(Iris Harris—U.S. Department of Commerce)
There are two key components to Michelle Rhee's success as a media star and influential voice in education. One is that there's a lot of money lined up against unions and for privatization, and by aggressively going after teachers' unions, Rhee came in for a share of that money and the accompanying PR machine. She was especially appealing as an appointee of a Democratic mayor; Republican governors like John Kasich or Rick Scott can work with her and claim bipartisanship though her agenda lines up with theirs.
But the other major component is her widely-accepted claim to have turned Washington, D.C.'s failing schools around. And there, even if we set aside the cheating scandal about which Rhee refuses to answer questions, her record is a lot less impressive than the billing it receives.
Rhee has claimed "record gains" on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, a federal, no-stakes test. But:
The rates of NAEP test-score gains under Rhee were no better than the rates achieved under her two predecessors. A January 2011 study by Dr. Alan Ginsburg, former Director of Policy and Program Studies at the U.S. Department of Education, shows that NAEP scores had been steadily rising under Rhee’s two predecessors. In fact, the rates of D.C. test score gains under Rhee were no better than the rates achieved under predecessors Clifford Janey, and lower than those under Paul Vance. The NAEP score increases Rhee touts are at least partially a reflection of rapid change in DCPS demographics, not the result of any real improvement in the education of the city’s poorest and neediest students. On the fourth-grade NAEP, for instance, the percentage of African-American test-takers (the lowest-performing group in D.C.) dropped from 84 percent to 77 percent between 2007 and 2009. At the same time, there were gains in the proportion of white (from 6% to 9%) and Hispanic (from 9% to 12%) test-takers. So, while aggregate NAEP reading scores appeared to show an improvement, there were no statistically significant gains among any individual race.
That's the NAEP. Then there's the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS), the high-stakes test on which erasures were a problem. DC-CAS scores did rise in 2008 and 2009. Though those increases were widely touted, there were a couple simple explanations:
First, she began enforcing a previously-unenforced policy that said high school students had to have enough credits to take the tests. And second, she changed the way that students who don’t take the tests are recorded in the data (they were previously counted as failing, but Rhee changed the policy to exclude them from the data entirely). Both changes resulted in groups of students being excluded from the data/test starting in 2008, but then results were compared with 2007, when both groups were included (the high schoolers without enough credits were almost certainly relatively low-scorers, on average, while the non-takers were previously counted as failing). These changes may have made sense for other reasons, but the fact that they inflated performance remains a serious problem when assessing DC-CAS results during Rhee’s tenure.
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The DC-CAS assessment system was introduced in 2006 by Clifford Janey, Rhee’s predecessor. [...] There is a good deal of evidence (here, here, and here, for example) that tests scores tend to falter or stagnate for the first year or two after a new testing system is introduced. This is usually followed by large score increases, after students, teachers, and administrators become more familiar with the format and content of the new exam.
D.C. test results followed this pattern exactly.
Additionally, the same demographic shifts cited as affecting the NAEP would have been in effect on the DC-CAS.
In 2010 and again this year, teachers were given an "operational blueprint" telling them which skills would be tested. They didn't get the questions or the answers, but of the set of concepts that students are supposed to have mastered, teachers knew which specific ones they actually needed to know to do well on the test. You can imagine how much more time went to those concepts than to others that, though theoretically of equal importance, weren't going to appear on the test. Even so, "Data from 2009 and 2010 show that scores dropped at most schools the year after they were flagged for excessive erasures, raising questions about whether heightened security curbed abuses," and results were flat in 2011, after Rhee had left but with her program still in place.
Rhee's reputation, in other words, was built on gains that were underway when she became chancellor, demographic shifts, shifts in what students took tests and how those who didn't take tests were counted, cheating, and teaching to the test so aggressively that teachers were not only teaching what might be on the test but what was on the test. Mirage is the kind word for it.
