Ok so for anyone who followed the Presidential election this year the name Michelle Rhee is at least somewhat familiar. In the last Presidential debate it seemed that both candidates Barack Obama and John McCain wanted to covet her as someone who agreed with their ideas for what to do with Education in this country. At the time I came away curious as to why they both held her in such high regard, but this time, for once, my curiosity didn't lead to a google search. But today over at Swampland, Karen Tumulty or KT as the commentors call her posted an excerpt from a TIME story about Michelle Rhee and another about PEOTUS Obama's views on education compared to Rhee's. This led to a discusion about her bonafides and what came out is a little unsettling at least to me. In particular there were references to daily howler stories about Rhee questioning her back story. The purpose of this diary is to get a conversation going before we all start lining up behind her proposals on education like people did with Bush lie of NoChildLeftBehind to disasterous effects.
First a little bit about me. Both of my parents taught public school for over 20 years a piece. I have several Uncles and Aunts that were also long time teachers or Principals in public school and one of my Uncles worked his way up to the level of assistant superintendent of schools in a big city in the south. I say that to say I have been around educators a lot in my life and one of the things I know is that there are no easy solutions to what ails most public schools in this country. The problems with the level of achievement of kids in schools now adays are many and they are complex in my opinion. So I am always wary of school administrators who believe that they can solve all of the problems with one or two moves. They usually come off sounding good and reasonable but ultimately they fail because complex problems require complex solutions. Enter Michelle Rhee.
After the debate I remember several news outlets touting Ms Rhee as an innovative chancellor of education for Washington DC. I kind of accepted that at face value and moved on. But then today the subject came up again on the Time Swampland blog. So I decided to read the story to get a better read on Ms Rhee. What I found was a story full of mostly fluff and not a lot of concrete ideas other than "tenure for teachers is bad" for schools as are unions. Now both of my parents were also members of the teachers union so I have a pretty good understanding of the anti union stances and I even agree on certain issues. But from the story I read Ms Rhee seemed to be saying that the problem is solely the lack of good teachers and that unions and tenure promote that problem and therefore they should be dismantled and then everything will be ok. Yes I am editorializing quite a bit but I encourage you to read the story and come to your own conclusion. An excerpt:
Rhee is convinced that the answer to the U.S.'s education catastrophe is talent, in the form of outstanding teachers and principals. She wants to make Washington teachers the highest paid in the country, and in exchange she wants to get rid of the weakest teachers. Where she and the teachers' union disagree most is on her ability to measure the quality of teachers. Like about half the states, Washington is now tracking whether students' test scores improve over time under a given teacher. Rhee wants to use that data to decide who gets paid more--and, in combination with classroom evaluation, who keeps the job. But many teachers do not trust her to do this fairly, and the union bristles at the idea of giving up tenure, the exceptional job security that teachers enjoy.
Now again I have my problems with school systems who give tenure to teachers who may not deserve it and I also have problems with teaching unions that make it harder for bad teachers to get fired. But these are hardly the stuff of revolutionary thought. And in my mind its kind of like focusing solely on the UAW when thinking about the auto bailout rather than also looking at everything else around them like the credit crisis as well as management decisions. I think everyone would agree that in a perfect world we would want public school kids to have very high performing teachers. Again thats not revolutionary. But having good teachers is just part of the problem. What about schools that are falling apart and can't provide the kids with books to take home and study? What about students who go home to parents who are either too busy trying to work and pay bills to help them or parents who just don't care? What about the criminal element in some schools and some of the ridiculous laws that allow them to get second chance after second chance without any meaningful reprecussions and all the while all they are doing is distracting the kids in the school who actually want to work and or threatening those kids safety? I had several more questions to go along with those but then a funny thing happened. A commentor on the blog pointed out how the daily howler has been asking some questions about Ms Rhee's backstory and nobody seems to be able to answer them. Mind you she has only been the chancellor for less than 2 years but people are already referring to her as if she is an Oracle of Education so I think the validity of her resume is a pretty big thing. So far she doesn't really have a record to match her mantle of reform but that can be attributed to her short time on the job. So how did she get her reformer street cred? Ladies and gentlemen this might just be another bridge to nowhere
So I go to the daily howler link provided by commentor gysgt213 and I find there is an article about Michelle Rhee. Well actually more precisely the article was about Jay Matthews and his laudatory article in the Washinton Post about Michelle Rhee. The folks at the daily howler were not impressed and decided to ask Matthews some follow up questions about his reporting. Their back and forth went thusly:
OUR QUESTIONS:
Are you troubled by the fact that the scores were never produced?
Did the Post ever ask the Baltimore schools to produce the scores?
Jay’s answers were helpful, though they leave some matters hanging. Here’s what he told us:
JAY’S ANSWERS:
Nope, because I have researched test scores at that period in other parts of the country, and nobody has them, particularly on a per teacher basis. This was way before the NCLB era. Her story is very close to what I have heard from other Teach for America teachers of that era whose work has since proved, in the NCLB era. that their scores were probably what they said they were.
We did, and discovered what I said above. Rhee herself said she never saw any scores in writing. It was all informal chit-chat stuff, with the central office people the only ones who had lists, it seems
.
Now I wasn't buying his answers and neither were they.
Do the data from Rhee’s tenure still exist? We have no idea. At the time of Rhee’s ascension, the Washington Times seems to have pursued this matter a bit harder than the Post; in a paraphrased passage, reporter Gary Emerling said that Baltimore’s current testing director "said retrieving data from a decade ago is hard because his office changed its information storage systems for the year 2000" (our emphasis). Is retrieving these test scores hard—or impossible? We have no idea. (Emerling included some hard data about third-grade achievement at Harlem Park as a whole—data which made Rhee’s claims sound a bit improbable. An aggressive journalist could surely pursue this type of analysis harder.) Meanwhile, Rhee has long made detailed claims about her students’ success. As the Post reported, her official resume had long asserted this: "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." At best, it’s extremely irresponsible to make such detailed claims on the basis of "informal chit-chat."
(For what it’s worth, it seems unlikely that "central office people" would have been "the only ones" who had the detailed, student-by-student data. Beyond that, we find it hard to believe that Rhee wouldn’t have wanted to know how her individual students tested, even after she’d left the school system.)
Now I noticed that in that article the daily howler linked to earlier articles they had done on Ms Rhee. So of course being the curious sort I am I decided to click through and see what all they had been researched about her. On the first link I clicked on I found this:
RHEE FAILS TO SHOW: A reader has tried to help us solve The Case of Rhee and the Wall Street Journal. As you may recall, the problem began with Michelle Rhee’s official biography—the one which helped the inexperienced ex-teacher get hired to run DC’s schools:
OFFICIAL RHEE BIOGRAPHY: Michelle Rhee’s commitment to excellence in education began in 1992, when she joined Teach For America after earning her Bachelor’s degree in Government from Cornell University. Her teaching career started at Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore, MD, where her outstanding success in the classroom earned her acclaim on Good Morning America and The Home Show, as well as in the Wall Street Journal and the Hartford Courant. Upon completing her service with Teach For America, she entered Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and graduated with a Master's degree in public policy...
It sounded good—and it helped its author win a very important job. But is the highlighted statement true? Did Michelle Rhee’s "outstanding success in the classroom" really "earn her acclaim" from those major news orgs? Using Nexis, we found reports about Rhee’s former school, Harlem Park Elementary, in the Hartford Courant and on Good Morning America (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/9/07). But in no case could we find any sign that Rhee had been praised in those news orgs’ reports. Yes, there’s always room for doubt. But he claim didn’t seem to compute.
But how about the Wall Street Journal? Did Rhee "earn acclaim" from the famous newspaper for her "outstanding success in the classroom?" Our reader has access to the Journal’s Factiva search engine. And again, the answer seems to be: No.
After searching the Journal’s archives, our reader sent us two news reports from the mid-1990s, reports which mentioned Harlem Park Elementary. As we’ve noted, the school was part of a nine-school privatization experiment in Baltimore, run by Education Alternatives (EAI); the effort got some national coverage until its demise in December 1995. But the Journal’s first article on this subject appeared in September 1992, at the start of Rhee’s first year as a teacher. Rhee wasn’t mentioned in the report—and the Journal’s Gary Putka seemed to have found little success at the school, outstanding or otherwise. ("The start [of the project] has been less than auspicious," he wrote, "leading to some dire predictions about the initiative's chances.")
Now I decided to click through again because at this point I was quite a bit more than curious. This time I found this.
So here’s the question: Did Rhee’s "outstanding success in the classroom" really "earn her acclaim" from the news orgs she named? Let’s start with the Hartford Courant.
In March 1994 and June 1994—long before her "outstanding success" had been recorded—Rhee was quoted as part of two news reports in the Courant. (EAI would soon be taking over Hartford’s schools, and the paper was examining the company’s effort in Baltimore.) But Rhee wasn’t the focus of either report, nor was there any claim of any outstanding success—on her part, or by EAI generally. Unless something is missing from the Nexis archives, Rhee’s claim about the Courant is simply a bald-faced misstatement.
How about Good Morning America? In the Nexis archives, transcripts of the program only date back to July 1996. (There is no report on Rhee, or on Harlem Park, in the archives after that date.) However, program summaries exist before that date; they show that Good Morning America aired a report on EAI and Harlem Park on October 24, 1993, at the start of Rhee’s second year of teaching. The detailed summary doesn’t say that Rhee was included in the program (although she may have been). But at this point, her alleged "outstanding success in the classroom" hadn’t occurred. We can find no sign that the program reported on Rhee, or on Harlem Park, at any later point.
Now why does any of this matter? Well I for one hope that PEOTUS Obama is serious about reforming education in this country. Its important that our kids start being able to compete better against their peers around the world. For that reason I want him to be counselled by the best minds in education. However with Ms Rhee it appears that her rhetoric about her own accomplishments is what has pushed her to favored education reformer status and after having to suffer through the farce of NCLB I would much rather we not write up Education policy again based on a program that didn't actually work the way the person pushing the program claims it did. If anybody else has more insight about Michelle Rhee or can actually back up Rhee's claims of success in Baltimore I am more than happy to hear it and i will post it in an update. Otherwise I think more people should be examining her bonafides before we all jump on her band wagon!