“Erase to the Top”

Remember that TIME magazine cover with Michelle Rhee holding a broom in front of an empty classroom, suggesting she was going to sweep out all of us riff-raff teachers?

Someone has modified the cover. It now has Rhee holding a very large Number Two pencil, with a large pink eraser at her feet; the title is “Erase to the Top”.  The text reads:

“Michelle A. Rhee, America’s most famous school reformer, was fully aware of the extent of the problems when she glossed over what appeared to be widespread cheating during her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC.”

 

(improved image is courtesy of the artist)

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Here is the ‘Smoking Memo’

Without any comment from me, here is the entire ‘Smoking Memo’.

 

 

 

 

The ‘Smoking Memo’ on Michelle Rhee’s EraserGate was leaked to John Merrow

The “smoking memo” has turned up.
The one that Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson, and Charles Willoughby didn’t want the public to see.

The one where the testing company expert told them all about the cheating and what steps they should take — none of which were taken.

That memo was leaked to John Merrow of Frontline. You really should read his entire article. It’s long, it’s got footnotes, and it’s excellent.

http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232&cpage=1#comment-19730

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Teachers, parents, and concerned citizens should take the time to read this long, footnoted, in-depth follow-up by John Merrow (a journalist at Frontline) on the cheating scandal (by adults) in Washington, DC public schools, in particular at Noyes right here in Brookland.

http://tinyurl.com/ctske44

 

The article points out several things:

(1) Rhee gave lots of money to adults who cheated

(2) She put impossible pressure on principals to cheat; they, in turn, put that pressure on their teachers

(3) The achievement gap between white and black students, and between poor kids and wealthier kids, increased on Rhee’s and Henderson’s watches; any increases in NAEP scores are continuations of trends that began under her predecessors; and DCPS students’s scores are still at the bottom of the nation

(4) Rhee, Henderson, Kamras, and IG Willoughby have steadfastly refused to investigate the cheating seriously and to do the sort of analysis that actually shows malfeasance

(5) Turnover among administrators and teachers in DCPS has turned a revolving door into a whirlwind

(6) The idealistic principal who followed Wayne Ryan at Noyes, and who was originally a great admirer of Rhee, found a lot of evidence of cheating there, but her whistleblower suit was dismissed, and she now runs a cupcake store

(7) Despite noises to the contrary by Rhee, the number of highly-paid central-office administrators has jumped; DCPS has the highest administrator-to-student ratio anywhere in the region

(8) Funds that should have been used to help students who were behind were, instead, used to pay illegitimate bonuses to dishonest adults.

Here is the URL:

 http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232&cpage=1#comment-19730

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A couple of key quotes:

“ former DeKalb County District Attorney Robert … Wilson said that he had been following the DCPS story closely.  “There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that adults cheated in Washington,” he said. “The big difference is that nobody in DC wanted to know the truth.”

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It’s easy to see how not trying to find out who had done the erasing–burying the problem–was better for Michelle Rhee personally, at least in the short term.  She had just handed out over $1.5 million in bonuses in a well-publicized celebration of the test increases[9]. She had been praised by presidential candidates Obama and McCain[10] in their October debate, and she must have known that she was soon to be on the cover of Time Magazine[11].  The public spectacle of an investigation of nearly half of her schools would have tarnished her glowing reputation, especially if the investigators proved that adults cheated–which seems likely given that their jobs depended on raising test scores.

Moreover, a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own “Produce or Else” approach to reform.  Early in her first year she met one-on-one with each principal and demanded a written, signed guarantee[12] of precisely how many points their DC-CAS scores would increase.

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It’s 2013.  Is there any point to investigating probable cheating that occurred in 2008, 2009 and 2010?  After all, the children who received inflated scores can’t get a ‘do-over,’ and it’s probably too late to claw back bonuses from adults who cheated, even if they could be identified.  While erasure analysis would reveal the extent of cheating, what deserves careful scrutiny is the behavior of the leadership when it learned that a significant number of adults were probably cheating, because five years later, Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.

This story is bound to remind old Washington hands of Watergate and Senator Howard Baker’s famous question, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” It has a memo that answers an echo of Baker’s question, “What did Michelle know, and when did she know it?” And the entire sordid story recalls the lesson of Watergate lesson, “It’s not the crime; it’s the coverup.”

That Michelle Rhee named her new organization “StudentsFirst” is beyond ironic.

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?

Utter, Stunning Failure by Rhee, Kamras, Henderson et al:

“Mr. Teachbad” did such a great job analyzing the utter failure of these contemptible liars that I hope he won’t mind that I re-post it in full:

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16 MAR 2013       by teachbad

Well, shit…THAT didn’t work. Now what?

This is stunning.

You remem­ber Michelle Rhee, right? She came to turn the DC pub­lic school sys­tem around. In 2007 she grabbed this city by the throat and shook it into sub­mis­sion.  Teach­ers were fired by the hun­dreds and prin­ci­pals by the dozens. Thou­sands have left the sys­tem because they did not want to work under the con­di­tions Rhee and Jason Kam­ras, her chief teacher tech­ni­cian, were imposing.

That was fine with her. Screw ‘em.  She would find new peo­ple who were will­ing to work hard and believed in chil­dren. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of new dol­lars were found and spent on telling teach­ers how to teach, reward­ing the lap­dogs and fer­ret­ing out the infidels.

Big change never comes easy. You can’t make an omelet with­out break­ing some eggs, etc. But if the right peo­ple have the resources and the courage to make and fol­low through with the tough deci­sions, great things can happen.

After five years, how is DCPS doing? A DC Fis­cal Pol­icy Insti­tute study released ear­lier this week has eval­u­ated the work of Rhee and her suc­ces­sor, Kaya “sucks-to-be-me” Hen­der­son. A write up of the study by Emma Brown can also be found at the Wash­ing­ton Post.

The prin­ci­pal find­ing of the study was that the “share of stu­dents scor­ing at a pro­fi­cient level at the typ­i­cal school fell slightly between 2008 and 2012.”

Whatch­utalk­in­boutwillis? Seri­ously? Read that again. Oh…my…God.

But hold on. That can’t really say every­thing. And what the hell is a “typ­i­cal school”? Let’s dis­ag­gre­gate the data.

Fair enough. The first thing to notice is that pub­lic char­ter schools are doing bet­ter than DCPS schools; not by a huge amount, but it is notice­able and across the board. So there’s that.

More impor­tantly, inter­est­ing pat­terns are revealed when look­ing at schools across these five years by income quin­tiles. Then, as now, the best per­form­ing schools are in the wealth­i­est parts of town and the worst per­form­ing schools are in the poor­est parts of town. That almost goes with­out say­ing. But have schools in the poor­est parts of the city begun to catch up? After all, that’s what this is sup­posed to be all about; clos­ing the achieve­ment gap. How’s that going?

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come out with it:

      Pro­fi­ciency rates have increased in the four wards with the high­est incomes. Pro­fi­ciency rates have fallen in the four wards with the low­est incomes.   

So, Michelle, Kaya and Jason…it appears you have man­aged to INCREASE the size of the Achieve­ment Gap in Wash­ing­ton, DC. And, Michelle, you are now try­ing to export your great ideas to the entire coun­try? If the three of you don’t feel stu­pid by now, you’re even dumber than I thought. You should all resign. Immediately.

But maybe there’s hope. There is a new plan. Not just any plan, but a strate­gic plan. The study notes that DCPS’s newCap­tial Com­mit­ment plan (yawn) sets the “ambi­tious goal of increas­ing pro­fi­ciency rates at the 40 low­est per­form­ing schools by 40 per­cent­age points by 2017….Given the DC CAS score trends over the past four years, it would appear that DCPS needs to under­take sub­stan­tial changes to the way it oper­ates to make this goal a reality.”

Wait. Didn’t we just do that?

——— Mr. Teach­bad

 

Enrollment in DCPS – Have Rhee & Henderson Saved It?

Michelle Rhee, her acolyte Kaya Henderson, and all their supporters keep saying that their corporate-style educational deforms in Washington DC have done wonderful things, such as increasing the enrollment in DC public schools.

As usual, they are not telling the truth.

To compare apples to apples, and not watermelons to peanuts, it pays to look at the same sort of data every year — in other words, let’s look at just K-12 enrollment for as far back as we have data.

Mary Levy has done just that, wading through mounds of official, audited data on fall enrollment in DCPS for 1990 through 2012; she shared it on the Concerned4DCPS yahoo group. (Thanks!)

I converted some of her data into graphs so you can see it more easily. I present first the total enrollment for grades K-12 during that time period. Tell me where you see a large uptick since 2007, because I for one can’t find it.

It seems to have stabilized, but that’s all; and this at a time when the entire population of the District of Columbia grew by about one-fifth (about 100,000 people) and the enrollment in our publicly-funded, but privately-run charter schools has gone through the roof. So, not exactly a stellar job; in fact, the sort of job that ought to get Henderson and company fired for sheer incompetence. In fact, this is not the only time that DCPS enrollment was roughly stable – that also happened from 1990 to 1996.

My next chart shows the actual year-to-year changes in DCPS K-12 population. A red bar pointing down means that the schools had fewer students that year than they did the year before. A blue bar pointing up shows an increase in students over the previous year.

There was a tiny increase in the fall of 2012 (the current school year), just like there was a tiny increase in the fall of 1992. The largest drop occurred in 1998, when DCPS had a net loss of about 5000 students from the year before. It is madness to pretend that things have been hunky-dory since Rhee and her inexperienced, arrogant, highly-paid management types and consultants arrived in 2007.

In point of fact, what they did is trash the few decent things in DCPS with their own corporate style of autocratic foolishness and hubris. They have fixed exactly none of the problems that parents, teachers and students were complaining about, and they hide any real data like this.

 

It is time to throw them out and go back to a democratically-elected school board and neighborhood schools — to begin with. Yes, lots of changes need to be made, but this crew has not a clue.

 

Even Conservatives Think There Is a Lot of Cheating Going On in DCPS

An article in American Thinker, a conservative rag, shows up Rhee, Henderson et al as corrupt liars, cheaters, and folks who stonewall and cover up the truth.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/m-unsolved_mystery_dc_public_schools_cheating_scandal.html

It’s pretty decent investigative journalism, in fact.

The first few paragraphs from the article:

Unsolved Mystery: D.C. Public Schools Cheating Scandal

By M. Catharine Evans and Ann Kane

The Washington, D.C. school system’s failure to hold higher-ups accountable for their 2008-2010 test cheating scandal has led to more speculation that some are intentionally stonewalling attempts to get at the truth.

According to the Washington Post, D.C. ‘s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), headed by Hosanna Mahaley, issued a December 23 press release after months of dodging Freedom of Information requests by journalists.  In September, a spokesman for OSSE told the Post‘s Jay Mathews that the “data was ready and I would get it after Mahaley returned from a trip to Brazil.”

Mahaley, who was attending a Pearson Foundation conference (one of the largest educational publishers in the nation) in Rio de Janeiro in October, has a reputation for governing in absentia.  For example, OSSE had set up six town hall meetings for November as part of a requirement by the federal government to “engage diverse stakeholders and communities in the development of its request” for a waiver from No Child Left Behind rules.  On the first advertised date, only one person showed up, and that didn’t include anyone from the OSSE.  Subsequent town halls were canceled until the new year.

Sloppy scheduling may be forgivable, but viewing that along with political maneuvers to hide test scores shows a pattern of questionable behavior.

Finally, a day before Christmas Eve, Mahaley’s office responded to inquiries.  But instead of releasing the anticipated erasure data concerning wrong-to-right answers (WTR) for 2011, OSSE announced a “Request for Proposal soliciting vendors to assess and investigate individual classrooms.”  The RFP came after an advisory committee of “national experts” convened to determine the best way to deal with test security.

The stall tactics didn’t go over too well, and on December 31, Mahaley’s office publicly released their “DC Comprehensive Assessment System Wrong-to-Right Changes Report” dated July 15, 2011.  The nine-page document indicated that 128 classrooms, 3% of schools tested, had high WTR erasures, down from 253 schools in 2009.  Although CTB/McGraw Hill named the flagged schools and teachers, they were purposely omitted from the OSSE report.

Tamara Reavis, Mahaley’s director of assessments and accountability, stated that erasures “are only one data point to flag classrooms.”  In fairness, an outside firm will be hired to measure the results “in conjunction with other information.” 

Mahaley and Reavis, along with DCPS chiefs and Mayor Gray, seem determined to drag this scandal out.  Why not just produce an in-depth analysis of answer sheet erasures for 2008-2011 and question all of those at the helm?  Why are top D.C. officials still calling for “vendors” to make recommendations for tighter security measures?  Why not rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with?  With the obvious delay tactics and suppression of findings, it appears that the campaign to keep parents, teachers, and journalists in the dark marches on.  Why all the obfuscation when former players like Michelle Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty are no longer in power?  Is the wrongdoing so egregious that it can be quashed only through a monotonous dribs-and-drabs strategy?

Last March, a USA Today investigation showed a huge amount of wrong-to-right answer sheet erasures at more than half of D.C. schools; their inquiry didn’t include charter schools.

Continue reading...

More Evidence on Lies and Deceptions by Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson, and Wayne Ryan

Quite a few interesting articles and documents showing that the so-called ‘reforms’ initiated in Washington, DC public schools under Michelle Rhee were nothing but smoke and mirrors, subsequent to the Frontline special (which was 90% puff and 10% good solid investigative journalism, thwarted by lack of cooperation from most DCPS employees).

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First, Frontline reporter John Merrow gave much more detailed information about what Noyes ES ex-principal Adell Cothorne said. His written report, very much worth reading, is here.

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http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6070

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Second, Cothorne’s own suit against DCPS can be found here, as a pdf. I am posting below a few key paragraphs.

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http://learningmatters.tv/pdfs/cothorne-v-district-of-columbia.pdf

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Third, Jay Mathews has his reaction to the additional information provided by Ms. Cothorne.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/dc-principal-slammed-for-reporting-cheating/2013/01/10/24e7b47a-5ac7-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_blog.html

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Fourth, we have an explanation from Mary Levy on Diane Ravitch’s blog as to why the investigative authorities chose not to do any real investigation at all into the rampant cheating that took place in DCPS to make it appear as if an educational miracle was taking place under the magic spell of Michelle Rhee.

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http://dianeravitch.net/2013/01/10/expert-why-cheating-in-dc-was-never-investigated/

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As promised, here are some selections from  the lawsuit filed by Adell Cothorne, former principal who took over at Noyes and found the rampant cheating there. The alert reader will note that specific individuals are name

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.

Chancellor Henderson Needs to Resign

Peter McPherson wrote this:

Dear Mayor Gray:

It’s been a week since schools chancellor Kaya Henderson announced her proposal to close 20 schools. After two days of council testimony on this issue and seeing her response to those citizen voices, I’ve come to the considered view that Henderson should no longer serve as chancellor. I am asking you to request her resignation and concurrently propose legislation that would end mayoral control of the schools. My request for the former is based on Henderson’s performance. Regarding the later request, I do not think District residents should have to accept a level of disenfranchisement at home comparable to that to which they are subjected by the United State Congress. The District of Columbia Public Schools are run with the same concern for the stakeholders as an 18th-century Russian Czar had for the Serfs. Appealing to the chancellor on any issue has exactly the same quality as making an application to an absolute monarch. I suppose there are some who would tolerate such a form of school governance if it produced an outstanding school system. But by any available measure it has not. The loss of democratic control of a vital public resource such as our schools has not produced a windfall in positive change. It is time to acknowledge that fact and give the schools back to the community they are supposed to serve.

In the five years of mayoral control of the schools the taxpayers of this city have spent billions of dollars on DCPS and taken on substantial public debt to modernize an aging and crumbling inventory of school buildings. What that unprecedented investment in the school system has produced is smaller enrollment, negligible improvement in student performance, astronomically high levels of staff turnover and a cheating scandal for which a satisfactory conclusion has not been provided. Many of these expensively modernized schools are not being fully embraced by the communities they were built to serve. We have a chancellor who was present at the birth of this iteration of DCPS. She is a proud parent of an administrative culture that established itself as judge, operating under the moniker of “accountability.” But that only flows in one direction, namely downward. This is a school system leadership for whom failings entirely rest with others. If student scores don’t rise, it’s because of bad teachers. If schools do not have computers it’s because principals didn’t buy them. If librarians are not performing as expected it’s not because of a dearth of books and other materials. Rather they’re just not giving an adequate return on investment.

Rather than accept responsibility for her inability to articulate plans and strategies that would bolster enrollment at small schools, instead she proposes their closer and make them and communities in which they reside responsible for their failure to thrive.

I think the situation DCPS faces is similar to that of Research in Motion, the Canadian company responsible for the Blackberry phone. Anyone with even a modest awareness of the smartphone industry knows that the Blackberry is in big trouble. RIM is making a play for survival in January by introducing a new generation of their signature device. If DCPS were RIM, it would have chosen to sell the same phone in a different box. And it would have closed the research division responsible for new products. The schools being proposed for closure received $1.7 million in “Proving What’s Possible” grant money. I guess they’ve proved already that nothing for them is possible.

You have asked us to accept a plan from the chancellor of your choice whose only major ideas are both closing schools and the continued pursuit of failed policies. I’m telling you that her plan is a disaster. DCPS is now facing an existential threat, one that is coming from within and without. An organization whose only response to an aggressive, motivated competitor is to retreat is going to fail. You’re on record supporting a competitive model of school choice. That only works if both sides are truly competing. Chancellor Henderson frequently telegraphs the belief that charter schools have the better product. And she is pursuing policies that are guaranteed to produce that result.

The chancellor needs to be replaced and the current governance model abandoned. An new interim chancellor needs to be selected by a broad community group.

Best,

Peter MacPherson
pmacpher@aol.com

(202)315-8155