households and on the poverty in the community. In that two-year period, none of those things changed. Their parents didn’t change.

“What changed?
“What we were doing with them in school.”

And as I pointed out in my previous post, her official resume says “Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90% of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.” (emphasis added by me)

Here comes the puzzle.

I looked up the CTBS reading scores for nine different schools in Baltimore for the period 1992 through 1995. I converted all of the CTBS NCE reading scores in the second grade for 1992, 1993, and 1994, and for the third grade in 1995 into percentile ranks, because that is the measurement that Rhee refers to. The CTBS is, as far as I can tell, the only nationally-standardized test that was given in Baltimore. The MSPAP, which was also given during at least some of those years, is a Maryland state-wide test, and so far, I haven’t found scores on the MSPAP for 1995.

Here are the graphs showing the CTBS reading scores in nine different schools (or clusters of schools) during the years Michelle Rhee claims to have worked her miracle. I included all of the seven Tesseract/EAI schools, including Harlem Park where Rhee taught, and I also included some of the regular public schools that were officially designated as comparison schools in the study that was supposed to figure out whether Edison was doing a good job or not.

I will NOT tell you which graph is Harlem Park. It’s your job to figure out which one it was.

Hint: Rhee was still in college for SY 1992. She worked at Harlem Park for SY 1993, 1994, and 1995. She taught second grade for the first two years, and then apparently followed the students into the third grade for SY 1995.

Let’s look at the graphs:

OK, boys and girls. Which school was it? A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, or I?

(No more hints today. I’ll give the identities of these schools tomorrow.)

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Error notice: I noticed this morning that I had accidentally inverted the percentile ranks and NCE scores in several places, which made some of these graphs wrong and the question harder to answer. It is now fixed, but I wish I was a better proofreader. I apologize to all.

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:

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.

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• 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’.

 

Why Does Anyone Listen to Blowhards, Liars and Cheats Like Michelle Rhee, Michael Millkin, Arne Duncan, Rush Limbaugh, Jack Abramoff, Newt Gingrich, Bernie Madoff?

Unfortunately, it seems like the ones calling the shots in American education today are more and more chosen from a small list of liars, swindlers, and psychopaths.

Take Michelle Rhee, for example.

She was essentially a failed Teach For AWhile America teacher who finally got her act somewhat together during her last year in a classroom, right before quitting for greening pastures.

She claims now that her principal told her at the time that her students’ test scores had gone up — but gave no specifics.

Later on, Rhee made up her own, famous, and  purely imaginary, specifics: Supposedly her class went from having 90% of them being below the 13th percentile to a situation where 90% of the students scored above the 90th percentile — a rise that is completely unparalleled and imaginable in human or educational history anywhere in the world, in any realm.

I helped dig up the well-studied Baltimore test scores at Rhee’s school and the other ones in the study. To me, the most salient fact that came out is that Rhee and her principal seem to have been pioneers in getting rid of low-scoring students, judging by the tremendous attrition in her school and in her grade level, and the fact that so many of her students scored SO LOW THAT THEIR SCORES WEREN’T EVEN COUNTED.

(Contemplate that for a while!)

Rhee said her “90%<13th %ile to 90%>90th %ile” myth not once, but numerous times, and had it on her official resume. This is simply bald-faced lying, and should have disqualified her from any position of trust. Plus, every single claim she made about outstanding growth in DC public schools, which she was the misleader of for three years, was false. Without exception.

Rush Limbaugh: a self-important, many-times divorced hypocritical blowhard, addicted to opiates, who calls for all other drug users to be locked up and rains moral judgements down on everybody who disagrees with him.

When Newt Gingrich talks about ‘moral values’ one wants to snicker and guffaw.

When Arne Duncan talks about helping students by closing their schools and demonizing their teachers and turning public education over to profiteers that have never shown that they were successful, you have to shake your head, given his utter failure in improving public education in Chicago.

Isn’t it rich that convicted financial felon Michael Millkin wants to profit off of our students by setting up some sort of get-rich-quick technology scam? When will Jack Abramoff be next?

There is a very fitting name for people like Michelle Rhee who fail in the classroom and go on to make up lies about what they do, and try to cash in by bossing around the teachers who essentially took a vow of poverty by remaining on the front lines, doing the best they know how. (Rhee, on the other hand, earns about the same per speech that many teachers earn in a year, and has the fervent backing of many a billionaire.)

The best term I can think of for Rhee is a tad too complex to catch on:

Lying, profiteering, asshole.

Can you think of a better term?

Indictments in Atlanta Cheating Scandal Make Me Wonder: When Will Michelle Rhee & Her Enablers Also Be Indicted?

Those who trust our DCPS leaders to do the right thing regarding building a school here in Turkey Thicket should consider this:

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Beverly Hall, the ex-superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, was just indicted with a recommended multi-million-dollar bond for leading a massive cheating ring run by her and some administrators and teachers on their state’s standardized tests; she and her cronies raked in big bucks and much fame and honors for these fake high scores. A link to today’s NYT article: http://nyti.ms/10ocfEK

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USA Today ran a brilliant series of investigative columns about a year or so ago on cheating by adults on standardized tests in Atlanta, Washington DC, and several other cities. The cheating here in DC, according to their serious, well-documented investigation, was about on a par with that in Atlanta, IMHO.  The most brazen example that they found — and one of the few examples where the reporters could find people willing to speak on the record — was right here in Brookland at Crosby Noyes ES/EC, under then-principal Wayne Ryan. You may have also noted that the principal at Noyes who followed Ryan found extremely clear evidence of said cheating ring, and spoke out about it, and was forced to resign for telling the truth. (Look up John Merrow’s PBS special on that.) That principal was later also publicly vilified by Henderson — essentially for telling the truth about the cheating.

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If you recall, Ryan earned big bucks, a promotion, and lots of fame and honors for leading a ring of teachers and administrators who changed students’ answers on the DC-CAS for many years. Michelle Rhee promoted him to the central office as being “all that” – a position that he mysteriously abandoned once the excrement hit the ventilator (figuratively speaking), just as Beverly Hall conveniently retired.

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Rhee herself similarly lied, repeatedly, in print and in numerous interviews, about her own non-existent, utterly unbelievable “90% below the 13th percentile rising to 90% above the 90th percentile” miracle in Baltimore. She lied about much more on her resume, and once chosen to be chancellor, gave all DC principals marching orders on how much to inflate their students’ test scores in the coming year and earn big bucks, or be fired. Kaya Henderson defended Rhee and Ryan, and was deputy to Rhee during all those shenanigans and lies.

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BTW: I and many others have shown that there has been NO tremendous surge in NAEP scores in DCPS under the disastrous reign of Rhee and Henderson. The one big change is that the gap between the scores of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, between those of white kids and non-white kids, and between those with free or reduced-price lnches and those without, has WIDENED and the gap is by far the widest here in DC than in any other state or city. If you don’t believe me, go look up the NAEP scores yourself, or look in my blog under NAEP in its little search engine. (You can also use my blog to do searches for the original news articles on the scandals I am discussing here.)

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I wonder when the turn before the grand jury will come for Ryan, Henderson, and Rhee.

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(Obviously not while we have Arne Duncan in the DOE and Charles Willoughby as our IG.)

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My conclusion is this:

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My neighbors here in Brookland should not expect any of the people I mentioned to do anything right for you or for me or my kids or my grandchild-to-be.

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The people I named are utterly corrupt, and take their lying very seriously.

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Not our welfare.

Your thoughts?

Why Does Anybody Listen to Anything Said by Michelle Rhee & Her Kind?

An aside:

It really is insane to keep building “public” charter schools when we have vacant really public schools that are part vacant. Wasn’t the idea of public charter schools was to carefully try out different experimental approaches, to see which approaches worked best, and then have all schools adopt the successful ones? After the first round of experiments, then another round of experiments could be tried, sort of like how scientists are supposed to operate? And aren’t education and sociology generally attempting to be empirical and scientific — isn’t that what these “data-driven” educational evaluation models supposed to be?

Appears to me that since the “instruments” that these data-seekers use are entirely defective, all of the “findings” of the current group of educational deformers readings are worthless and a waste of time. They lurch from one half-assed idea to the next without waiting for results. Some, like Michelle Rhee, are famous for declaring victory before her experiment was even begun, and then lying about the results.

 

(The instruments are, of course, badly-written standardized tests prepared by underpaid temporary workers that have no real classroom usefulness at all. It’s the equivalent of measuring your personal character by the shapes of the bumps on your head, or predicting the future by casting lots, or studying tea leaves, the lines on your palm, or even animal entrails a la Cicero and Caesar..)

Rhee has been forced to admit, to the DC City Council, that she made up all those supposedly specific figures, about those supposed miraculous results she pretended to have achieved while she taught for THREE WHOLE YEARS in Baltimore?

But Rhee has never dealt with the other cheat that shows up on the record published by UMBC, many years ago, as part of a careful study of an experiment, of which Rhee herself played a small part, because she taught for several years of a relatively-well-controlled scientific experiment on the efficacy (or lack thereof) of a for-profit model of educational delivery. (What happened is that the city of Baltimore, under some pressure, allowed an experiment where Edison/Tesseract company took over so many Baltimore City schools and ran them their way (whatever that was) and the exact same number of closely=-matched BPS schools would be watched and measured on lots of different criteria, and then the public and the politicians could study the evidence and see which approach worked best.

Bottom line? The study concluded that there was no big difference.

Nobody at the time wrote any headlines about Michelle Rhee bringing a class of 2nd graders for two years into third grade, and that “she brought a class from UNDER the 13th percentile to OVER the 90th percentile” or whatever version of the story Rhee felt like telling on that day.

Nobody.

Had it really happened, don’t you think that the Edison company wouldn’t have found a way to leak it to the prerss? After all, Edison lost a lot of money and cliients and opportunities to make BILLIONS of dollars by having their project shut down – about the same time that Rhee quit teaching forever.

It’s like the dog that DIDN’T bark in the night. If Rhee had made stupendous progress, a self-serving, self-promoting person like Michelle Rhee would have arranged to have it publicized to the skies. It’s not in ANY of the newspapers that Rhee claimed it was published in. (Another lie!)

And when you take a slightly closer look at the data from those 3 years at those dozen or schools, you do notice two very peculiar things about Rhee’s own school:

(1) A huge amount of attrition – about half of each cohort disappeared after 3 years — no other school had that. Where did those kids go? Why? I can only guess, but somebody does know;; those records exist somewhere, I bet.

(2) Many, many kids (we are talking 20-30%) of the kids in a number of schools, in particular Rhee’s school and grade level, scored so low that their scores weren’t even counted. What on earth? Those kids scores aren’t counted at all? Wow! Hmm … that might give an unscrupulous person, perhaps someone whose name rhymes with “Wheeee!”: if  you get half of your kids, especially those from the lowest-scoring half, to drop out (you’ll miss some, but no matter), the scores of the remaining ones will look great. And if you can somehow manage to arrange to make sure that the answer sheets of a number oof other kids are SOOOO BAAD that they get tossed out completely, why you could in fact probably get your scores up a LOT. (If the scores were normally distributed, and you could cut off the entire bottom 50%, plus cut off the bottom 20% of the remaining half, that leaves only 40% of the students, all ones at the top half, and your remaining group would be by definition all above the 60th percentile. An excellent lesson in “How to Lie With Statistics”, newly revised edition by Michelle Rhee.

Why does anybody listen to this serial liar? Why do supposedly intelligent billionaires give her so much money?

It’s not like anything she tried ever worked.

It’s not like she hasn’t got caught red-handed, so to speak, lying her ass off.

In the real sciences, when a scientist makes a claim based on lies, he/she has to give up his/her awards, positions, their name on papers and institutions, and suffers public embarrassment FOREVER. Because they lied. Some even have the go so far as to commit suicide in disgrace.

But not charlatans like Michelle Rhee and Michael Millken (the cheating, early-released felon who stole BILLIONS from the rest of us; which shows that if you want to get rich by crime, it’s best not to use guns and knives — spreadsheets and law degrees are much more effective, and earn you almost no time in jail at all…)

Yeah, MM is back — the cheating liar has served a mere 2 years of his 10-year sentence, and he is trying very hard to join these other lying,, thieving politicians and crooks in cashing in on the privatization bonanza/gold rush that’s going on right now in the field of education.

(Making a mistake, admitting it later after either being shown the error or finding it out yourself, and then changing your mind and actions, as most real scientists do, are fine. Arguing and debating the results, great. But lying and covering up evidence are about the two worst things a scientist can do.

(Another aside: Unfortunately for us, those are precisely the problems with medicine and drug treatments today. Pharmaceutical companies are HUGE businesses today; their products have revuolutionized life today (kids don’t get measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough, scarlet fever, smallpox, and/or hepatitis the way my family did before about 1960), but we know for a fact that they do NOT publish the results of negative trials and tests. (They aren’t the only ones doing this. The Alternative Medicine section of NIH essentially does the same thing: lots and lots of studies on acupuncture, herbs, crystals, aromatherapy etc are started, but after 10 years and umpteen thousands of dollars later, nothing is published as to results? Not a word? How come? One could certainly be forgiven for becoming a bit cynical and concluding that the results were so abysmal (either the alternative medical route was worse than the regular medical course or the placebo, or else there were no differences at all?)

And our Dear Leader Kaya Henderson? Michelle Rhee’s acolyte all these years, backing her up all that time, never calling her out on her serial fabrications of evidence. And who was Michelle Rhee’s advocate and creator? None other than Joel Klein, who has been dismantling NYC public schools for about a decade — though he had never, ever taught a class in his life and had no experience running any individual school.

Klein now works for Rupert Murdoch, if you hadn’t heard.

But here’s the kicker: what was the result of the Edison/Tesseract experiment in privatisation in Baltimore:

Simple: No better results but the privatized schools cost quite a bit more.

What has been the results of study after study of charter schools and merit pay and paying students to do well, and so on?

Results are about the same and often worse, when dealing with average kids. The ones that appear at first to do better (eg KIPP) do serious winnowing of their low-performing students.

Does that negative result stop anything?

No.

Boys and girls, this is the true zombie or vampire of our day: The idea that our public schools should be given over to private corporations, and re-segregated again by race and income and so on, while those who stand to profit from this move engage the best PR agents and think tanks to learn how to pretend that they are doing the exact opposite.

Just like the Confederates kept claiming they were fighting for ‘freedom’.

Where are these “Dozens and Dozens’ of DC public schools with continued, steady growth thanks to Rhee & Henderson?

Michelle Rhee said on the recent Frontline PBS special that there were ‘dozens and dozens’ of DC public schools that supposedly made steady progress on the DC-CAS over the past four or five years.

Jay Mathews only found 13 schools which did what Rhee claimed:  Brent, Eaton, Murch, Oyster-Adams, Payne, Plummer, Prospect, Ross, Thomson, Tubman, Hart, McKinley Tech, Sousa.

A commentator by the name of ‘LetsBeReal’ pointed out that a large fraction of those schools in fact were populated mainly by relatively affluent white students or were schools with selective admissions: Brent, Murch, Eaton, Oyster-Adams, Ross, and McKinley Tech.

I looked at the grade-by-grade proficiency ratings at the remaining schools and found a LOT of very suspicious rises and falls in proficiency rates for same-cohort groups from year to year, in all but one of those schools: Hart.

Here is what I found:

At Payne, the cohort that was in the 4^th grade in 2012 went from 38% proficient in reading in 2011 to 55% proficient the next year, a 17-percentage-point rise, which means (to me) that it should be flagged. Either the teacher last year was doing something so wonderful that entire books should be written on how to replicate those feats, or there was cheating. Same group went from 14% proficient in math in 2011 to 60% proficient last year. Unbelievable, frankly.

The cohort that was in the 5^th grade at Payne in 2012 had DC-CAS reading proficiency rates since 3^rd grade of, respectively, 17%, 23%, and 46%. In math, the scores for that same cohort, by year were 23%, 35%, and 50%. Either amazingly good or brazen cheating, one or the other: in any case, it needs to be checked out.

The Payne cohort that was in the 5^th grade in 2011 had DC-CAS reading proficiency rates of starting in the 3^rd grade of 52%, 31% and 50%. In math, 58%, 34%,, and 31%: very suspicious as well.

Still at Payne, the cohort that was in the 5^th grade in 2010 had DC-CAS proficiency rates in reading of 41%, 32%, and 63%, which is again unbelievable. The math scores were a lot steadier: 24%, 32%, and 33%.

At Plummer, I also found a lot of suspicious rises and falls. Cohort in 4^th grade in 2012 in reading went from 31% in the 3^rd grade to 68% proficient the next year. In math, the same group went from 38% to 81%. The cohort that was in the 5^th grade in 2012 went from 40% to 18% to 46% proficient in reading over three years, which is unbelievable. In math their scores were much more believable: 36%, 32%, and 40%.

Still at Plummer, the cohort that was in the fifth grade in 2011 had reading scores that went like this over their three years there: 44%, 33%, and 36%. In math, their scores were 60%, 18%, and 29%. The cohort that was in the fifth grade in 2010 had reading scores of 47%, 22%, and 30%. In math, they were 37%, 13%, and 33%.

Prospect LC is a special education school, where teachers are apparently able to rewrite the DC-C AS to fit their students’ needs and abilities. (At Sharpe Health school, where students are often unable to walk, feed themselves or clean themselves,  between 95% and 100% of the students are supposedly “proficient” or “advanced”, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in other schools.) In any case, at Prospect, I found one cohort (the group that was in 7th grade last year) whose proficiency ratings went from 25% to 0%, then 0% again, followed by two years of 5% — in reading. In math, that same cohort went from 13% to 31% to 0% to 24%, hardly reassuring. The cohort one year older had reading pass rates of 0%, 0%, 0%, 6%, and 0%. In math, their pass rates were 0%, 0%, 11%, 29%, and 25%. (I’m not making this up, as Dave Barry used to say.) And the cohort that reached the 8th grade in 2011 had pass rates in reading of 0%, 0%, 0%, and 17%.. In math, the same group had pass rates of 0%, 0%, 17%, and 42%.

At Tubman, to summarize, I found nine cases where proficiency rates jumped or fell by more than ten percentage points from one year to the next from 2008 through 2012.

At Sousa, I “only” found seven such cases.

At Thompson, I found eight suspicious rises and falls.

At Hart, I only found one suspicious rise, but if Rhee thinks that going from about 12% proficient overall to about 25% proficient is wonderful progress, then I don’t know quite what to say, given that Rhee herself bragged — falsely — on her resume that she brought an entire class or two of students in Baltimore from below the 13th percentile to above the 90th percentile, using methods that she has never shared publicly.

Both Erich Martel and I feel that a ten-percentage-point rise or fall raises a red flag. Just possibly, such a rise would demonstrate tremendous teaching. However, from our own experience, it’s much more likely the result of cheating. In any case, it needs to be checked out – but not by “See No Evil” Inspector General Charles Willoughby.

In any case, if these are the only schools which Jay Mathews found that had sustained gains, and if these schools fall into two groups: schools with mostly non-poor students and relatively large fractions of white students on the one hand; and schools with many very many suspicious rises and falls in cohort proficiency rates – with the single exception of Hart, then I think we can say pretty clearly that Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson have a pretty clear legacy:

Complete.

Abject.

Failure.

Abetted by fraud and deception.

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You can find the school-by-school, grade-by-grade proficiency ratings at http://nclb.osse.dc.gov/index.asp for 2008 through 2011. Unfortunately, OSSE still has not released the grade-by-grade scores for 2012, but I was leaked a spreadsheet containing that data. If you would like to see it for yourself, I have posted it on Google Drive, here:

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I will shortly post tables containing the exact numbers so you can see what I’m talking about.

I’m Rather Disappointed with the New Frontline Piece on Michelle Rhee

I just finished watching John Merrow’s most recent hourlong piece on Michelle Rhee.

I was disappointed that it still seemed to make Rhee seem like a superstar who does little wrong.

Yes, he does point out pretty clearly that there was a huge amount of cheating by adults in DC public schools in the form of changing student answers on yearly tests; it is clear to me that Rhee pushed for impossible gains, and principals and teachers felt that they needed to cheat in order to keep their jobs and gain large bonuses. Merrow was, of course, unable to get Rhee to admit to stonewalling the investigations. But she clearly did, if you look at the exchange of emails and letters printed in USA Today. But will viewers agree with me, or give her the benefit of the doubt?

Merrow should have asked Rhee something like this: “You held up Wayne Ryan of Noyes ES as a superstar for raising test scores so dramatically — and promoted him, and gave him large bonuses. It is abundantly clear that those gains were the results of cheating. He refuses to comment. What do you have to say for yourself now?”

Another question he should have asked, as a follow-up: “You say that you don’t know why Caveon didn’t use all of their investigative tools to detect cheating on the DC standardized tests. But the reason was very simple: they would have to be paid more money to do so. Why did you decide not to commit the funds to have these extra investigations done?”

He did get the subsequent principal of Noyes to describe what looked like an ‘erasure party’ by staff at the school, and evasions by staff to avoid talking to investigators. She also told how nobody from the DC Inspector General’s office even interviewed her at all.

He also should have examined one of Michelle Rhee’s supposedly signature reforms: the ‘Capital Gains’ experiment, where students at certain middle schools were paid to be good, to be on time, do their homework, and so on. It was a failure: there were no differences in achievement between the control group and the experimental group; but she never, ever acknowledged this failure; I seem to be the only person who has commented on this failure in print.

He also should have shown with graphs what the results were in DC public schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, before, during, and after Rhee’s administration. If he had done so, he would have had to note that her reign made only one really significant difference: the gap between whites and blacks in DC, the largest in the nation, became wider than ever.

Having Richard Whitmire on screen so much was a joke: he is a fawning admirer of Rhee.

Not enough was done to point out that every single “fact” that Rhee put forth in her resume and verbally concerning her career at Harlem Park ES in Baltimore was a lie. I personally gave Merrow plenty of data, but he let Whitmire have the last say on the famous “90% below the 13th percentile to 90% above the 90th percentile” claim that Rhee made.

 

If you watched the show, what were your reactions?

As usual, if you want to make a comment you have to find the words “leave a comment” that are in super-tiny letters at the bottom of this column.