These two need to be stopped.

Adrian Fenty, who apparently thought that running a school system boiled down to slapping paint on walls and hiring incompetent, unprepared managers, and Michelle Rhee, who has no idea how to manage a large organization, must be stopped. In their latest move to mask their sheer ignorance of education, Rhee and Fenty are seeking to declare a "state of emergency" in the DC public schools. Now, in a "yes we're all concerned" kind of way, DCPS has been in a state of emergency, but in a technical, as in "declare martial law, suspend laws, shoot to kill" kind of way, no such state of emergency exists.

These two must be stopped.

I argued this publicly and privately to anyone who would listen when the school takeover was being floated and Rhee was handed the reins: this maneuver [the takeover] had nothing to do with improving DCPS and everything to do with dismantling the teacher union and outsourcing -- essentially privatizing -- public education. With every move Michelle Rhee has made, I've only grown more confident in that prediction. [as a side note, I suppose when I use "incompetent" in relation to Michelle Rhee, then I'm taking at face value her claims to want to improve the system -- I think she's a tremendously competent tool of the think-tanks and foundations that want to dismantle public education in the US, but a terribly incompetent manager.]

Now comes this bizarre move, where she and Fenty seek to invoke the same sort of emergency activity that New Orleans used after Hurricane Katrina. Under the Bush regime, neocons and neolibs alike looked to the "state of emergency" conditions to suspend ordinary regulations that sought to protect workers and turned the New Orleans rebuilding effort into a giant laissez faire showplace of corruption and thievery. Let me be clear: privatization in most of these contexts means taking public money and handing it over to cronies in the private sector, often giving far more for far less and with no oversight or accountability.

If adopted, the measures would essentially allow the District to begin building a new school system. Such an effort would be similar to one underway in New Orleans, where a state takeover after Hurricane Katrina placed most of the city's 78 public schools in a special Recovery School District. About half of the district's schools are
charters, and it has no union contract.

Unfortunately for Rhee and Fenty, DC apparently hasn't suffered any major natural disaster like a hurricane, earthquake, or flood (although I might make the argument that Rhee's tenure has been an man-made disaster, maybe like an act of terrorism...though that's a bit harsh isn't it?), and I doubt Barack Obama's administration will be as friendly as Bush's was to undermining public education.

Teacher unions aren't the problem. Bad management is the problem. Critically underfunding local school in-classroom and enrichment activities is the problem. Utterly mismanaging facilities is the problem.

Yes, there are bad teachers out there, just like there are bad co-workers at most offices in the private sector, but anyone who thinks the solution to DCPS is to dismantle the teachers union is falling for the old bait and switch. Destroying the teachers union does nothing to improve education but it goes a long way toward satisfying the anti-government forces whose ultimate goal is to undo government support for education.

For years -- long before Rhee rode into town -- DCPS's problem has been a lack of good management at the top. That lack has resulted in crumbling facilities and moronic curriculum decisions that treat phys ed, art, and music as luxuries rather than integral components to education (not to mention an administrative attitude that placed little emphasis on keeping track of students and seriously underfunded guidance offices). That's where the problem lies, and until someone addresses that root problem -- the imperial central administration -- DCPS will not improve.

These two must be stopped.

It's good to be Queen.

When will DC Council get it through their heads that when you are Queen, you don't answer summons from the commoners?

I seriously don't understand where DC Council gets off trying to have Chancellor Rhee or Victor Reinoso appear in front of them. They ceded authority when they handed over control of the schools to the mayor, despite all evidence that the mayor and his team (chiefly Victor Reinoso) couldn't even put together their own plan for running a school system. If there's one thing I make sure my freshmen composition students know how to do, it's cite sources, because plagiarism is simply wrong.

This is the same city council that approved the hire of an individual with three years of classroom experience and no education degree to run one of the more high-profile and disfunctional school systems in the country.

Here's Rhee, in her own words, talking to Fast Company, a magazine that was born and should have died extolling the "rule-changing" tech boom:

Rhee has been outspoken about the low value she places on appearing before the council. In the September issue of Fast Company magazine, she described watching council hearings on television: "There's this crazy dynamic where every agency head is kowtowing. They sit there and get beat down. I'm not going to sit on public TV and take a beating I don't deserve. I don't take that crap."

The arrogance is astonishing, but Rhee has taken a calculated gamble that this city council will roll over for her, and so far she's been correct. Her most intense opposition comes from Councilmember Barry, and she correctly dismisses that as non-threatening, since his own credibility is severely compromised in this town. Who will step up and put his or her political capital on the line to stop her?

Vincent Gray? Hmm...does it advance his political aspirations to appear annoyed but in the end not seriously challenge Rhee's lunacy? A: Yes.
Jim Graham? Please...
Kwame Brown? Mr. Brown likes to talk, but that's about it.
Jack Evans? Sure...The Developer's Best Friend has two reasons to let Rhee run amok: her failure reflects poorly on Fenty, therefore increasing his own influence AND his developer backers are dying to get their hands on public property that DCPS controls.
David Catania? No. DCPS and DC's children can all die quietly in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Carol Schwartz? (because she will beat that right-wing Republican as an independent) Possibly, but doubtful.

OK, I'll stop. It's too ludicrous to go into the remaining members (Mendelson, Bowser, Cheh, Alexander, Thomas, Wells). OK, maybe Mendelson, because he has a habit of putting obstacles in the way of steamrollers, but like Barry, he would have trouble garnering support or public interest in his opposition.

Crossroads.

If you're interested in witnessing the beginning of the end of public education in the District, follow closely Michelle "Wrecking Ball" Rhee's so-called "Plan B" as detailed in the Post today. Frustrated that union leadership hasn't rolled over and played dead (for a change), Rhee has made plans to make the union irrelevant through some sort of murky process she's afraid to discuss publicly, or as the Post says,

What she calls "Plan B" involves a more aggressive use of powers she already has and that are not subject to contract negotiations with the union. These could include strengthening the existing system of annual personnel evaluations that spell out procedures for terminating teachers.

Uh huh. Well, I have news for the Post and Rhee: unless this union is entirely brain-dead, personnel evaluations are covered in some way under the contract (read: not necessarily named as such but certainly connected to some procedure that will tie up her machinations in knots). The Post also notes that the state board could gift-wrap Rhee a package including a maneuver that would create an extra licensing procedure based on classroom performance, effectively telling teachers that their current credentials are good enough to teach in all 50 states of America, but not in the colony known as the District of Columbia.

Rhee doesn't need extra-special powers to get rid of bad teachers; she needs good managers. Unfortunately, she doesn't have them and isn't likely to get too many more of them given the fact that not too many of the stellar national candidates whom she claims to be recruiting for principalships bothered to apply to DC, where they're promised one year contracts and the ability to be fired without cause.

I just about laughed out loud when I read this choice tidbit from the article:

Rhee's ultimate goal is clear: to weed the District's instructional corps of underperformers and remake it, at least in part, with younger, highly energized graduates of such alternative training programs as Teach for America, where she began her career. Unlike many tenured Washington teachers, those emerging from such programs are unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education. But they will, in Rhee's estimation, be more inclined to embrace her core message: that children can learn no matter what economic and social conditions they face beyond the classroom, and that teachers should be held directly accountable for their progress through test scores and other measurements.

Laughing to keep from crying as they say. Let me proceed in bullet-point style on the ludicrous arguments and presuppositions put forth here:

• Rhee's ultimate goal is not to staff the District with Teach for America products; that's called a means to an end. The ultimate goal is to break the teachers' union.
• Teach for America grads are no more likely than traditional education majors to be highly energized and motivated fresh out of school. The fact is that most of them burn out -- that's why they're "unlikely to invest their entire working lives in education" (which for Rhee apparently is a bad thing: to think that dedication to craft would be a negative...)
• Most insultingly, Rhee behaves as if veteran teachers and teachers who don't follow her program of "at-will, no cause" majesterial dictation somehow don't believe that all children can learn. In fact, this point is too important for mere bulleting, so I'll elaborate below.

On that third bullet: Rhee has used from her midnight appointment the rhetoric of "all children can learn." Well, no shit. However, in deploying that rhetoric, she is of course implying that her critics don't believe that. Sort of like the Bushism that if you were against the Iraq Boondoggle you were somehow a supporter of Saddam Hussein. It gets even more insidious when she uses it to gloss over the fact that research has held for decades -- decades I tell you -- that social conditions impact learning, or to put it a bit more bluntly: if Johnny spends his afternoons hanging out, his evenings dodging bullets, and his nights watching the late late show, he's less likely to be prepared for Tuesday's spelling quiz. Doesn't mean he can't learn. Doesn't mean he won't learn. However, it does mean he will have more obstacles put in his way than little Jimmy, whose parents work with him on his homework, get him to bed well fed and early, and check up with his teachers (none of which by the way will guarantee little Jimmy is a genius, but odds are he'll do better in school).

Oh, and kids who think Rhee's two-tier system is a good idea...please understand that once the union's gone, you can kiss all those merit bonuses good-bye, because the foundations won't be interested in funding them...Rhee's job will be done...you will have a chance to get reacquainted with Mr. Ramen and have home meals prepared by Chef Boyardee.

Somewhere in Newark, Clifford Janey is smiling.

DCPS has released test scores indicating marked improvement on standardized tests this year. It's great news for a system so maligned that the citizens of DC have given up any sort of representative oversight over it. As expected, Chancellor Rhee and Fenty are trying to take credit for the gains, despite the fact that system-wide education reforms rarely take hold in less than ten months, which is roughly the time between Rhee's taking office and the students' taking the standardized tests. It didn't even bother Rhee that she'd hedged her bets on taking office, claiming that gains wouldn't be seen for three to five years:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said the initial results demonstrate that the approach she used in her first year in office is working. Rhee said previously that she did not think test scores would receive a bump from her initiatives for a few years. [WP]

Well, it could be that scores are receiving a bump because she has introduced no academic initiatives: the curriculum in place -- and to a large extent the methodology -- is a product of Clifford Janey's reign as superintendent, which coincidentally just happens to have begun...umm, September 2004...oh, about 3.5 years before those standardized tests.

As superintendent, Clifford Janey ditched the old curricular standards and adopted some of the toughest in the nation (including the Massachusett's standards...and unlike Victor Reinoso, Janey openly admitted he was using those models); he replaced the old Stanford-9 test with the DC-CAS; and he laid it all out in a "Master Education Plan." That plan is still in place, and Reinoso hasn't had the chance yet to scribble out Janey's name and put his own on it. You can actually still get Janey's plan off the DCPS website.

As the Post article also notes, one possible cause for a jump in scores is that students are getting used to the new test:

In 2006, the number of schools achieving proficiency dropped, which officials and outside experts said then was an expected byproduct of administering the new, more difficult D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS). It replaced the Stanford 9, which used multiple-choice questions and tested students on national standards.

Then-Superintendent Clifford B. Janey introduced the DC-CAS exam, which requires students to give short responses. It was part of an effort to upgrade instruction by aligning testing with new learning standards.

School system officials said yesterday that this year's gains resulted in part from programs that accustom students to the DC-CAS format.

As with most of life, test gains and losses are never cut and dry...you can't standardize life. So it's really distressing to see Chancellor Rhee pretending that her reforms -- which only a month ago she and Fenty were claiming were largely facilities related and had little to do with academics -- are the cause:

"We made every one of those decisions because we felt that this is what was needed to happen . . . so achievement can be maximized. I fully believe we will see the upward trajectory as long as we're making the hard decisions," Rhee said at a news conference at Plummer Elementary School in Southeast Washington, where reading scores jumped 17 percentage points and math by 15. In the 2007 academic year, the reading scores rose by two percentage points and math by six.

"I wasn't expecting to see such large gains early on," Rhee said. "It's a testament to what kids can do. I believe the children in the District of Columbia can achieve at high levels."

I don't know what's worse...the idea that she's trying to equate her "hard decisions" of closing schools and firing high-achieving principals with increased test scores, or her empty platitude about what kids can achieve. I challenge anyone out there to show me a school chief who doesn't throw out some bone about "believing the children can achieve at high levels."

OK, I do know what's worse: it's trying to take credit for results that surprised the hell out of you because you spent the entire length of your tenure so far trying to distance yourself from the test results...in other words, you truly believed scores would be stagnant or just plain lousy.

However, if your goal is simply to improve standardized test scores as opposed to improve the education of children, then you can get a boost from full-time test prep...

The best news of course is that scores have gone up; unfortunately, many of those responsible for such improvements have been fired by Fenty or Rhee.

Another popped seam, another look at the Chancellor's New Clothes

A little while ago, I mentioned the fraud that was the Rhee Regime's slogan of "aggressive national search" for principals for the DC schools. Well, the Post has finally gotten around to looking into the actual data from the recent round of principal pools and has come up with some unsurprising numbers:

About two-thirds of the more than 700 applicants were from the surrounding suburbs or already working for the school system, according to figures provided
by the chancellor's office. It's not a surprising result. The city offers no relocation assistance to principals, according to application information on the D.C. schools Web site. And as "at will" employees, there is no guarantee that a job would last for more than a year.

So the principals class of 2008-09, which officially began work last week, looks decidedly local. Along with Taylor and Jordon, new hires include Terry Dade, a former Fairfax County teacher taking over at Tyler Elementary in Southeast, and Maurice Kennard, an assistant principal at Walker-Jones Elementary in Northwest hired to head the new Francis-Stevens Educational Center in Foggy Bottom, which will offer pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Of course, if you were a high-performing principal in a good situation in your own district, would you really want to come to a system where the chancellor appears to be offering no job security even for employees who do good jobs? Would you trade a system of checks and balances for an imperial chancellory, where courtiers curry favor and your employment prospects hinge on who you know rather than how you perform? Probably not.

And it's not as if Rhee doesn't know better. Her old organization, the New Teacher Project, actually put out a policy paper on principal hiring. Apparently, Rhee didn't bother to read it.

If you really want a laugh (or a cry) you should check out the chart on page four of the report...the "model principal hiring process." Apparently, principals shouldn't be hired in rush jobs, where you announce a vacancy on a Friday and scoop together a panel to interview candidates on a Saturday eight days later.

Only if they're smoking Rhee-fer...

Borrowing another classic move from conquerors everywhere, Chancellor Rhee has proposed a contract that would essentially split the Washington Teachers Union into two opposing camps. She proposes a "red" track that would maintain a traditional contract based on tenure and seniority with modest pay increases and a "green" track that would end seniority and tenure and offer far greater financial incentives in return. In other words, those green tier employees would trade their collective bargaining rights and long-term stability for the possibility of a big payday. Here's how the Post describes it:

Under the proposal, the school system would establish two pay tiers, red and green, said the union members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. Teachers in the red tier would receive traditional raises and would maintain tenure. Those who voluntarily go into the green tier would receive thousands of dollars in bonuses and raises, funded with foundation grants, for relinquishing tenure.

Wait...how will those bonuses and raises for the greenies be paid for? Oh, foundation grants...well that's interesting. So the money's not actually budgeted for Rhee's promises, but is rather tied to the whims of outside foundations. The three foundations that the Post names are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Broad Foundation; none of the foundations cared to confirm that story.

The Broad Foundation is a big player in the public schools these days, having bankrolled the New Leaders for New Schools among other para-educational organizations, and according to Susan Ohanian, their education initiatives skew heavily toward business-oriented concerns and involve a good bit of log-rolling:

According to the Broad Foundation website ( http://www.broadfoundation.org ), its plan is to "redefine the traditional roles, practices, and policies of school board members, superintendents, principals, and labor union leaders to better address contemporary challenges in education." Broad's deep pockets mean it gets to define those challenges. Follow Broad money: A pattern emerges of business and foundation money moving in on local elections. Founder Eli Broad was influential in getting the Los Angeles superintendency for former Colorado governor Roy Romer, and it's no coincidence that the Broad Foundation gave its first urban ed prize to Houston -- with Rod Paige at the helm. A tight circle of backslapping and influence peddling reigns.

Nice. But let's assume nothing but good intentions from these foundations (Dell? OK, it's a long shot, but let's suspend disbelief...). Are these grants given in perpetuity? Or until DC can come up with its own funds to pay for the bonuses, which according to the Post could potentially raise a "mid-range" teacher's salary from 62K to over 100K?

Or maybe these grants will last long enough to bust the teachers union.

At any rate, the Washington Teachers Union will have to be smoking plenty of Rhee-fer to go along with this plan, for the following reasons:

1. The union will essentially cease to function as a union once differentiated salary tiers go into place -- the groups will be divided against one another and will no longer have mutual interests and goals, which is precisely Rhee's intention.
2. The "green" tier teachers will no longer have job security. While Rhee pays lip service to things like rewarding excellent performance, her track record with the employees she now has power over (for instance, the principals) indicates that excellent performance reviews are no guarantee that you will keep your job.
3. Her plan to pay for bonuses through grants means there's no guaranteed source of funding for these promises...which of course makes it of a piece with most of her other promises, or as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle.

__

No accountability.

I'm leaving aside for now the completely disgusting tactic used by the Catholic Church to offload their education mission on the DC taxpaying public, all the while reaping a nice little tax free rental income, thank you very much.

Let's start with the "Education Mayor" and his flunkies. Fenty and his flunkies have known since last fall that the Catholic Church was looking to do what other private foundations have been doing for several years now: dip into the public coffers in the name of charter schools. In fact, as the Washington Post reports -- in a surprisingly critical piece -- it was yet another example of empty promises from the education wing of Fenty's regime:

Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education, indicated at the time that the city clearly understood the implications of the archdiocese's announcement: "We will take it into consideration as we plan future budgets," he said.

That never happened.

District officials disclosed last week that they are still looking for the money to finance the schools, a sum that could come to as much as $16 million this year. They have told the nonprofit operator, Center City Public Charter Schools, that its first quarterly payment from the city -- due by July 15 under District law -- will be delayed.

Brilliant. Loyal readers should know Victor Reinoso's name: he's Fenty's "Deputy Mayor for Plagiarism," or as he's colloquially known, the deputy mayor for education. Still, a toothless DC Council approved his nomination last summer...

Reinoso and Rhee are cut from the same cloth: say what's expedient at the moment and forget about the follow-through. As with Rhee's empty promises to Benning Elementary, Reinoso's assurances are merely meant to placate and defer the inevitable moment of truth.

Not exactly a wise way to run a school system.

And maybe the D.C. Council is finally starting to take notice that it's not necessarily a good thing to offload your authority and oversight and hope for the best:

The Center City application touched political nerves on the council, which has grown increasingly concerned about its lack of control over a charter school sector that now costs the city more than $360 million a year. Earlier this month, Gray and D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) introduced legislation tightening the regulation of charter schools, including a mandated 15-month planning period before newly approved schools open.

Really? You think maybe $360 million a year of public money going to private organizations is something you should be concerned about, Councilmembers Gray and Wells? Well, thanks for the brilliant insight. Maybe you should perk up before Rhee finishes the job.

Rhee-treads anyone?

What do you do when you preside over one of the biggest education disasters in recent history? Why get a job with DCPS of course!

Cleveland, of all places, is chortling over the Rhee Regime's luring of several notable Cleveland failures to the District's system:

We knew something strange was going on when Lisa Ruda, the chief of staff for the Cleveland schools back in their heyday of horror, got hired to play the same role in the Washington, D.C. school district [“Thanks, D.C,” August 7]. She may have been part of Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s Dream Team that invented attendance numbers, bungled the $1.5 billion construction project, and helped the district earn a reputation for the Worst Education This Side of the Mississippi. But we never would have believed that someone else wanted to repeat our experiment in abject failure…

Needless to say, Cleveland isn't exactly upset about the District's "poaching" their "talent." In fact, they're ecstatic that Ruda, once she landed in the nation's capital, began hiring her cronies, although Lisa Rab, the reporter covering this strange rhee-incarnation of failure, was admittedly perplexed and tried to connect the dots. Here's the connection between DCPS and Cleveland:

Turns out that Byrd-Bennett, the former Cleveland schools chief who led Ruda and the rest of the disastrous team, also has a new job in D.C. She’s a director for New Leaders for New Schools, a non-profit that trains principals to – get this! -- turn around failing schools. Which means, unfortunately, that one of Cleveland’s most-hated government flunkies is now spreading her wisdom to younger generations. According to the Washington Post, she’s been advising D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee on some issues, too.

Amazing. A corrupt former schools chief and her corrupt cronies are imported almost whole-cloth into the District. New Leaders for New Schools is one of those organizations -- like Rhee's own New Teachers Project -- that found there was money to be made (and lots of it) consulting and providing head-hunting services for the public schools.

Byrd-Bennett, unlike her underlings, is not working directly for DCPS; instead, her organization is providing the "vetting" or litmus test for principal hires in DC. Byrd-Bennett is not well-liked in Cleveland and beyond. In fact, the ACLU went after her for trying to circumvent Ohio's "sunshine laws" that ensure public disclosure of school business. Incidentally, Michelle Rhee already won a court battle in her attempt to keep public school budget numbers from the public until it's too late...but it's possible the DC Council might get some backbone to stop the nonsense...doubtful, but possible.

Disturbing news, but no one cares.

So you've been in charge of DC Schools for a year...schools tend to be in the business of educating students, yet it's only now, after a full year, that you admittedly decide to turn your attention to academics?

No, I didn't make that up.

Chancellor Rhee has finally figured out that DCPS is in the business of providing education, and so she's pledged that in her second year on the job she would concentrate on academics. How refreshing:

Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said the focus in year two will be on boosting student achievement levels.

Wouldn't you hope that boosting student achievement levels would be the focus of a schools chief every year everywhere?

Rhee and Fenty were busy yesterday touting their education bona fides and listing their accomplishments. What they left off the list was one of the most important things: "Left in place every one of former Superintendent Janney's curriculum programs -- until two days ago when She-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Questioned effectively ended or delayed continued implementation of the Columbia University Reading and Writing Workshop." Obviously the administration shouldn't be terribly proud of record, since Rhee's snap decision at the very end of the academic year throws training for new hires into utter disarray...but what does she care. Here's what the Post tells us about the Fenty/Rhee achievement list:

A five-page, mostly single-spaced handout detailed 46 initiatives. They include a new textbook distribution system, refurbished high school athletic fields, spruced-up buildings, more art and music teachers and digitized personnel files that eliminated 4.6 million documents in disarray.

These are all good things. Even though Rhee overstated the textbook distribution problem, it's good to have a more transparent one in place (though it's not the first time DCPS officials have claimed to have streamlined textbook delivery); many DCPS fields were a disaster -- demoralizing and dangerous to students; many buildings obviously needed an overhaul; art and music should not be treated, as they were for years in DCPS, as luxuries (though Rhee's art and music initiative will not hit the classroom until fall 2008, and her seeming largesse comes at the cost of both the Weighted Student Formula and the Small-School Subsidy); and finally, the state of personnel and other files in DCPS needed to be addressed before accountability, both academic and financial, could be enforced.

However -- and you knew that was coming, right? -- only one of these highlighted initiatives touches academic achievement. Two of them are clear facilities issues and two others are business operations -- meaning they lie completely outside the need for the involvement of educational experts.

So what has our chancellor been doing for the past year...oh yeah, exactly what people who aren't educational experts do.

Anatomy of a hit.

If you want to understand the Rhee modus operandus in a nutshell, look no further than the Benning Elementary story in the Washington Post today. Leaving out the details, here's how it works: 1) meet and greet the community 2) pretend to hear their concerns, make promises, and assure them you are on their side 3) make decision that completely ignores or dismisses those concerns and promises 4) pretend you knew nothing about the community's concerns.

It's a pattern that's very transferable and has happened at a number of schools, although the Benning Elementary closure is certainly extreme -- Rhee uses this method for decisions great and small, because it's very effective: you've essentially bought time by making promises you have no intention of keeping, but by the time the community figures that out, they're fractured, shocked, and dismayed by your astounding duplicity.

Here's what happened at the end of last school year at Benning, a school suffering from deteriorating facilities and low enrollment (who wants to send his or her child to a school where the roof leaks?):

In an elegant white jacket, she [Rhee] walked the dimly lighted corridors and soiled carpets with Fenty and a platoon of cameras, chatting up students and teachers, promising to fix what ailed Benning. Fenty (D) picked the Northeast Washington school for Rhee's debut, aides said, because it crystallized many of the technical and academic challenges she would face.

Act I, the photo-op. The promises to fix the school. Fast forward to the end of the school year, and Benning Elementary is being closed:

A year after Rhee's whirlwind tour, the leaky roof remains, as does most of the worn-out carpet that kindergartners sit on each day. Other things got better, teachers and staff say. For the first time on Principal Darwin Bobbitt's three-year watch, the school had math and reading coaches, as well as an art teacher. All classroom teachers got new computers. Although maintenance personnel weren't able to fix the school's cranky air conditioning, they were far more responsive when it went down, staff members said.

In other words, fix the things that can move, like the computers and the personnel. Allow the students to spend each day on filthy rugs under unsound roofs, because all along Rhee knew her promises to keep Benning open were simply shell-game shuffles, designed to placate the parents committed, despite all its failings, to their neighborhood school.

Act II, then, begins with signs of improvement -- new computers, more academic support -- yet the larger structural problems remain unaddressed. That is classic rising tension...it reminds me in ways of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, in which the town's outward signs of economic success are belied by the poisons whose eventual discovery will compromise that economic recovery.

Act III, and this is a 3 Act play, comprises the climax and denoument so far. Rhee drops the hammer. Parents are stunned:

"What can I say? My word means nothing," said Tamika Jackson, mother of a second-grader. Like many Benning parents interviewed, she said she is looking to charter schools as an alternative.

Another of Rhee's goals accomplished: public school parents leaving the system for charter schools, those quasi-public institutions that believe they shouldn't be beholden to public oversight even as they swill at the public trough...

The play would not be complete, however, without Rhee's protestations that she did no wrong, broke no promises:

Rhee said she does not recall complaints about the roof, but tried to make what improvements she could. She said she does remember being impressed with Bobbitt, calling him a strong leader, and eventually offered him the principal's job this fall at Malcolm X Elementary in Southeast. As for the closing, she said it was unavoidable.

Bobbitt, for his part, retains a role in Rhee's next production and is understandably grateful, since Rhee has been replacing more successful principals with her friends and associates.

And that's the story so far, a sad tale of raised and dashed hopes, of promises unkept, and of the miscreants escaping justice. I fought the law and the law won, as the song goes.

I'm want to see the ending rewritten, perhaps expanded out to a five act, in which Rhee's hubris finally encounters sustained community solidarity, and she's held to account, made to justify her actions, and unable to do so, is summarily deposed by the mayor...or perhaps we will have to wait, like Fortinbras, for a final tragedy to clear the way for rejuvenation...

Time for a Rhee-Call.

Continuing her efforts to destroy public education in the District as quickly as possible, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has pulled the rug out from under students and teachers district-wide by cancelling the contract DCPS had with Teachers Institute to implement and provide continuous training for the Columbia University Reading and Writing Workshop.

Her ostensible reason is that the contract was not competetively bid and was not written up properly. Perhaps that's true, and Teachers Institute founder Sheila Ford seems like a bit of scoundrel -- OK, make that a full-fledged scoundrel -- by securing funding from DCPS for Teachers Institute before she resigned her DCPS principal's job, but the program itself is incredible. My son has had the opportunity to work with this program all year and I was extremely satisfied with the progress he made and the materials and methods used in the process.

One of the concepts behind the Columbia Reading and Writing Workshop is that teachers receive ongoing training in teaching reading and writing, and many DCPS teachers will tell you that previous to programs like this one, they have received little or no instructional training from DCPS. Another concept behind the program is differentiated learning, allowing students to move through "leveled libraries" as they progress in their abilities.

I'm disgusted by this action on Rhee's part. She seems to have no regard for student learning or the stability of learning communities that are working -- and from what I've seen, the reading and writing instruction in DCPS is far better under this program begun under Clifford Janey than in previous years.

I won't be surprised to find in a month or two that Rhee has identified a new partner to continue the program...perhaps an organization headed up by one of her old cronies. After all, she's been working hard to put her version of the "old boy network" in place throughout DCPS -- qualifications be damned, you'd better be a friend.

Dying by degrees.

Listen up, kids, and I'm going to show you how democracy disappears little by little in increments so small you don't realize it's gone until it's too late.


The D.C. Council is going to be entertaining a bill that's supposedly about "homeland security." It's currently scheduled for Monday, 14 July 2008, 10:00 am, in the Council Chamber, Room 500, and the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary will be holding the hearing on"Freedom of Information Homeland Security Amendment Act of 2007", Bill17-0355.


Very dry, right. Of course, the title is a bit of a giveaway, what with the "Freedom of Information" bit. That would be related to FOIA and various sunshine laws enacted to keep governments from hiding their dirt from the public eye. Well, DC wants to hide that dirt a little more. Ostensibly, the bill would keep "critical infrastructure" safe from FOIA requests. Interestingly enough, public education is included in the "critical infrastructure," which while I'm relieved that DC government finds public education critical, I'm curious as to why information about public education would be covered under homeland security concerns.


Is the mayor afraid the terrorists might learn the lunch menu for next Thursday?


More than likely, this request -- made in the fall of last year -- has something to do with Michelle Rhee's constantly being outfoxed by public watchdogs like Save Our Schools (DC) and Fix Our Schools, two groups that have exposed her sore lack of legal knowledge and lack of desire to be publicly accountable.


So goes the "public" in public education...

This just in: I wrote this post up before I read today's Post about the even more crazy DC Police plan to cordon off neighborhoods and ask for everyone's "papers" for access to the area...does this plan sound a little bit, um, mid-century to anyone else out there?

At best I give her two more years.

The D.C. Teachers are fools if they sign on to the contract proposals Michelle Rhee is offering. Rhee wants to eliminate seniority, a move she pretends -- as all managers do -- is meant to allow greater flexibility in staffing. It's a tremendous public relations ploy, too, because everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard the old war stories about the tired old teachers who can't teach and don't care and just show up and no one can get rid of them because of the union....

Bullshit.

Bad teachers can be fired. It's happened at my son's school. The problem though is that it takes an administrator who feels like doing his or her job, and those people are hard to come by. Don't blame the union; blame the administrator who didn't feel like documenting poor performance.

At any rate, the teachers would be fools to sign any agreement giving Michelle "The Hatchet" Rhee any more control over hiring and firing; Rhee's already shown she can't be trusted to act judiciously with the power she's already been given. For example, look at the Oyster Bilingual Fiasco. Rhee unceremoniously dumped Oyster's principal, despite the school's success and popularity, and she can provide no reason for doing so, cloaking her arbitrary retrograde action behind the facade of "not commenting on personnel matters."

If the Post were interested in doing some journalism instead of parrotting the Rhee line, they might try digging into the actual cause for firing a principal at a successful school. Instead, if you followed the story, you realize the following:

1. May 6: The Post does a story on Rhee's firing of "up to 30 principals" and links that to failing schools. The story also accepts as standard practice the notion that principals are hired on one-year contracts, a change that Rhee implemented this year (and one that should serve notice to most good principals that they don't want to have anything to do with DCPS).
2. May 9: In the wake of the link between Rhee's firings and failing schools, the Post does a story on Oyster's principal being fired. While the reporter points out that Oyster is "among the city's most coveted, with high test scores and a national Blue Ribbon for academic achievement," he doesn't even try to penetrate the lack of accountability that is Rhee's style: "Rhee said through her spokeswoman, Mafara Hobson, and by e-mail that she could not comment on Guzman's situation because it was a personnel matter." Wow, way to dig, Scoop.
3. May 16: The Post details the 24 principals fired by Rhee and notes that 13 are at schools that didn't meet NCLB guidelines. That means 11 are at schools that are meeting the standards. The Post reports as fact the standard Rhee line that "She has been conducting an aggressive national advertising campaign to attract high-performing principals to the District." Again, the reporters, who seem to be more like repeaters, accept the Chancellor's line: "Rhee and other school officials have steadfastly refused to discuss specific reasons for the dismissals, citing privacy and personnel regulations." Again, Scoop, if Rhee and her henchmen won't talk to you, start digging. Don't you think encountering such a stone wall around this topic is a clue? Jesus, where's Blue when you need her? HINT: Maybe the Post should start looking at the candidates that come before the principal selection panels to see how "national" these candidates are...go from there.

Anyway, I'm still astounded by the ease with which an inexperienced and politically clumsy Chancellor manipulates the Post. The Examiner -- a free paper! -- has actually published several better examples of investigative reporting as regards DCPS this year, and school activists routinely outmaneuver her on legal grounds.

I'll be surprised -- and greatly saddened -- if the WTU rolls over so easily for this amateur.

The Shell Game.

Michelle Rhee has been criticized for doing things behind closed doors, but when the plans get leaked, the administrators trip over themselves in an effort to belittle the plans themselves, as if these were just brainstorming sessions that will have little bearing on the direction of education in the District of Columbia over the next two years before Rhee hands in her resignation.

If I were as clueless as she appears to be, I'd be trying to hide everything, too.

Rhee's latest trick is a variation on the old shell game, except instead of a ball under a shell, we've got the taxpayers' money being moved around to different lines, as the Examiner reports (as an aside, the generally right-wing Examiner does a great job covering DC education gaffes). Rhee proposes cutting the DCPS payroll from $505 million to $168 million. That's a significant chunk of change. I mean, she's proposing dropping $337 million dollars out of payroll. That's two-thirds of the payroll! Amazing.

Oh, wait. Actually, it's not so amazing, because she's also proposing increasing contracts from $170 million to $512 million. So she's adding $342 million to the contract budget. That's a net savings of...oh no...it's not a net savings...it's a net loss of $5 million for DC taxpayers.

But it's a net gain of $342 million for private contractors! Which incidentally is the pool Rhee came out of...and where she has many friends still.

Acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles argues that these plans are really nothing more than scrap paper, even though DC government only released them under threat of court order:

“It’s only a base budget. There’s a meeting every week with these guys in green eye shades and you talk about how much more you need,” Nickles said. “I’m not quite sure that the plaintiff parties understand that.”

Actually, Mr. Nickles should understand that the plaintiffs are quite aware of the budget process, since many of them have been intimately involved as watchdogs over the corruption of District government for decades. Relative amateurs like Fenty, Rhee, and Nickles -- with their ham-handed and clumsy efforts at subterfuge -- have consistently been outwitted by these trained noses. The budget may be unfinished, but it's not hard to see that Rhee has fairly drastic plans to transfer loads of money from the District's control to private contractors.

So here we go, with the District, as always, playing gameboard for right-wing and neo-liberal dreams of private contractor utopias, where we can privatize all services because someone in economics 101 talked about competition and free markets.

Unfortunately, those of us in the real world understand that world doesn't exist.

Two posts in one day? What the hell is going on here?

I got caught up in the New York Times today and took until late afternoon to read the Post, but it was well worth the effort as it included this tidbit about our "new" schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. Readers of this blog know that I'm not her biggest fan, mainly because she brings no managerial experience to a hopelessly corrupt system that needs heavy-duty managerial clout to straighten up (sorry, but running a head-hunting agency is not managerial experience on this scale).

As you might recall, Fenty's takeover of the schools got off to a bumpy start when it was revealed that Victor Reinoso, Fenty's hand-picked "Deputy Mayor for Education," plagiarized a third of the school plan that the mayor presented. His excuse was pretty much as bad as the typical undergrad who's been caught cheating: blah blah cut and paste blah blah meant to cite the source blah blah must have pasted wrong paragraph in yadda yadda. It doesn't work in freshman comp, but it does work in DC government.

But that was last spring. Our new school leaders have now had nine more months (for Rhee, seven) to get used to the fact that people seem to be paying attention to what they're doing and not rolling over for them. Yet, here's Rhee being quoted by the Post on the DCPS registration process:

Her frustration, as a D.C. public schools parent of two daughters, with the bureaucracy in the schools. She complained that registering her children for school "was a nightmare."

Uh oh. It's pretty bad when the Chancellor isn't able to navigate her way through a process that thousands of parents seem to negotiate easily enough each year. I'm sure there are problems, especially in communities where the local school administration is uninterested in helping parents, but I'm fairly certain Rhee isn't sending her kids to any of those schools. I remember registering my son. It took something like, oh, ten minutes (of course you have to get your documentation together confirming that you live in the District and that your child is immunized...maybe she had some trouble there).

However, more stunning was Rhee's statement about school improvement:

Her speculation that despite all her initiatives, significant improvement might not occur for several years. Experts, she said, told her "realistically, you're not going to see gains until five years out. . . . I do think starting in the '08-09 school year, we'll start to see [test scores] moving in the right direction."

OK, let's do some math. Rhee was hired at the very end of the 06-07 school year, meaning she didn't have any control until the 07-08 year (the current year). So she says that in 08-09 school year (i.e. beginning this August), we'll see the change that comes five years out...That would place the initiatives that would drive up test scores squarely in the tenure of....wait a minute....Clifford B. Janey.

And why not? She hasn't changed the curriculum he put in place.

Am I the only one who understands that five years don't pass between summer 07 and summer 08?

Does anyone remember the old adage about comparing apples and oranges?

Yet another education study has been released that ranks DC among the bottom -- in fact, in this study, DC is the bottom -- in the nation. The headline, which is what everyone reads, gives most people all they need to know to fill up their water cooler talking points: "Report: Md. and Va. Schools Rank Among Nation's Best; D.C.'s Are the Worst."

Most people, rushed for time and not necessarily that invested in education issues, will only read that headline, since it confirms for them their preconceived notions that DC schools are an endless pit of violence, leaking roofs, non-flushing toilets, and remedial curriculum. And who can blame them, since the media reinforces this impression through its lazy reporting?

Dig a bit deeper into the article, though, and you find the following:

Swanson [Director of Editorial Projects in Education's research center] cautioned that although his group included District schools in the national report because its leaders set educational policy like a state does, its extremely low performance is more similar to other large cities than to states with a mix of urban, suburban and rural schools.
"D.C. is a combination of a low-performing urban school system and, quite frankly, not the most active policymaking," Swanson said.

Oh. So you included the District even though it doesn't fit the model for the study. Brilliant. So you might say that the District perhaps fares so poorly as compared to states because the District is in fact not a state, but rather a city system. In other words, it's an orange and therefore doesn't taste, look, or feel like an apple.

Basically, the study then is worthless as a comparative assessment as far as the District is concerned. However, even that fact does not excuse the District's spokesperson for ignorance of the report:

D.C Public Schools spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said she had not seen the report and could not comment.

Honestly, there's no excuse for being ignorant of an annual report from a major education research organization. That comment simply reinforces most readers' opinions that the DC schools administration is completely out of touch, unconcerned, and ignorant about educating the children of this city.

We didn't know what we were getting into...

No, this post is not about Iraq, although the headline is applicable, and to tell you the truth, the pathetic excuses coming from the officials are very similar and have their grounding in the same basic truth: when you refuse to listen to criticism, when you brand critics as disloyal or coddling failed regimes, when you push forward without clear ideas about where you're going or how to get there, then you make colossal mistakes.

I am speaking, of course, of Mayor Fenty's takeover of DC schools.

Buried in freebie-rag The Examiner's Friday story about the failure of many DC public schools to make NCLB Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is the following revealing statement:

But aides to the mayor now say they didn’t realize what they were getting into when they moved to take over the stricken schools and are quietly moving to dampen public expectations for reform.

Huh? All these fools needed to do was ask any involved parent out there and they could have found out the state of DC schools. Did Fenty think he would wave his magic wand, sprinkle pixie dust all over the schools, hire a former school teacher with only three years' experience to run the schools (by the way, it generally takes more experience to become eligible for principal positions, let alone system head positions), and voila! we have school reform?

I actually think he did believe that.

I suppose that instead of studying the state of DC schools, the mayor and his cohorts were out touring other school districts and stealing printed material to pass off as their own. Let's not forget that Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso couldn't even be bothered to write his own plan for reforming the schools, or that Rhee couldn't substantiate some of the more impressive claims of her resume, not that the city council cared a whole lot.

Critics of the plan who saw the takeover as a done deal still advised Fenty to keep Janey, who remains the only DCPS Superintendent not to run away from the job in the last decade plus. Fenty, you may recall, unceremoniously fired Janey in a midnight phone call.

Now DC parents and students are being told, "Sorry, we weren't actually aware of what we were doing, but you all can suffer because we're pompous assholes. Don't expect much." I am, of course, paraphrasing, as I don't have the mayor's aides' words in front of me.

[I could now launch into a diatribe about the idiocy of bringing business models to education, the ideological failure of libertarian education approaches, the hubris of politicians who believe experience is a liability, etc., but see my last post about the constraints of time...perhaps another day. Additionally, I could include a paragraph about the trustworthiness of the Examiner, which in the very same issue refers to "acclaimed author" David Horowitz...D.Ho is hardly an acclaimed author, unless of course you count ill-researched alarmist right-wing claptrap as worthy of acclaim. If you'd care to see him take yet another verbal beat-down, check here.]

Lies Lies and More Lies. And what does it matter?

Let's try to be serious for a moment. Let's try to suspend all our fantasies, our assurances that despite all odds, it really is the 70 to 1 longshot that will win the Derby, that in fact one lone veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder could take on and defeat the entire Vietnamese Army, that we really could escape from certain death by building a jetpack from a filed-down bicycle frame, two rubber bands, and an empty tin of Port Cliff Fish Steaks...

Let's try to pretend that we still think logically.

Here's the situation. Your local mayor (remember, this is hypothetical: it could be any mayor) has requested control of the school district, and to advance his cause he hires someone to write a comprehensive strategy for the his school reform plan. Unfortunately, that person steals nearly one-third of the final plan from another school district, an act that in education circles is referred to as "plagiarism" and generally warrants a failing grade for the offender (in this case the miscreant has not only not been punished, but also he's not even interested in explaining himself).

Just pretend something that crazy happened. Then pretend that despite this early signal that the mayor was not exactly capable of overseeing such a complex operation as a real school system if he couldn't even get together a good original one on paper, the city council approves the takeover.

I know, I know. Just pretend.

Now suppose then that the mayor, having been granted power over the schools, makes a midnight appointment without consulting a panel that was to be able to give feedback on the nomination -- in violation of the specific directives of the School Takeover Act that he championed -- and that the nominee was a former classroom teacher with three years experience in the classroom and about a decade's experience as a headhunter...you'd think he was joking.

But remember...we're still in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe...so let's say everyone takes him seriously and the city council decides to hold confirmation hearings.

Then it comes out that some very very specific accomplishments listed on the nominee's resume can't be substantiated. We're not talking about whether the sun was shining on a particular day or whether she took five or six steps to reach the refrigerator from the dining room...no, we're talking about percentile numbers on student achievement tests. It sounds ludicrous, doesn't it, to make claims about something that is so concrete, so specific. Yet here we are.

Apparently, Michelle Rhee, trying to make the most of her scant three years inside a classroom, claimed on her resume that she had made remarkable improvements in the students' test scores in Baltimore. However, she didn't simply claim that the scores improved; she gave very specific numbers, as the Post story tells us:

Rhee's résumé asserts that the students made a dramatic gain: "Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or
higher."

OK. Those numbers have to come from somewhere, right? I mean, unless you're just making them up. I mean, test scores are things that school districts document, prospective parents and teachers research, and government bodies tend to track (even before the days of NCLB). Yet, Rhee either thinks we're really stupid or she quite honestly just "guessed" that her student's improved so dramatically:

"When people say, 'Do you have documentation?', I've been saying no," Rhee said yesterday. "I think this is an important thing going forward for teachers to have documents to say, 'This is what the data look like.' My lesson is: How do we set up a system so teachers can have this kind of information on their students?"

Say what? You have absolutely no evidence for a major claim on your resume, the one experience you have in direct classroom instruction, and you think the lesson is that teacher's need to have documentation? How about, "the lesson is I shouldn't lie on my resume"? Because I have news for Rhee: teachers do have that kind of information on their students, at least in DCPS, because the good ones use it to target instruction. They've had that data on my child in every teacher conference I've ever attended. So if the lesson Michelle Rhee takes from her false statements is that we need to set up a system, then she's missed the boat before she's even begun. The system is already there, and I'm not clear on how lying on your resume is related to creating another system for making teachers aware of their students' progress.

I have no faith in the DC City Council to do the right thing -- they are a pathetic lot who have almost no political backbone and their major interest lies in posturing and preening -- but what makes this entire episode so upsetting to me is that the mayor's grand plan, his revolution in education, is looking more and more like the same politics as usual.

Maybe multiple instances of dishonesty from those who would be leaders of this new education experiment inspire the faith of the Council, but not me.