What Rhee Promised to the Billionaires (Walton, Gates, et al) but Didn’t Deliver

Part Three of Many

Over and over again, Michelle Rhee and her acolytes in the DC public schools (including the now-disgraced former leader, George Parker) promised utterly amazing results to the boards of the Arnold, Broad, Robertson, and Walton Family Foundations would occur, for which DCPS would receive up to $64.5 million to pay for bonuses and a contract that pretty much eliminated any job security for teachers, since principals could use almost any staffing-related excuse to fire almost anybody at the end of a school year, with no recourse unless the teacher could somehow find another job at another school.

I cut-and-pasted here the phrase that occurs, word for word, in the agreement between Rhee and each and every single one of those foundations:

Let me spell that out again, in text form:

“D.C. Public Schools and the D.C. Public Education Fund must verify that D.C. Public Schools is meeting the student achievement outcomes detailed in the ‘Predicted Gains’ document received on February 16, 2010.”

In other words, if they want to keep the money, they are REQUIRED to meet these goals. One would think that if they didn’t meet those goals, then there should be some consequences. Those consequences are spelled out on page 8 of the published PDF:

A lot of fine print, but here is the important part:

“in the event of any material breach of any Grant Agreement or these Grant Terms and Conditions by DCPS, [then the fund that is administering the grant] reserves the right to withhold or withdraw any or all [money] Grants then due or owed, regardless …”

You would think that they would have let the public know whether Rhee et al had met their goals or not, right? Well, I’ve showed so far that out of the two I’ve checked, Rhee & Henderson met neither one, not even close.

You can find the original agreement here.

And here are ALL of the numerical goals again, for your viewing pleasure:

How many of these 78* goals do you think they have actually achieved?

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*I count 16 DCPS growth targets, 48 goals for closing the racial/ethnic achievement gaps on the DC-CAS, 10 specific numerical goals for the NAEP, and 4 goals for being in the top half of all NAEP-TUDA districts by the year 2013.

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The saga so far:

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

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