Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Michelle Rhee lists her five favorite education books in a Browser interview. Number one is A Hope in the Unseen, Ron Suskind’s portrayal of Cedric Jennings, an honor student at a D.C. high school who struggled to succeed in the Ivy League.
Also on Rhee’s list:
Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit
Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmore
Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
Special Interest by Terry Moe
Stop smearing Michelle Rhee, writes Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District.
The case against Michelle Rhee is full of holes, writes Paul Peterson of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance in the Washington Times. Ed Next has his full analysis.
Rhee was more effective than her predecessors, he writes, contradicting a recent study (pdf) by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education. And, contrary to a National Research Council (NRC) committee’s preliminary analysis, which downplays progress, there’s reason to believe Rhee’s reforms made a difference.
Like Ginsburg and the NRC committee, Peterson looks at NAEP data, since it’s a low-stakes test with no incentive to cheat. He excludes the scores of charter schools beyond Rhee’s control, which caused a blip in the data in 2007, inflating pre-Rhee progress. He finds progress accelerated after Rhee took over as chancellor.
Once the data are corrected and adjusted for national trends, it becomes evident that during the Rhee years, fourth-grade students gained at a pace twice that seen under her predecessors in both reading and math. The gains in math by eighth-grade students were nearly as much, although no eighth-grade reading gains are detected.
Gains are not enormous in any one year, but over time, they add up. In 2000, the gap between the District and the nation in fourth-grade math was 34 points. Had students gained as much every year between 2000 and 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, that gap would have been just 7 points in 2009. Three more years of Rhee-like progress and the gap would have been closed. In eighth-grade math, the gap in 2000 was 38 points. Had Rhee-like progress been made over the next nine years, the gap in 2009 would have been just 14 points, with near closure in 2012. In fourth-grade reading, the gap was 30 points in 2003; if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next six years, the gap in 2009 would have been cut in half.
The NRC committee claims that District gains “were similar” to those in 10 “other urban districts” for which comparable data is available.
In fact, D.C. students gained 6 points between 2007 and 2009 in both math and reading, while the average gain for the other 10 cities was just 1 point in reading and 2 points in math. In eighth-grade math, D.C. gains were 7 points, as compared to an average of three points for 10 other cities. Only in eighth-grade reading did the District lag behind, dropping a point while elsewhere, students gained 2 points.
The committee also admits that student and teacher attendance improved significantly during Rhee’s tenure, but questions the significance of the change.
Rhee said she wanted to change the culture, Peterson notes. When students show up to learn and teachers show up to teach, that’s considered a very good sign. But Rhee’s enemies don’t want to give her credit for anything.
When test scores soared at a low-performing District of Columbia school, the principal and teachers collected bonuses. Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus was called one of D.C.’s “shining stars” and was named a National Blue Ribbon School. But cheating may explain Noyes’ apparent turnaround, reports USA Today.
In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
. . . Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
Noyes’ proficiency rates fell significantly in 2010.
“For the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests,” reports USA Today. “The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.”
On the 2009 reading test, the average erasure rate for D.C. seventh graders was less than one. At Noyes, seventh graders averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures. “The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance,” according to statisticians consulted by the newspaper.
Who’s right about the value of value-added? A University of Colorado analysis challenges the validity of the Los Angeles Times’ value-added analysis of teachers’ effectiveness. The Colorado “critique is more cautionary than damning,” argues Rick Hess.
. . . this is a case where I think the results mostly highlight the import of moving carefully and thoughtfully on value-added. That said, the standard in crafting value-added systems ought not be perfection, because nobody anywhere in the private or public sector has got a system that can meet the standard. The question is whether a given system is better than the alternative. And the truth is that today’s personnel systems are so insensitive to performance, so protective of mediocrity, and so dismissive of excellence, that value-added systems need not be flawless to be good and useful tools.
Washington D.C.’s teacher evaluation data will be used to assess principals, teaching coaches and education schools, reports the Washington Post.
Now in its second year, IMPACT uses five classroom observations to rate how effective a teacher is in nine standards — including explaining content clearly and engaging students — deemed essential to good teaching. Certain teachers are also judged on whether their students’ test scores sufficiently improve — a metric known as “value-added.” All of the numbers are crunched into a teacher’s annual rating, ranging from ineffective to highly effective.
Last year, former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee fired 75 teachers with poor IMPACT evaluations and gave bonuses to more than 600 top scorers.
In the future, D.C. will use the data to determine which education schools are producing high- or low-scoring teachers, said Jason Kamras, the district’s personnel chief. “We’ll just stop taking graduates from institutions that aren’t producing effective teachers.”
Just as teachers are being held accountable for students’ performance on tests, Kamras said, administrators will be held accountable for teachers’ performance on IMPACT evaluations. Teacher ratings from one cluster of schools might be compared with those from another cluster to assess how a particular instructional superintendent is faring. Principals will be judged in part by the number of “highly effective” teachers they are able to retain from year to year. Instructional coaches will be held accountable for the ratings of the teachers they coach.
IMPACT also will help the district target teacher training to areas of high need, Kamras said.
IMPACT is too flawed to be reliable, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. He worries that use of IMPACT scores will lead D.C. to stop hiring teachers from historically black colleges and universities.
Since Michelle Rhee left her D.C. schools job, everyone wants a kinder, gentler version of her reforms, writes Richard Whitmire. But “Michelle Lite” won’t be enough to change the worst urban districts, he fears.
The thinking on the former D.C. Public Schools chancellor goes like this: True, she had to focus on teacher and principal quality, but not exclusively. Yes, she had to close underutilized schools, but not without collaborating. Finding a better way to reward teachers was admirable, but not by riling the unions so much.
I’ve come to think of this conventional wisdom as Michelle Lite. Improving teacher quality, streamlining schools, giving teachers new pay incentives — all good ideas, but only if done gently, quietly, cooperatively.
Baltimore, Tampa and Miami are trying to reform schools collaboratively, but they’re not likely to match the changes Rhee forced in D.C. schools, Whitmire argues.
His book on Rhee, The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District, comes out in a few weeks.
Up to 45 Los Angeles schools will be protected from teacher layoffs under a settlement approved last week of a lawsuit that charged seniority-based layoffs disproportionately hurt high-poverty schools, which tend to be staffed by young teachers. In addition, “layoffs in the district’s other 750 schools must be spread more equitably,” even if that means some senior teachers could lose their jobs, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The teachers’ union will appeal the order.
Seniority-based layoffs are under attack across the country.
“This year, if we are forced to lay off teachers, we will be forced to lay off some of the most effective, and keep some of the least effective,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a speech this week. “It’s not right. It’s not fair. And it’s not something we can allow to happen.”
Some hard-hit districts may have to lay off 15 to 20 percent of teachers, writes Michelle Rhee, founder of Students First, in a New York Times op-ed. They should keep the best teachers, regardless of seniority, she writes. Twelve of the 50 states now “allow school administrators to consider teacher effectiveness in making layoff decisions.”
Ending last-in, first-out layoff policies is the priority of former NYC schools chief Joel Klein, who’s joined Education Reform Now as board chairman.
On their way out the door in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty take credit for making “politically unpopular choices” in the Wall Street Journal.
Forced to lay off excess staff to save money, they “decided to allow principals to make the layoffs based on the quality, value and performance of their staffs” rather than seniority alone. It took 2½ years of bargaining with the union and millions of dollars from foundations to get teachers to approve the new contract.
• It rewards great teachers who accept a higher level of accountability with some of the highest teacher pay in the nation—up to twice as much as they were previously making.
• No longer do educators have a job guarantee for life. Ineffective teachers are immediately dismissed from the system. Minimally effective teachers do not receive a pay step increase and have one year to improve their performance. If that doesn’t happen, they are subject to termination.
• If layoffs are necessary, the decisions about whom to dismiss are based on quality and performance instead of seniority.
• We also instituted a comprehensive system for evaluating teachers, including growth in student achievement as measured by standardized tests (so that teachers who take on the toughest students aren’t unfairly penalized), observation of their classroom practices and assessment of their contributions to the school community.
Every student subgroup in D.C. has improved on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Rhee and Fenty write. Graduation rates have increased. SAT scores are up too.
So what went wrong?
We did not explain why we were doing what we were doing well enough. We did not do enough to engage the local leaders and neighborhood activists who needed to be at the forefront of the fight.
People who want change were overwhelmed by “special interests—unions, administrators and opportunistic politicians—who are vocal and committed,” Rhee and Fenty argue.
Whither Michelle Rhee? asks National Journal of its Education Experts. Michelle Rhee has resigned as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools.
She leaves as her legacy the mass firings of teachers rated as minimally effective, increased emphasis on charter schools, and expanded use of standardized tests.
. . . For education policymakers, how significant is Rhee’s very public struggle with a major city’s public school system? Does it help or hurt the debate to have a face and a name attached to it? Can educators take policy cues from her experience, or are the lessons to be learned largely about politics?
“Bold education reform isn’t particularly popular with the general public,” writes Checker Finn.
Education reformers tend to suppose that there’s a vast army of parents, voters and taxpayers marching behind them. Would that it were so. Most folks, though, don’t welcome disruption in their lives and even if their child attends a dreadful school or has a feckless classroom instructor, they aren’t necessarily keen to make a change and they’re even less keen to have someone force a change upon them.
Being nicer wouldn’t have helped, writes Rick Hess.
The superintendent hero who swoops in and saves the schools is a “sure=fire recipe for disappointment and cynicism,” writes Larry Cuban, a former superintendent and emeritus education professor, on The Answer Sheet. Of course, he’s thinking about Michelle Rhee, who may soon swoop out of Washington, D.C.
What’s the alternative to heroes entering and exiting leaving broken china scattered behind? Yes, some china must be broken. That’s the easy part. The hard part is building a strong political consensus among teachers, students, parents, and larger community that the job can be done, will take a lot of time, and the folks who can do the job are right here in River City.
Cuban’s examples are Tom Payzant in Boston (1996-2006), Carl Cohn in Long Beach, CA (1992-2002), Pat Forgione in Austin, TX (1999-2009), and Laura Schwalm (1999- ) in Garden Grove, CA.
They wore no capes and donned no tights. They slogged through a decade or more of battles, some of which they lost, to accumulate small victories. They helped create a generation of civic and district leaders and a teacher corps who shared their vision.
They built brick-by-brick the capacities among hundreds and thousands of teachers, principals, parents, and community members to continue the work. Yes, they angered many and, yes, they fought to win but they persevered. They left legacies that teachers, principals, and parents can, indeed, improve schools by working together.
Switching metaphors, Cuban says school leaders should be marathon runners, not sprinters.
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