John Merrow really takes Michelle Rhee to the woodshed. I don’t spend much time thinking about education policy, but it seems like I’ve been missing out on quite a scandal. I suspect that Atlanta and DC are just the tip of the iceberg. Rhee’s specific policies seem custom-made to encourage cheating by teachers and administrators, but the emphasis on test scores is nationwide. You give the educators the carrot of bonuses and stick of getting fired, and of course some of them are going to fix the students’ wrong answers.
I hope the DC case blows up, because we need hearings on this so we can get the momentum we need to repeal the worst aspects of No Child Left Behind.
I hope she’s destroyed and that standardized testing quickly follows suit.
Point is, teaching is an art, not a science. Conditions are different for every teacher, school, district. You know a good teacher when you see one, but that would require too much attention. Teaching can’t be quantified by stupid algorithms. Making tests the measure of good education is like making adjective count the measure of good books, or number of quick cuts the measure of a good movie. Just more crap from the curse of way too many MBAs and their ilk scrambling to get rich on scams. .
Why people think tests written for pennies by undergrads and the unemployed, none of whom have ever taught, have better judgement than teachers is beyond me.
I agree this scandal is a big deal, and one totally predictable.
However, the larger issue for me is what are we educating people for?
Currently we have millions of UNemployed and under employed people in our nation. did they not receive a public education and many of them a college education as well?
Frankly I think this pathetic fact is the foundation of the movement by “investors”/scammers pushing to privatize public education– that and federal funding of education is a giant pool of (taxpayer provided) money the banksters like Goldman Sucks are dying to get their greasy hands on.
Why spend millions repairing/renovating crumbling bricks and mortar public schools in cities like Chicago and Detroit when they can simply be shut down (for good) and the kids educated at home with a subsidized laptop connected to the groovy new “on line” education company (for profit)?
If the kids opt to play Grand Theft Auto instead of attending “classes” and don’t graduate, well that’s the parents fault.
… is a good day for students, parents, and teachers.
John Merrow recently profiled Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC superintendent of schools and darling of the school privatization movement. The story was a fawning puff piece on her. Evidently he has now found out that things in the DC schools may not have been as Rhee presented them.
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232
More here at USA Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/11/memo-washington-dc-schools-cheating/2074473/
Waiting for (not Superman) Subpoenas!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/12/why-not-subpoena-everyone-in-d-c-chea
ting-scandal-rhee-included/
(I posted this on another board today and thought I’d get more mileage out of it here.)
You know, if our media and government structures were working on the basis of “data-based policy”, the USA Today expose’ of Michelle Rhee’s corrupt leadership atop the DCSD, now nearly two years old, would have shitcanned Rhee’s career, as it should have.
Instead, I now see her commanding multimillions of dollars through her horrible Students First organization, and getting tonguebathed all over the media landscape as she pours her poisonous lies into the body politic. Listen to this February 2013 “interview” at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/node/65191
The interviewer treats Rhee’s critics with a deceptive contempt, rhetorically holding them down in order to make it easy for Michelle to violently pummel them. Particularly delicious is when Rhee compains about the polarization of the dialogue re. public education and decries the teachers’ unions and other opponents for shedding heat but no light and being so meeeean. One minute later, she’s throwing down on the teachers in the most snotty Mean Girls fashion. Her frequent use of personal anecdotes to back up her positions comes off as transparent lies to me.
When I heard this broadcast at 2 am on my local NPR station, I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Rhee and her movement are extremely dangerous snake oil peddlers.
Boo (Martin), you say you don’t spend much time thinking about education policy. Maybe you should – what is going on there is a microcosm of what the GOP and the Lieberdems have been doing to our government and society.
I’m not going to tell you that public education has always been rosy – it certainly hasn’t. And the NEA-sponsored reforms weren’t always the best, but they generally had the benefit of being child- and results-focused.
However, what’s emerged in the last quarter century is just horrible. First there was in the intrusion of the fundamentalist-zealots-in-the-name-of-Christ, but as usual their damage was limited until they got the backing of serious money. It was, of all people, Phyllis Shafly (remember her?) who really started the trend of schooling-for-profit under the guise of right-wing educational values.
Today every level of the schooling system is under seige. First we’ve got the Texas Test Taker philosophy, forcing kids to undergo 3, 4 and 5 full days of tests per year everywhere allegedly to measure improvement and ultimately to cut funds of districts that don’t measure up. It turns out this doesn’t waste just a week of the school year but much more – in self-defense virtually every school district spends months teaching “how to take tests” and “what questions to look for on tests” topics. It’s much worse for education, as much time is wasted. But there are huge profit$ in the test making.
Then there is the charter school scam. We’ve tried a number of these over the years and in the end not one avoided the problems with corporate profiteering. The idea is that you create an on-line curriculum and school infrastructure and get one of the poorer school districts in the state to agree to sponsor you in exchange for a cut of the profits. Then you sell yourselves to students in the whole state. Usually in the first years you actually have something to sell. A promising on-line school infrastructure, skilled teachers, well-thought-out curriculum, and close oversight responding to problems. Just long enough to get a critical mass of students. And then profit-taking kicks in. Replace the experienced teachers with those just out of college or who got dumped by every other school district. Stop enhancing the web site and cut the IT team’s budget by 90%. Start using on-line versions of the books (using a cheap tool that lacks even a search function) instead of shipping out books. Replace the promised computers for students with ancient hand-me-downs.
My son was in one of these programs, Connections Academy for the record, and very few of the curricula had been updated since 2003. For some of these it worked – history was a little funny as it had that “post-9/11 glow”. The Java course was simply unworkable, as none of that technology worked anymore (the teacher allowed me to buy a new Java workbook and come up with similar assignments for my son).
The conservative world view is: scam the government for everything you can and don’t give a rat’s ass about actual governing or providing services – blame the darkies, spics, and smart people to distract from what you are doing and to get the low income morons to keep sending you the votes – and rely on the fact that the Dems will occasionally get in power long enough to repair the infrastructure you destroyed. Unfortunately, that rationale seems to be failing now that the Democrats in power aren’t much better.
By the time something starts to get done, it will be too late. Rahm Emanuel is shutting public schools in Chicago as fast as he can. It is not as much about education as busting the teachers unions. Wonderful how Democrats are destroying major parts of their base.
Rahm Emmanel, like Joe Lieberman, is as evil as any member of the Greedy Oligarch Party.
For anyone who asserts that Barak Obama is somehow anything to the left of a DC Centrist (which is far to the right of the rest of the first world, and far to the right of the US population even after 30 years of conservative propamedia) I offer only two words in rebuttal: Rahm Emmanuel.
The catch-phrase in the media seems to be “Erase to the Top”.
As I’ve said before, Obama may be worse on edu policy than Bush.
YES!!!
AG
she was a fraud, not qualified to TEACH in the DC Public Schools…
but, she was able to be IN CHARGE of the schools?
f-that.
Don’t forget the influence Rhee and others have in the Obama White House.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/how-michelle-rhee-is-taking-over-the-democratic-
party/262082/
Chris Hayes weighs in with his new show All In, with a segment interviewing John Merrow This is one reason why Hayes’ new show is going to become the must watch of the news programs while blowing O’Reilly right off the screen.
check
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Tony Bennett’s legacy in Indiana. We got rid of him in Indiana so Rick Scott hired him in Florida.
This story came out in the Indianapolis Star. I expect many more like this and much worse.
Waiting for Subpoenaman.
Booman, you need to start paying attention to education policy. You’ve got a young one that rich and powerful interests view as a profit center not a kid.
I’m in the same boat. We’re in TX; the twins will be starting third grade in September. The school is very good, or has been so far, but we’re just waking up to this stuff now and we’re quite concerned.
You might be interested in this article about what is going on in the TX legislature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/education/texas-considers-reversing-tough-testing-and-graduation-r
equirements.html?ref=education&_r=0
Education is all fluxed up.
I’ve been following education policy for a long time due to my belief that our current models of education are severely flawed. While I went to public school and thrived (for the most part) in spite of the institution itself. I often found school itself boring and spent my time in other pursuits but for some subjects great teachers inspired me to excel in those particular areas (Biology and Japanese) but lack of inspiring instruction left me wanting in others. There were also opportunities to further focus on subjects I enjoyed (Computers) when courses became available. So overall I don’t think my public education was terrible… but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I managed to get into college but dropped out after a few years to pursue the career I had already begun (as a programmer) after high school. I went to a small liberal arts college which assisted me in further refining my ability to teach myself, but once I’d accomplished that I left and just continued learning on the job. Once leaving college I joined the institution I had been working for (a major private university) as a full time staff member. From there my education continued primarily as an apprenticeship where I moved through varying levels and eventually was in charge of a group of more junior programmers. I’d say a very small fraction of what I learned came from my schooling and most from my own curiosity and desire to learn new stuff.
Early influences were James Burke (ConnectionsThe Day the Universe Changed), various books about Biology and Science (John Gribbin’s In Search of the Double Helix and everything by Richard Feynman stick out in particular). Later influences were the work of Fritjof Capra (The Tao of PhysicsThe Turning Point) and Maturana and Varella’s The Tree of Knowledge.
But I think the key was my parents and their positive example of life long learning. They were both always studying and getting into new things and including my brother and myself in these new activities. They also left us a lot of unstructured time to explore our own subjects and didn’t over plan our schedules with too much stuff (though we did have music lessons… though nothing ever really amounted from them on a practical level).
Some other interesting reads/watches if anyone is interested:
This whole “educational cheating” thing is just a snapshot of what is happening on every level of the American system. The only way that one can beat the brainless control machine is to cheat. We cheat on taxes; we cheat while driving; we cheat in business; the media cheats and lies in horrific fashion; we cheat in politics and we cheat in foreign affairs.
We are a nation of fucking cheats now, right across the entire spectrum of economic and political position. Poor people cheat; middle class people cheat; the rich cheat. Democrats and Republicans both cheat, one way or another. It’s cheat or lose. Cheat or die.
The only way out of his morass of dishonesty?
The truth.
But when someone steps forward and tries to tell the truth about what is up here…again, on any level from national politics right on down to the least noticed blogs…a massive oppositional system immediately rachets into top gear. I first realized this during the July Massacre/Pie Fight fiasco on the Daily Kos in 2005. I soon began to see the same system in effect up and down the scale, from my own daily workplace adventures right on up to the highest levels of politics. Media is a total lie…just look at what happened to the journalist Peter Arnett when he tried to tell the truth on CNN about what was happening during the Iraq War or the way the media treated British MP George Galloway when he spoke the truth about what was going down in the Middle East to the U.S. Senate. For that matter, look at the non-personing of Ron Paul during the Republican primaries last year.
The rightwing media lies; the centrist media lies and the left wing media lies.
Pie fight be damned. It’s a lie fight, and may the best liars win.
Booman writes regarding this latest little lie dustup:
Hell, Booman…this “tip of the iceberg” is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg that this country has already impacted on a very dangerous level. You support Obama’s lies as “the necessities of politics” or some such falafel, but you want to pillory the teaching system for the same kinds of lies only on a much smaller scale? Wake the fuck up. The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable too.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Keeping Up With the Pauls from Charles P Pierce who seems far more awake that you are:
Mr. Piece works for Esquire magazine. You know…the one with the little middle=aged man who looks like the Monopoly trademark as its icon?
He is hired to appear to be clever for Esquire readers…middle class men aspiring to be upper middle-class, I suppose, in their 40s and already regretting it. Its shiny neo-liberal front hides a Wall Street Journal level of conservatism…as does Obama’s, come to think of it. Anyone who could write “…hundreds of young people in stocking caps who really, really find war to be a bummer” about what is going down here in the U.S. can kiss my royal Irish ass.
AG
Re: GAMING THE SYSTEM Exposed
There, fixed for you.
How is this any different than derivatives eggheads on Wall Street pushing the limits of the law until the system crashed? How is this any different than Enron privatizing the California energy grid for their own profitable nefarious purposes? How is this any different than the savings and loan scandal of the 80’s? How is any different from the Winkle-shit twins buying millions in Bitcoins hoping YOU WILL TOO before it all comes crashing down? And yet WE end up holding the bag in the end.
You don’t have to follow policy. The fuckheads that own this country operate from a premise that to do so is to steal from it, no matter what enterprise you look at, from finance to public education. I GOT MINE, FUCK YOU is their clarion call. They had incentives built into the system to encourage them to do it, and mysteriously no one saw it coming.
I have to disagree with you on the various edu-cheating scandals. Teachers and their unions have been warning of this danger since the inception of high-stakes, high-reward, high-punishment testing.
And a lot of good it did to stop it from happening. It’s starting to sound like a familiar song to me, like that saying: history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.
When I say “mysteriously” I say it tongue in cheek, because all the warning signs are there for everyone to see with all of these scandals and somehow they just seem to play out anyway. A willful ignorance sets over the powers that control the decision making process, largely because there is money to be had in ignoring the signs.
Yes!!!
And there you have it.
Unions too. In the money-making business when you get right down to it. It wasn’t so long ago that almost the entire union system of the United Staes was owned and operated solely for the benefit of gangsters. Now? It is operated for the “benefit” of the officers and their political contacts. Same scene, different gangsters.
Up and down the line, from local government and business right on through the Feds and CorpAmerica. A gigantic criminal conspiracy, supported and made possible by the lying media’s mindhold on the American public.
Bet on it.
AG
Thanks for this. I also have just learned that 86% of Texas school districts (including ours) representing 91% of all Texas public school students, have signed onto a critical Resolution concerning High-stakes Testing issued by the TX Association of School Administrators:
http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/04/resolution-concerning-high-stakes.html
El Paso Schools Cheating Scandal: Who’s Accountable?