Exploring Michelle Rhee’s destructive influence over Michigan education reform

I was just reading how some teachers in Seattle were refusing to give standardized tests.

“Teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle say they have voted overwhelmingly to refuse to administer a district-wide standardized test. A statement from Garfield teachers called the test a waste of time and money.

Students in Seattle Public Schools take the standardized Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test up to three times a year, from kindergarten through ninth grade or beyond. Along with many standardized tests required by the state, the school district requires the MAP test as a measure students’ progress in reading and math.”

http://www.kuow.org/post/teachers-seattle-school-refuse-give-standardized-test

Rep. Scott wasn’t just a member of the Michigan House, he was the Republican House Education Committee Chairman. The following is from the Daily Kos.

Education blogger At the Chalk Face has obtained an internal briefing document from Michelle Rhee’s Students First, and makes clear just how extensively Students First collaborated with Michigan Republicans on four education bills targeting teachers, including one limiting collective bargaining. The 30-page PDF is available here.

The crucial take-away is that although Rhee has claimed publicly that eliminating collective bargaining is not her end goal, and although Students First didn’t publicly support Michigan’s bill limiting collective bargaining for teachers, the document leaves no doubt that in fact the organization privately supported the bill, saying:

StudentsFirst did not work directly with the House on the collective bargaining bill and we have not expressed public support for the bill. However, many of the things they included in the bill came from our policy agenda and pave the way for implementing a new eval process, mutual consent and performance based RIFs.

However, even the claim that Students First did not work directly on this bill is contradicted elsewhere. In fact, the discussion of the legislation begins:

“The [Republican House Education Committee chair] Rep. Scott and the House Republicans worked closely with StudentsFirst to develop four* bills.”

Read more:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/23/987681/-Rhee-s-Students-First-collaborated-on-Michigan-bill-limiting-collective-bargaining-for-teachers#

John Merrow of PBS also has a really good, revealing written piece focusing on former Noyes principal Cothorne http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6070

It includes transcripts from unused footage from the Rhee documentary.

she probably identifies as a democrat, which means she is basically a republican.

This is absolutely the best thing I’ve read in ages. This is probably because I agree with everything but also because it’s just awesomely snarky. Can we get this article to go viral? Seriously, this is pure brilliance…it’s pure Maynard!

I think the way it works, Patti, is first you have to share it on Facebook, and then you have to ask your friends to do the same.

Doug Henwood’s latest on Rhee:

http://lbo-news.com/2013/01/07/more-bogosity-from-michelle-rhee/

Mr. Y–awesome! Dick DeVos and I will have something in common after all. Oh wait, that’s not awesome. I will still try it though! At the very least, it will get my “homeschooling rocks!” friends going….

I’ve really been thinking about this for the past couple of hours (I am getting sick and need something to occupy my thoughts). What is her motivation (besides greed/money)? Is there another motivation for her? I am also wondering…if Big Money came to my door right now and offered a huge paycheck would I also turn on my public school roots? I mean seriously, who *does* this? Who goes from being a teacher to being someone who wants rote memorization/standardized testing as the holy grail of all education? How does that transformation happen? (Is it just the big check)?

http://www.rheefirst.com/

Anon, is Venom a band?

Hi Mark: I am surprised it took you this long to discover M. Rhee and her agenda. Yes, all problems could be solved if those lousy, lazy teachers would just buck up and take their students home with them! If only Rhee could get teachers to become priests, nuns, religious, so they could sacrifice even MORE and give up their own lives, their hopes and their own dreams. And be paid nothing for their work, effort and education. Kidding aside, I work for a very large district and I can tell you the pain, struggle and emotional cost teachers, administrators and support staff go through every day–all for their students. It will be a cold day in hell before Rhee acknowledges that not all problems can be fixed in the classroom. We can not make up for parents smoking dope, not being present, being incarcerated, being immature, being too young with too many children. We can not make up for students who have no food, no clothes, no bed to sleep on, no one at home to tell them to go to bed, no one to care for them before and after school hours. We can give out hugs and socks and shoes, but we can never, ever make up for what they do not and are not getting at home. No amount of bullying from Rhee and those like her, will change the daily and nightly realty of students who suffer from poor parenting, violent communities, a depressed economy, and people like Rhee who do not offer support to teachers, but instead, badger, harass, intimidate and and bully.

The Waltons, who own Walmart, are supporters of her work as well.

From its founding in October 2010 through July 2011, the organization raised $7.6 million, the most recent federal tax filings show. Kahlil Byrd, who became president of the group in November, said donors have pledged $150 million by 2016.

Rhee, as the chief executive of StudentsFirst, which employs 124 and is based in Sacramento, earns an annual salary of $61,000, according to federal tax filings.

But she can make almost as much as that through a single speaking engagement. According to Creative Artists Agency, Rhee Enterprises LLC charged $50,000 per speech in 2011 and required first-class travel arrangements, including a chauffeured town car for travel between her appearances and the airport. But a spokeswoman has said that Rhee often reduces that fee for organizations she favors.

StudentsFirst is not required to disclose its backers, but several, including the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, have reported donations to Rhee’s group.

Also:

At least five high-profile employees, all Democrats, resigned from StudentsFirst late last year. According to one source with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the staffers were uncomfortable with some of the bonds Rhee was forging with Republicans.

From John Tierney in the Atlantic:

The dominant regime for the past decade or more has been what is sometimes called accountability-based reform or, by many of its critics, “corporate education reform.” The reforms consist of various initiatives aimed at (among other things): improving schools and educational outcomes by using standardized tests to measure what students are learning; holding schools and teachers accountable (through school closures and teacher pay cuts) when their students are “lagging” on those standardized assessments; controlling classroom instruction and increasing the rigor of school curricula by pushing all states to adopt the same challenging standards via a “Common Core;” and using market-like competitive pressures (through the spread of charter schools and educational voucher programs) to provide public schools with incentives to improve.

Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform initiatives and spending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don’t work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions, disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver “significantly worse” results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new report from the Economic Policy Institute.)

Fueled in part by growing evidence of the reforms’ ill effects and of the reformers’ self-interested motives, the counter-movement is rapidly expanding. Here are some reasons why I predict it will continue to gain strength and gradually lead to the undoing of these market-based education reforms.

It’s what history teaches us to expect. In this country, we lurch back and forth between efforts to professionalize and efforts to infantilize public-school teachers, and have been doing so since the beginning of public schools in America. Neither kind of effort accords teachers much respect. Because teachers are chiefly employed by local governments (unlike doctors or lawyers who are typically employed in private enterprise), there has always been a tendency on the part of some groups of people to try to exert greater central control over teachers, not believing them to be professionals who can be left to do their jobs according to their own judgment. When those skeptics hold sway, the “solutions” they impose favor quantitative/metrics-based “accountability,” top-down management, limitations on teachers’ autonomy, and the substitution of external authority (outside measurers and evaluators) for the expertise of educators themselves. (See William J. Reese’s op-ed piece Sunday on the early history of the “testing wars” in America.)

Education policies based on standardization and uniformity tend to fail. The policy alchemists’ notion that a “Common Core” or standardized curriculum, along with standardized tests, are appropriate measures for “fixing” American education is uninformed by an understanding of history and practice. Twenty-five years ago, two of our wisest scholarly analysts of educational reform, Richard Elmore and Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin, observed, based on their study of education reforms over the decades: “Reforms succeed to the degree that they adapt to and capitalize upon variability [from school to school and classroom to classroom]. . . . Policies that aim to reduce variability by reducing teacher discretion not only preclude learning from situational adaptation to policy goals, they also can impede effective teaching.” Today’s corporate reformers are flying in the face of experience.

Policies based on distrust of teachers tend to fail. The current crop of reformers also roundly ignored another fundamental principle laid down years ago by Elmore and McLaughlin on the basis of their exhaustive research: policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. Why? “The fate of the reforms ultimately depends on those who are the object of distrust.” In other words, educational reforms need teachers’ buy-in, trust, and cooperation to succeed; “reforms” that kick teachers in the teeth are never going to succeed. Moreover, education policies crafted without teacher involvement are bound to be wrongheaded. When the architects of the Common Core largely excluded teachers from involvement in its development, they simultaneously guaranteed its untrustworthiness and its ultimate failure.

Judging teachers’ performance by students’ test scores is both substantively and procedurally flawed. A teacher’s instruction matters in student performance, but too many other things (a student’s socioeconomic background, upbringing, parental involvement, motivation) also matter for students’ test scores to be a reasonable indicator of a teacher’s merit. As The Nation magazine reported in 2011: “The research consensus has been clear and unchanging for more than a decade: at most, teaching accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes, while socioeconomic factors account for about 60 percent.”

Moreover, using students’ test scores for such judgments is poor policy from a procedural standpoint. The news reports in recent weeks that teachers and administrators in various jurisdictions (Atlanta and Washington, DC, for example) have cheated by manipulating test scores carry a powerful message, but not the one many observers may first think. The message is not that educators are venal or mendacious, but that rewarding or punishing teachers based on students’ test scores is a fundamentally flawed process that fails to take into account Campbell’s Law, one of the best-known maxims in the literature on organizational behavior: if you impose external quantitative measurements to judge work performance that cannot be easily and clearly measured, all you will achieve is a displacement of goals — in this case, some teachers and administrators will be more concerned with maximizing scores (even through cheating) than with helping kids learn.

More people are realizing that many of the organizations involved in “corporate reform” seem to need reforming themselves. A great irony of the corporate reform agenda is that the mission to bring business-like accountability and efficiency to public education has been hampered in part by the colossal incompetence of some of the companies involved. A good example is Pearson, which calls itself “the world’s leading education company,” a slogan which, if true, should give all of us great pause. This big testing company, like its testing-industry competitors, has been screwing up over and over again for more than a decade now, with news of its most recent colossal mistake coming just this past week. Moreover, despite their screw-ups, these companies are enriching themselves and their executives from taxpayers’ dollars – Pearson’s pre-tax profits soaring by 72 percent in 2011. And in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up vein, we got the news in the last few days that Pearson is allowing embedded plugs for commercial products (LEGO and Mug Root Beer, anyone?) in the exams for which taxpayers are footing the bill. No wonder growing numbers of people are rebelling against the intrusion into public education of the sort of gross commercial greed and incompetence the testing-industry represents. (If you want to read a detailed and damning appraisal of the secretive and error-ridden testing business, read this 2003 report by Kathleen Rhoades and George Madaus of Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.)

People wonder why reformers themselves aren’t held accountable. Accountability is a central tenet of the market-based reforms. So people naturally find it disturbing when the architects and advocates of the reforms elude accountability for wrongdoing they knew about. To be more pointed, it’s fair to say that the behavior of Michelle Rhee, the former DC school commissioner who was once the darling of the reform movement, has done genuine harm to her cause by countenancing or ignoring the misbehavior on her watch.

Read more:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-coming-revolution-in-public-education/275163/

Michelle Rhee is at the Mackinac Conference right now, according to Michigan Radio, helping to guide Governor Snyder as he–check this out–seeks to have the Educational Achievement Authority be completely funded ($100 million, of which $60 million is now pledged) and run by private “stakeholders.”

Researchers find an interesting between Rhee’s work and the over-prescription of ADHD drugs.

There has been a lot of public agonizing lately about the steep rise in diagnoses of ADHD over the last two decades. There is growing, and justifiable, worry that a lot of kids are being put on stimulant medications who don’t need them.

What there hasn’t been is a plausible theory about what’s driving this explosion of diagnoses — 40 percent over the last decade and more than 50 percent over 25 years. The CDC now estimates that 12 percent of school age kids, and as many as 20 percent of teenage boys have been diagnosed with ADHD.

Blame has been directed at parents, for being so poor at discipline that they reach for a pill to make unruly kids settle down. Teachers are blamed for being so inept at maintaining order that they want students medicated into submission. Psychiatrists are blamed for being the pawns of drug companies peddling ADHD meds. But blaming doesn’t explain it. It’s not credible that an increase of this magnitude comes from individual parents, teachers and doctors suddenly pathologizing ordinary child and adolescent behavior. In my experience, most parents are quite reluctant to put their kids on psychotropic medication unless they’re in serious distress.

Now comes a book that, finally, offers a data-based analysis that could begin to account for an increase on this scale. “The ADHD Explosion [2],“ by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, considers all kinds of factors that may contribute to the surge, from diagnosis by undertrained and harried pediatricians to pharmaceutical advertising. But the eye-opening insight from Hinshaw, a clinical psychologist, and Schleffler, a health economist, who are colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, is the correlation between educational policies and the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses.

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, [3] Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies.

“We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers — how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region — or the ways states supplement Medicaid,” explains Hinshaw. “It might have to do with advertising. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?”

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

Read more:
http://www.alternet.org/education/disturbing-link-between-adhd-and-conservative-education-reform

Michelle Rhee, dubbed ‘Public Enemy No. 1′ of the teachers’ unions is eyed by Trump team for Education Secretary

The Donald Trump transition team is eyeing former Washington, D.C. public school chancellor Michelle Rhee for Secretary of Education, multiple sources close to the transition tell the Daily Mail.

The appointment of Rhee – who has been dubbed ‘Public Enemy No. 1′ of the teachers’ unions — would be a bold move by the Trump team, and a signal that his administration is gearing up to take an aggressive stance on education reform.

It would also cut across partisan lines. Rhee is a lifelong Democrat, and a proponent of Common Core, a set of federal education standards that is opposed by many conservatives and Donald Trump.

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3939586/Woman-dubbed-Public-Enemy-No-1-teachers-unions-eyed-Trump-team-Education-Secretary.html