D.C.'s imperious Rhee itches to wield the ax against teachers

December 3, 9:13 AMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Education Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

 

Michelle Rhee is being watched. As she wrestles the demons of Washington, D.C.’s school system, the flashy chancellor of D.C.’s schools has educators everywhere keeping an eye out to see whose blood ends up being shed.

The update on Rhee in the current Time Magazine is worth checking out. Reporter Amanda Ripley is one conflicted woman. In some ways, she drinks the Kool-Aid – she parrots as gospel a standard list of blasts at our nation’s schools without backup or sourcing (which is supposed to be a journalistic sin), yet you can see that she was pretty appalled by the bloodless yet imperious Rhee after hanging out with her for a while, so it’s no puff piece.

In Rhee's view, the entire key to the problem is bad teachers and the fact that it's too hard to fire them. So she's trying to establish new work rules to eliminate tenure, while simultaneously offending everyone around her so badly that no way is the teachers' union going to work with her.

I'm still fascinated by the fact that Rhee firmly claims to have worked miracles in the second of her total three years of teaching, in the early '90s, by raising the achievement of a Baltimore classroom of low-income, high-need kids. There are no statistics to back her up, and if her former students are stepping forward to declare that she changed their lives, it hasn't made the news. Rhee explains that away by blaming the bad teachers who came after her. Time noted, "Rhee's principal at the time has confirmed the claim," but without naming the supposed principal or using any quotes. What gives?

Does that mean we can all do this on our resumes now -- make sweeping boasts about the miracles we've achieved, with no substantiation? Did I mention the Pulitzer I won, a few years after I finished my Ph.D. at Harvard and performed solo at Carnegie Hall?

The BS factor is water under the bridge, though,  if Rhee succeeds in what Time says she promised: "...to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation."

Addendum regarding Rhee's miracle resume claims: The never-wishy-washy Daily Howler blog -- written by a former Baltimore teacher -- tried to look into those claims. Rhee has asserted that the average test scores of her third-grade class at Baltimore's Harlem Park Elementary rose, under her brilliant tutelage, from 13th percentile to 90th in one year. "Howler" Bob Somerby points out that that increase would be so stupendous that Rhee should have won global acclaim -- while actually, the "confirmation" from her then-principal and a co-worker is more like yeah, the scores went up, and "we were proud" of those kids. Here's what Somerby wrote in July 2007:

“We were proud of the third-graders then?” If those test scores were legit, those third-graders had authored a miracle! The wider world should have been asking: How did this young teacher do it? ... you’d think that Harlem Park Elementary—and its directors from Education Alternatives (EAI)—would have been bruiting this news to the skies. A great deal was riding on Harlem Park’s scores at the time that this would have occurred.

Harlem Park was proud of those kids? Yes, we know—it’s an offhand remark. But it’s puzzling to think that these scores were recorded—and no one bothered to say boo about it. But the archives of the Baltimore Sun suggest that this is what occurred. In 1995, the Sun was covering those EAI schools very closely (to its vast credit)—and no one seems to have said a word about the miracle at Harlem Park.