Michelle Rhee's no Educational Genius.

D.C's school district turned in incredible test scores the very first year Michelle Rhee became the Chancellor. There are now questions whether principals and teachers felt so threatened with the loss of their jobs that they cheated to improve test scores. Rhee is a test zealot, and pressure from her could have pushed many over the edge. Big surprise. Another reason a balanced approach makes more sense.

Rhee's 15 minutes of fame may be over finally:

USA Today: The publication of a 2009 memo written by a data analyst who said that there were suspicions that nearly 200 teachers had cheated on 2008 standardized tests in the District. The cheating concerns arise from Michelle Rhee’s 2008-2010 tenure in the District.

The memo was released by independent journalist John Merrow — who  chronicled

Rhee’s D.C. tenure in a “Frontline” segment for PBS earlier this year — as part of a post on his Taking Note blog titled “Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error.” It starts with this note: Michelle A. Rhee, America’s most famous school reformer, was fully aware of the extent of the problem when she glossed over what appeared to be widespread cheating during her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC.  A long-buried confidential memo suggests that the problem was far more serious than kids copying off other kids’ answer sheets.  Twice in just four pages the consultant suggests that Rhee’s own principals, some of whom she had hired, may have been responsible (“Could the erasures in some cases have been done by someone other than the students and the teachers?”).

Rhee has publicly maintained that, if bureaucratic red tape hadn’t gotten in the way, she would have investigated the erasures.

As John Merrow concluded, Rhee’s overzealous fixation on testing and measurement, and her efforts to silence and fire anyone who questioned her reckless, destabilizing strategies, ultimately failed D.C.’s kids. Under Rhee’s tenure, DC-CAS scores showed little or no gain, and the performance gap between low-income and upper-income students actually widened. Schools were destabilized by the constant churn of teachers and principals being fired, relocated or leaving out of frustration. Our children deserved better. 

After Vilification of Public schools and Vouchers shift, Republicans move away from testing and higher standards. Big Business Blindsided, Betrayed and Apoplectic.

Wanna know how sincere Republicans are about improving education, now they've bashed public schools and sold for-profit private voucher schools?

After strapping public schools with a heavy load of testing under NCLB, which turned a big profit for closely tied Republican businesses that wrote the tests (all in an effort to fail public schools), they’re now reversing course.

Since Republicans have successfully shifted taxpayer dollars to private schools through dozens of voucher schemes, Texas politicians are now lowering standards.

Ed Week: Leading Texas lawmakers are working to rewrite the state's high school graduation requirements with plans to change the default course of study and lower from 15 to five the number of end-of-course exams most students must pass to earn a diploma. Proponents call the legislative effort a reasonable approach to reduce testing and give students more flexibility in selecting high school courses.

You can just hear the Republicans now saying, “Suckers!”

Some observers say the plans would take Texas in the opposite direction of states that have worked to ratchet up their graduation requirements and embrace end-of-course exams.

The legislation, in a landslide vote, would replace the state's "recommended" high school pathway known as "4x4" (where) students must successfully complete four years of coursework in English, mathematics, science, and social studies … the measure would create a new "foundation" diploma, with fewer specific course requirements. Students would able to earn specified "endorsements" for such areas as STEM and business/industry if they wished. Students also would have to pass far fewer end-of-course exams. Among those no longer required would be Algebra 2, chemistry, physics, and English 3.

Keep in mind, Democrats have always argued for more flexibility to improve and change education for the better, and with fewer tests, but Republicans had a different more destructive idea; vouchers and the end of public schools.

Republicans screw over big business:

Sixteen business groups and large companies, including the Texas Association of Business, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, ExxonMobil, and Texas Instruments, sharply criticized the measures in a letter to state lawmakers last month. "We have been a national leader in promoting higher expectations for all students, and our young people have reaped big rewards," they wrote. "Now is not the time to reverse progress when Texas needs a more skilled workforce to meet the demands of the 21st-century economy."

Ideology of smaller government trumps everything. And all those Republican tough on education tests? Now they're saying "overboard" and "gone wild:"

Catherine Clark, the government-relations director for the Texas Association of School Boards, called the changes a common-sense approach to rein in state requirements that have gone too far. "What we have done to change public education in the last four or five years has gone overboard," she said, "requiring students to take 15 end-of-course tests that count for graduation. That is just high-stakes testing gone wild."

Ya think?

La Raza and the Education Trust, in a letter last month to Texas lawmakers call the legislation a "retreat from progress Texas has made" in recent years. "The proposed changes would take Texas back to the bad old days of pervasive tracking…”

Just in time for vouchers…?

Walker: Fire all the Teachers! But Student Test Scores Wrong Way to Go.

To hear governor candidate Scott Walker talk about it, teacher evaluations based on student tests is tough love, and another way to finally weed out freeloading union teachers. But why base anything on research when strict disciplinary remedies illicit stronger, more predictable voter reactions and outrage. From Upfront with Mike Gousha (Goo-shay):



The facts say otherwise, and once again reinforce the shoot from the hip style of the Republican Party and why were in this deep recessionary hole. From the Economic Policy Institute:

American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

… there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.

A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that … such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation … Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise. Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, even with the addition of value-added modeling (VAM), a new Economic Policy Institute report by leading testing experts finds.

The distinguished authors of EPI’s report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, make clear that the accuracy and reliability of analyses of student test scores, even in their most sophisticated form, is highly problematic VAM results show that they are often unstable across time, classes and tests; thus, test scores, even with the addition of VAM, are not accurate indicators of teacher effectiveness.

Student test scores, even with VAM, cannot fully account for the wide range of factors that influence student learning, particularly the backgrounds of students, school supports and the effects of summer learning loss. As a result, teachers who teach students with the greatest educational needs appear to be less effective than they are.

Furthermore, VAM does not take into account nonrandom sorting of teachers to students across schools and students to teachers within schools. Furthermore, creating a system in which teachers are, in effect, competing with each other can reduce the incentive to collaborate within schools—and studies have shown that better schools are marked by teaching staffs that work together.

Finally, judging teachers based on test scores that do not genuinely assess students’ progress can demoralize teachers, encouraging them to leave the teaching field.

Demoralizing teachers, by demonizing their unions or poorly funding mandates on educators, is really the point here. Oddly, teachers in private schools doing a similar job or more poorly are never mentioned. Voucher school advocates have never suggested similar tests for private school teachers, complaining instead that such meddling would interfere with the free market and inhibit innovation.