Reactions to John Merrow’s recent piece on E.D. Hirsch

It is an odd mixture, but I hope you will glance at the short post, on the occasion of Don’s 85th birthday.

Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/Yr6hEI

Thanks,

John

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Thanks for this, John.

I have very mixed reactions to EDHirsch — not all necessarily at the same time.

About a decade or so, I thought EDH was just plain wrong, but decided I should read what he had to say, so I did just that. It was a painful experience, but I had to admit he made a lot of very convincing points. I wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Post about that time, in an article that was mostly critical of what I saw a poorly-thought-out and clearly never-tried out math curriculum  that was being foisted on the students of DC by administrators who had no clue. I think I concluded by endorsing his effort over what was being tried in DCPS at the time – long before charter schools started spreading like fungus or mushrooms.

In any case, my opinion is that Hirsch is worth reading, but he’s a very powerful, logical, and persuasive writer, and if you immerse yourself in his work without having time to discuss it with friends or acquaintances or colleagues or students, you may find yourself being won over by Hirsch, simply because you were unable to argue back with actual data and facts (not just rhetoric). Some of what he argues is correct, but I disagree with him that it is really possible to come up with a single, standard curriculum for everyone, and I also think that a number of educational experiments that he condemns as utter, outright failures have actually been successful at times.

(I should go back and look at my copy and see if I write any comments in the margin. )

In any case, if I had it to do today, I would probably withdraw the endorsement I made at the time, unless I had a chance to visit one of the Core Knowledge schools myself and see how they do it. CK schools may not be perfect, and probably wouldn’t suit me or my wife or my kids, but it might be a pretty good.way of teaching that doesn’t do too much harm, and produces some good results. It seems from your piece, John, that the CK model seems to be working at the schools you visited, and seems well-organized and providing a reasonable education.

Which is about the best one can hope for!

We are not all going to agree  on one and only one perfect way of raising or educating children. Disagreements on what should be emphasized and what should be discouraged are part of what make us human.

That’s fine.

However, what’s not fine is to cheat and abuse kids, and, unfortunately, that’s happening a lot. It should not be the case that the children of the rich and near-rich get an excellent education, with small classes, teachers who aren’t being micro-managed, and lots of ‘extras’ like art, music, sports, drama, and project, but the children of the poor and near-poor, particularly but not exclusively minorities, get a lousy one. Irony of ironies, those ‘extras’ are being removed from the education of those poor students — in the name of improving it! Influential “reformers” like Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg say it’s a wonderful idea to have 50 to 100 students in a room with a single, inexperienced and untrained teacher who has no plans to stick around in the teaching profession. What planet do these nuts come from? Have they ever taught a class themselves?

Oh. They never have. That explains a lot. Neither did Arne Duncan.

Unfortunately, it appears from the objective facts that a good number of organizations that claim to be all for the children seem to be mostly focused on increasing profits for a tiny handful of corporate billionaires, following some arbitrary educational philosophy that has exactly ZERO experimental support and which has FAILED to achieve any of the miraculous results they boasted they would achieve, not even raising test scores. In other words, kind of like latterday, educational snake-oil salesmen, and what they are proposing is quite demonstrably NOT WORKING. If you want examples, look at my blog as well of those by Valerie Strauss, Diane Ravitch, EduShyster, and anybody else we point to on our blogs.

And one of their biggest pitch-ladies, Michelle Rhee, who actually did teach for a while in Baltimore, has been proven to be a serial fabricator of facts. Or, in plain English, a big fat liar, as I and you, John, and many other people have repeatedly shown. Every claim Rhee made about her supposed successes in Baltimore are demonstrably false. (Whether she ate a bee or not, I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I don’t put E.D.Hirsch into that category of Rhee-ly big liars, because I have no evidence of any phoniness or fraudulence on his part. (Then again, I haven’t looked. Has anyone?)

But I have one big question, the answer to which I have no clue, again because I’ve never looked:

What kind of attrition rates for cohorts are there at the schools modeled by EDH? 

(That’s an enormous indictment of even the highest-flying charter schools: they find that they have the exact same difficulty that the regular, urban public schools (RUPS) have been increasingly unable to solve: RUPS are forbidden from expelling, suspending, or otherwise sanctioning in any way the most difficult-to-handle, violent, mentally disturbed students. Teachers have in fact been disarmed of the weapons they need in the classroom: the promise that if a student is seriously disruptive, the student will be removed by another adult and will face very unpleasant consequences that the kid and his/her family actually care about, up to and including removal to another institution that’s much less free. There is absolutely no disciplinary support behind teachers in most non-magnet public schools. And, sorry, NRA, a teacher carrying a gun is the absolutely worst solution I can think of for this problem. I mean, a teacher is ALWAYS considered to be in the wrong if he/she happens to come into any physical contact whatsoever with a student – whether to straighten a collar, remove a “kick me” sign from the back of an unsuspecting patsy, congratulating a student with a pat on the back or head, god-forbid! actually hugging a student for ANY reason, or trying to stop a fight. I know of a number of cases just like this, and could give you lots of details if you cared to listen for a few hours. What the charter schools DO have, and here in DC they use it liberallty, is the right to get rid of students. They have many subtle and not-so-subtle ways of doing it; if public schools could do it, they would be a lot more orderly than they are today. It’s quite difficult to manage a class with just one or two out-of-control students when you have neither administrative nor family support. I honestly assure you that this happens in many public schools and also in some charter schools I have visited.)

So, if a charter or alternative school claims that they are achieving superior results in test scores and attendance and graduation and college acceptance rates, in comparison with the exact same population that’s in the regular public schools, they are simply lying. For one thing, you have to look at the attrition rates. I know a little bit about my few  strengths and many weaknesses as a teacher over my 30 years teaching in public schools in DC. You may find it hard to believe that a lot of my students actually went on to college, even Ivy League in a number of cases I know about — and some went on to jail. Some went on to productive lives doing all sorts of things. Most, of course, I have no idea, but I do run across some of them from time to time.

 

Guess what, no surprises: a strong correlation between family income & education on the one hand and student achievement on the other. (Academic achievement and actual smarts for life are two different things: many of my kids were way smarter than I was at many things — some that I know of even ended up doing much more mathematics or sciences than I ever did, at much deeper levels, so that I can’t follow what they are doing at all. Others were soooo good at emotionally manipulating a situation in ways I seldom could anticipate.

 

Teaching in south Anacostia (DC) is quite different from teaching in Chevy Chase (DC) – and that was as true 35 years ago when I started as it is today. You don’t think I tried to overcome that? I did, I tried as hard as I possibly could, and I failed.

We’ve all failed. Nobody has won.

Yet.

Any “reformer” who claims that the gap has been overcome that gap is probably referring to a charter or private school where the truly emotionally disturbed kids, the ones most affected by what it means to be poor and black or Hispanic in America, the violent and disruptive crazies, have been either made to shape up or ship out. Or never entered in the first place.

We in the public schools have lost the “ship out” solution.

Why? Is it the intention of the today’s ruling class — as publicly advocated by wingnuts like Jerry Fallwell — that the public schools must fail?

——————–

To restate my question, what in fact do they do at Core Knowledge schools about the attrition problem?

Guy Brandenburg, Washington, DC 

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/


http://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html

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From: John Merrow <jmerrow@learningmatters.tv>
To: John Merrow <jmerrow@learningmatters.tv>
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:26 PM
Subject: Some thoughts about E.D. Hirsch, Jr and the randomness of life–an odd mixture

It is an odd mixture, but I hope you will glance at the short post, on the occasion of Don’s 85th birthday.

Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/Yr6hEI

Thanks,

John

John Merrow

Education Correspondent,

PBS NewsHour, and President,

Learning Matters, Inc.

My blog:

http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/

The Influence of Teachers:

http://amzn.to/qLS7JT

Follow Learning Matters:

http://learningmatters.tv/the-latest/

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:

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

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

 

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’.

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.

 

What Teachers Need To Do — or, rather, What Traitors Have Led the DC Teachers

I would like to commend Diane Ravitch on an excellent post on why teachers in Philadelphia need to organize and go on strike. She refers to a local Philly opinion piece: a  column that explains in detail why they should do that.

The big question then becomes HOW do you do that. Hopefully the Philly teachers have gotten rid of any corrupt, sellout union leaders like we’ve been plagued with here in DC. That’s what the teachers in Chicago had to do in order to organize the strike that took place there.

I say that concerning DC because, of our last two teacher union presidents of my local, WTULocal6,

(1) even though she sometimes talked a good game, Barbara Bullock confessed to stealing somewhere near five million dollars from US TEACHERS right from under our noses, partly by verbally abusing anybody who crossed her in any way. I saw her do it, and I’m sure she also browbeat Esther Hankerson, who was my colleague at Francis and at Deal JHS and was #2 in the WTU leadership under BB…  Bullock was only sentenced to a few years in jail, and is now free. I’d be surprised if even 10% of the stolen money was ever recovered.

Funny how embezzlers and corporate thieves get off easy, especially in comparison with those caught with certain drugs…. Think of the Enron thieves and Michael Milken (he’s out!) and then read the book by Michelle Alexander and you’ll see how the ‘War on Drugs’ is essentially acting like the Jim Crow laws (read “Slavery by Another Name”).

I regret now that,  like many others, I did not notice BB’s corruption, and I also regret not making a public, principled protest when I found how she was maneuvering not to have monthly membership meetings — ones that might have helped hold her to account. I sat on labor-management contract negotiation committees as a rank-and-file presence during the arduous process of hammering out a new contract between the Board of Education and Superintendent of schools (and their lawyers and the city council and mayor as well) on the one hand, and the Washington Teachers’ Union on the other, around 2000-1.

 

You may ask, how did I not notice she was stealing? Very simple: I don’t follow women’s fashion at all — I try my best not to look at my wife’s fashion magazines (except for some of the really cute models, to be honest) and don’t pay any attention to labels. I get my clothes from Costco, Filene’s, sales, discount catalogs like Sierra Trading Post, and whatever my family members get me. The other two teachers and I were by far the worst-drerssed people in the rooms whenever we had negotiations — you know that all of the lawyers and bureaucrats negotiating for the Board of Ed (few of whom had ever taught) were dressed to the nines every single day. Personally, I just thought that Bullock wore really ugly, loose-fitting clothes because she was overweight; I also just thought she really liked her to-me-unfashionable long wispy hair and pocketbooks that looked funny to me, too.

 

Later on, after BB was convicted and went to jail, I ran into the other two rank-and-file classroom teachers who were on the negotiating team with me that year and asked them if they had any inkling of the monies that BB was stealing. We all had the same reaction. None of us any idea that all that ugly stuff was worth all that money. Stupid me, I had no idea she had not one but many, many expensive, wigs — all of them ugly (in our opinions). I saw a whole bunch of white-elephant figurines on her desk once, and made a comment that those looked like Republican symbols. Apparently that’s her college sorority’s symbol. (Why does anybody need dozens of them, all different?)

But that’s apparently what she and her crony Henderson spent their ill-gotten cash on, that they stole from me and my colleagues: kitchy tchotchkes.

 

We definitely agreed that she was an amazingly good negotiator. But despite that, Barbara Bullock’s betrayal make all teachers look stupid and criminal.

In my opinion, the fact that BB and her closest associates were so publicly corrupt, (convictions and confessions, not just allegations, remember) had a HUGE negative effect, nationally.

That betrayal demoralized teachers and friends of labor everywhere. It also emboldened the billionaires, Wall Street crooks like Milken, the Koch Brothers, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, the Amway family, hedge-fund traders,  right-wingers and religious fundies and assorted eduShysters who want to divert funding for public education for the poor into their own bank accounts, even though they say the exact opposite.

It’s the results that count.

Their first attack is on the teachers, and boy have they been busy at it for the past 6-7 years. And you know something — the same group of edudeformers are the same group that invented the PLATINUM parachute for themselves and the sub-minimum-wage job with no benefits, difficult-to-impossible transportation at crazy hours, no job security at all, and the balloon mortgage on your house that you put all your savings into. They are also the ones that brought you the fact that after all those years in college and/or grad school, you’re still an unpaid intern working part-time at a bunch of demeaning jobs, and you can’t pay off all those student loans, and if you declare bankruptcy, the one debt you can NEVER write off even a portion of, is your student loan. Even though it those loans were often supposedly guaranteed by the gummint. (You didn’t read all the fine print! ) And brought us banks that failed and economies that have huge fractions of unemployed, all around the world. While the One-tenth of one percent is more wealthy than any ruling class any time, any where, in history.

In places like Pakistan and other third-world countries, workers are  burned alive or otherwise killed. Here in the US, more and more workers long for the good old days when they only had to work 40 hours a week, had health and other benefits, paid vacations, a decent, fully-funded pension plan, and the right to have elections for their own union representation who could speak for them if case they had a disagreement with their boss. For many of us, those things, like the weekend, are things of the past. If you only want to work 40 hours a week and expect overtime for anything more than that, you’re a ‘moocher’. If you want a guaranteed pension and a freely-elected local union and paid health care, you’re a “lazy union thug”.

But if you are a billionaire who never worked a day of actual hard labor in your life, who simply managed to find all the loopholes to squeeze large amounts of money from every working person out there because you run a near-monopoly or have figured out how to disassemble companies and fire workers and dispossess homeowners to rake obscene profits, well, then you’re an outstanding visionary. Who can tell the teachers what to do, in detail.

 (2) And then remember her successor, George Parker? Once he lost the following local union election, he literally went over to the enemy!

Just think of it–the person who during election campaigns claimed that he would defend the interests of teachers, students and parents, actually went to work for Michelle Rhee’s astroturf-funded organization, RheeFirst. Sorry, “Students First”, which is doing everything it can to break teacher unions, degrade teaching into a part-time, non-professional job in every low-income public school whose sole responsibility is to read from a script, give out and collect standardized tests every single week that were written by other low-paid temps, and — don’t forget — work miracles on a 95-hour workweek with no benefits. Yeah, our past union president went to work for arguably the most anti-public-sector “Edu-DEform” organization out there – funded by the worst of the worst billionaires.

 When the last contract came up for a vote, it was very difficult for teachers to see how much it differed from previous contracts. In the past, we got to see the old contract printed with the parts that were changing being very carefully annotated, which is as it should be. Contract language that was being retained would be in an ordinary font. Sentences, words, letters and paragraphs that were being deleted were written like this with crossouts. New contract language was in bold-face.

However, this time, none of that clarity. Teachers got a copy of the new contract, and only someone who had as much undivided time as a lawyer could possibly go over the two contracts line by line to see what we teachers had given up. Time, of course, is one of the things that a teacher does NOT have.  Even I, a retired teacher, didn’t have time to analyze the changes in the short amount of time we had.

This last WTU-DCPS contract, which for the first time brought in special, poisoned bonuses that were paid for by some billionaires for just a couple of years, at the same time that the schools were imiplementing – without any field testing whatsoevber – a radically new evaluation system largely based on mindless following of a single teaching model and a random-number generator called “Value Addicted”, was a real game-changer all over the nation.

Apparently Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, and George Parker colluded on this contract — and it really sucks. It was a real step backwards for the labor movement.

Benedict Arnold, traitor to the new American republic >200 years ago, George Parker, traitor to teachers much more recently.

 Philly teachers, I hope you are successful in organizing. Be aware that there are many, many folks all over the country who do not believe the stories being peddled by the billionaires and their paid mouthpieces like Michelle Rhee. If you organize well, you can win.

Good luck and timing wouldn’t hurt, either. I wish you the best.

 

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?

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...

Some Legacy. Some Editorial.

The Washington Post has essentially reprinted a press release from Kaya Henderson and published it as an editorial. A reader asked me how I respond to it.

First, I would point people to the responses of John Merrow and other Frontline correspondents and editors, which you can read here or here and here.

I would also add this:

That editorial is despicable in its pretense of honesty and objectivity. The DC Inspector General and Henderson and Rhee and the WaPo editorial board and WaPo owners (a large educational profiteer, Kaplan) are determined not to see any cheating.

Therefore they refuse to have any serious statistical analysis of the erased scores. They refuse to do any investigation of SY 2007-8 scores, which were the most suspicious of all. They interview one person every 10 days, putting nobody under oath. They refuse to answer questions. They promote and praise one of the most egregious offenders, Wayne Ryan; but shortly after the USAToday reports are printed, Ryan suddenly disappears from sight.

I myself have many times demonstrated on this blog the fact that DC scores on the NAEP have shown no real change in patterns since the 1990s (the math scores continue a steady rise, but reading scores have been flat for a long time. Not sure why.) — LONG before Michelle Rhee came to rule DCPS.

There was no miracle jump in those NAEP scores when Michelle Rhee was anointed our chancellor. There was, however, a marked increase in the width of the gap between scores of affluent kids and poor ones; and between white kids and black kids. What we have in DC is by far, the worst such gap of any US state or of any city for which we have data.

Some legacy.

John Merrow also replies to a friend of Michelle Rhee

One of the tiny handful of DC parents who are deceived by Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson wrote another attack on the credibility of the good section of John Merrow’s PBS special on Rhee. It reads like a press release from Henderson’s office. Here is Merrow’s response:

Here’s PBS’s John Merrow’s Response

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to your open letter to the PBS Ombudsman. Let me begin by addressing the timing of the statement by the USDE Inspector General. It was released just hours before our national broadcast, and it was only then that Frontline learned of Adell Cothorne’s legal complaint, which had been sealed from public view until it was released by the IG. Although it was too late to include this information in the body of the film, Frontline made extraordinary efforts to include detailed information about the USDE IG’s statement and Cothorne’s filing, and included links to documents in the coda to the film and on its web site.

While we had heard rumors of an investigation by the USDE IG, we were unable to confirm them and could not identify any DC educators who had been interviewed by the USDE IG. We understand now that she [the USDE IG] did her work ‘in tandem’ with the DC Inspector General.

You write ” . . . on six exams administered since allegations of cheating were raised, DC students continued to show steady progress rather than a system wide drop off as you would expect under increased testing security.” I would make two important points. First, the relevant comparison is not to the entire system but to the schools which were flagged for high erasure rates. If one examines the data for the 16 schools with erasure rates of 50% or higher, it is clear that heightened security had a significant impact.

The DC-CAS scores at Noyes, where 81% of classrooms were flagged for high erasures, are themselves circumstantial evidence that supports Cothorne’s allegation. Below are the Noyes DC-CAS scores over five years; 2011 represents the year that security was tightened.

	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Reading	44.14%	61.53	84.21	61.36	32.40
Math	34.24%	57.69	62.79	53.64	28.17

 

 That represents a drop of nearly 50 points in reading between 2009 and 2011, and a drop of roughly 34 points in math. Note also that in 2011 Noyes students were scoring belowtheir pre-Rhee level.

In all, data are available for 16 schools with erasure rates of at least 50%. DC-CAS reading scores rose in only two schools after security was tightened. Math scores rose in just 4 schools and declined in 12.

Here are three examples:

* At Aiton, (which, like Noyes, had been awarded large cash bonuses) scores in reading dropped from 58.43% proficient to 20.80%, well below pre-Rhee levels. In math, Aiton dropped from 57.87% to 16%, which is also below pre-Rhee levels.

* Raymond also received large bonuses from the Chancellor. Its scores in reading fell from 70% to 42.44%, and its math scores fell from 68% to 45.71%. The reading score is below pre-Rhee levels.

* Savoy went from 46.51% to 20.39% in reading and from 38.37% to 15.38% in math, also well below pre-Rhee levels.

Second, you reference ‘steady progress,’ and it is true that the DC-CAS scores have shown very slow but steady growth (a point made by Rhee in her final interview and shown in our film). That change is credible and consistent with what students of measurement say can be expected in schools that are making progress. However, hugegains and losses are greeted, quite properly, with skepticism by experts, although not by Rhee or her team.

Moreover, as noted in the film, DC schools continue to rank among the worst districts in the nation and have the absolute lowest graduation rate in the US.

The co-investigator of the cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia (where investigators had subpoena power and put those testifying under oath) told Frontline that they considered wrong-to-right erasures at a rate of three or more standard deviations away from the norm to be prima facie evidence of cheating. In some classrooms at Noyes, the rate was five or more standard deviations away from the norm, and yet this did not trigger an in-depth investigation.

‘In depth’ would mean erasure analysis and a search for patterns. This can reveal if the person doing the erasing corrected the easier questions or the more difficult ones. If the latter, that raises questions.

No erasure analysis was conducted by Caveon or the DC Inspector General or requested by Rhee.

You write: “Frontline implies that the DC Inspector General’s investigation was not credible and relies on Cothorne’s testimony to substantiate this point.” That is incorrect. We examined the IG Report carefully and reported the facts. Which are: The DC IG report did not examine DC-CAS results during Rhee’s first year, the year with the greatest number of erasures. He did not perform erasure analysis. He did not interview Cothorne. Individuals who spoke with him were not under oath. His report cites one instance where he heard conflicting testimony and simply accepted the word of one individual and rejected the other’s, but he provides no support for that decision. During his 17-month investigation he interviewed just over 50 people. 17 months is approximately 515 days, meaning that he interviewed, on average, one person every 10 days.

He did not examine other schools. In fact, the IG acknowledges that he eliminated one school, Wilson, because the current Chancellor convinced him that Wilson faculty and staff were working hard. However, Wilson’s scores dropped 19% in reading and 23% in math between 2009 and 2011, and 100% of its classrooms had been flagged for high erasures.

We requested an interview with the DC IG to discuss his report, including Cothorne’s charges, but that request was rebuffed.

After interviewing Cothorne, Frontline also attempted to interview Chancellor Rhee. It is accepted form in journalism for the subject of a program to be given ‘the last word,’ a final opportunity to respond to what others have said, and we wanted that to be the case in this instance. We negotiated with Rhee’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, who insisted on seeing written questions that we would be asking. Frontline submitted a number of written questions, which we will not release because they include references to other allegations not made public. Weingarten had indicated that Rhee would respond in writing and, at the same time, consider an on-camera interview. In fact, she did not respond in any way.

Frontline stands by the program, and I stand by what I wrote in Taking Note, my blog.

Frontline counters lies from Kaya Henderson

You’ve probably heard Kaya Henderson’s attempts to discredit Adell Cothone and John Merrow of Frontline. Let me reprint here what Frontline replied:

Response from Frontline’s Phil Bennett

In her statement, DC Public School Chancellor Kaya Henderson asserts: “PBS did not give DCPS the opportunity to respond to these specific allegations. PBS contacted DCPS about doing a documentary on education reform, but did not share any allegations of impropriety or offer DCPS the opportunity to refute any claims.”

This statement is misleading. FRONTLINE made repeated interview requests to current and former DCPS officials including Chancellor Henderson to discuss allegations of cheating — including the 2011 report by USA Today. In response to an email request for an interview, Henderson wrote to our correspondent, John Merrow, “I would prefer not to be interviewed further for your documentary.” It is unclear why Henderson wrote “further” since an earlier introductory phone call from Merrow was not an on-the-record interview. Merrow and Producer Michael Joseloff sought responses to Cothorne’s allegations from the DC Inspector General, who investigated allegations at the Noyes Education Campus (but did not interview Cothorne), and repeatedly from Wayne Ryan, Cothorne’s predecessor at Noyes and later her supervisor when he moved to the DCPS central office. Neither would agree to an interview. FRONTLINE also asked Michelle Rhee for a final interview after we had learned of Cothorne’s charges. She declined to answer a list of questions that we submitted in writing. We did not return to Henderson with a list of specific allegations after she declined our interview request. One reason for this was that the practices that Cothorne says she discovered at Noyes took root during Rhee’s tenure, not Henderson’s.

It is disingenuous for DCPS officials to suggest that they were blindsided by allegations of cheating at Noyes. They were given multiple opportunities to talk with us, and refused. Rather than address the serious questions raised by the film, many of them beyond the alleged cheating scandal, Chancellor Henderson chose to attack the messenger.

As for the question of whether Cothorne was interviewed by investigators twice, as Henderson asserts, we reported in the film that the DC Inspector General did not interview Cothorne about alleged cheating at Noyes, even though she was the principal of the school. This is accurate — neither DSPC nor the IG has challenged our reporting on this point. This is significant because DCPS cites the IG investigation as the most recent and thorough report on the allegations. We did not address in the film whether Cothorne was questioned by Caveon. When we interviewed Cothorne on camera, she told us she had not been interviewed by Caveon about the 2010 DC CAS (Comprehensive Assessment Test). On the morning of the broadcast, she told us that she had misspoken. She said then that she had been interviewed by Caveon, but was asked only about test security procedures and not cheating. She told us that she had not volunteered her charges of cheating because she feared retaliation. She told us that she had later reported her concerns to DCPS and was called to meet with a “higher up” (her whistleblower lawsuit indicates it was Wayne Ryan) prior to the Caveon interview and was warned off of the subject.

We do not know what Henderson is referring to when she says Cothorne was interviewed “twice by an independent investigator.” According to USA Today, Caveon’s interviews at Noyes about the 2009 DC CAS took place on Jan. 29 and Feb. 10, 2010. Cothorne did not become principal until July 2010.

On this subject, as with the film overall, we absolutely stand by the story we presented to viewers. “The Education of Michelle Rhee” is an exhaustively fair, thorough and accurate treatment of a tumultuous period in the DC public schools, the influence of which continues to be felt not just in classrooms in Washington but in the critically important national debate about the future of education.