There is a large and vocal support of Michelle Rhee in the press. I beg to differ and to offer an opinion and some research that the reporters, and her friends have not examined to think about her policies.No one speaks for many who have worked in urban, or rural or
difficult education for years without any support, funding or publicity. Maybe some of these people should attend the Think Tanks on Scholarship to tell their truths or at least question the soothsayers.
I am a citizen of Washington DC. I have taught in a school in my neighborhood in South west. No, I am not one of her victims. I taught in Arlington, Virginia for years, I taught in DODDS schools in Baumholder, GDE, and I have taught using technology in every state in the US but Montana, and North Dakota. I am not unaware of the plight of the Native American students, nor the Hispanic students. I am the digital equity chair of two educational organizations and we study these ideas and talk about them for our members, this essay however, reflects my own views.
Empowerment and Enterprise Zones
I taught in an initiative for the White House that crossed the country in areas of need and especially in urban areas. I have friends wo have invited me to Mississippi to teach and it was a wonderful experience, I have worked in 22 countries in educational technology during WSIS and for the GAID. The work in developing nations is not much different that the problem of the places without broadband. The key to successful education is teacher professional development of a quality nature.
My Beef, The Canonization of Ms . Rhee as the only Educational Leader
The Wall Street Journal recently wondered out loud why Michelle Rhee is not supported by the President.
Heavens forbid such a thing should happen!
Ms. Rhee is a business entrepreneur. She has worked her way into the think tanks of the rich and famous along with Mayor Bloomberg. She had a very brief teaching experience in Baltimore. She admits that in her short time of teaching that she was not very good.
Her plan works well economically, dump the older teachers, close and consolidate the schools and save the mayor money. Oh and get rid of the Union influence. This has been brought before the think tanks of the US. You know, the ones that most of us cannot afford. They cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000.
Regular people are not able to attend these thought police programs.
The programs bring her out as a provocative speaker. She is their rock star.
Her project is Teach for America. The ideas of the project are not bad. That students go to the best schools and then dedicate their time to schools in need is not a bad one.
There is some conflict for the jobs within the grasp of those who finish in the
Minority Serving Colleges and Universities, but that is a minor blip. Teach for America is less expensive than hiring the recent graduates of the colleges and universities in the regions and who may have very dedicated students who are hoping to be the base of broadening engagement for America as well.
The economic base works. If you are not one of the older teachers or one of the minority teachers seeking to work in your own area.
Achievements? Depends on What you Read!! Who Do you Believe?
ONLY ONE CONCLUSION can be drawn from national tests showing D.C. public schools outpacing many of their big-city peers in bettering students’ math skills: The reforms being undertaken by Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee are working. But even as the District celebrates the loss of its dubious status as one of the nation’s worst school systems, the sobering reality is there is still a long way to go before it can boast about its public education system.
New findings released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department showed the District making dramatic gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Of the big cities studied, the District was the only one to post gains of more than five points in both grades; only two other big cities have ever done that, with the last having done so in 2005. D.C. now ranks 11th out of 18 urban school systems at the fourth-grade level, and 13th out of 18 at the eighth-grade level.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120903940.html
Red flags regarding Michelle Rhee
Regarding the Dec. 10 editorial “Doing the math in D.C.”:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/12/13/AR2009121302446.html
As a former D.C. public schoolteacher, I find it perplexing that The Post’s editorial board continues to participate in Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s cult-of-personality campaign despite a body of evidence, some reported in these very pages, that much of what has been accomplished is an illusion.
Ms. Rhee has gone as far as to comment that previous test gains were the result of picking “low-hanging fruit.” Moreover, the recent internal and external investigations into cheating and the changes in the number of students who can be given alternative assessments are indicative of an administration that is scrambling to educate itself in the realities of the classroom.
Chancellor Rhee says, “Students [defied] naysayers who told me two years ago that the school district of D.C. was a lost war for the prosperity of children’s minds.”
The low Hanging Fruit..? The work done by Clifford Janey!!
This from the Washington Post
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dc/2009/12/janey_says_footprint_still_fre.html
When Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee met with reporters last week to tout the District’s improved math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) , she did it with a nod to her predecessor, Clifford Janey. It was under Janey, who was dismissed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty after Fenty took control of the public school system in 2007, that the six year rise in NAEP scores began.
In Janey’s view, the shout-out wasn’t necessary.
“The Janey footprint is there and it needs no excavation to be seen,” he said in a phone interview last week from his office in Newark, N.J., where he has served as superintendent of schools since mid-2008. “Those in-the-know, know. I don’t need affirmation to know we made some incredible acts of transformation in Washington D.C. over a short period of time that is evidenced now much more publicly through the NAEP.”
Janey said that one of his first tasks after he came to the District in 2004 was to find a new standardized test to replace the Stanford 9, which he said lacked rigor.
“The first thing I did in he first month of my tenure was organize a group of teachers, administrators and community advocates and members of the business community,” Janey said. “I tasked them to research the very best content standards and curriculum frameworks at the state level and to see who was making faster improvement on the NAEP.”
Permission?
What Michelle Rhee is good at is holding NCLB, as the mantra for her doctrine of what should happen in schools. We DC citizens are crippled by the lack of an active voice on the hill that matters, and in DC by a lack of interest in school policies as to what the community wants. You have only to read Bill Turque’s columns to see the difficulty.
Hidden problems are the moving around of school populations , not that gang territories should be the map of the way schools are designated for closure.
There have always been members of the minority populations who have given their all to upraise their race, culture and minority group. There have always been those who stood in harms way to make a difference. There have also been those who have not had a Harvard, or Brown education, nothing from the Ivy League, but they have soldiered on working with students who have been in the direst need. The implications of the press are that none of us have ever made a difference and that we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Ms Rhee holds the doctrine of No Child Left Behind as her mantra for chance.
The National Academy, National Research Council, Washington DC neither Republican, or Democratic in nature examined the assessment practices of NCLB , both negative and positive and found them wanting. The testing specialists are called pyschometricians. You can find all of their presentations on this home page and reach your own conclusions.
The goal to reach all children was a great one. But there were problems that exceed the positive impact of reaching out to every child. The system is broken
Education needs change in many ways. As we use the participatory cultures in technology we are aware that there is a digital, a content , an information and a technology divide.
Here is where educators are now, we share formal and informal learning practices using participatory cultures that foster and motivate student development of the skills needed to achieve in a new media learning environment that will lead toward workforce readiness for the 21st Century. .
We feature broadening engagement in the use of emerging technologies with referential case studies, research and books, as well as videos from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and provide examples of how digital media empower youth, and encourages self-directed learning, unfolds in three stages of progressively greater immersion and learning: what they label as “hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out.”
Finally, we connect the dots to STEM and the computational sciences with games, and virtual learning initiatives that go from data to discovery and scientific learning that identifies and nurtures pools of potential STEM talent ?
Since No Child Left Behind was created testing has taken over our schools. Not just the testing for the program , the state tests, the interim tests, the practice tests, the grade level tests, and the school focus tests. Even in the best of teaching situations, testing has become out of control. Think AYP. Thinking about it is one thing individualizing it for a school a difficult problem.One has only to look at the matrix of the tests that have been created in Washington DC to see that testing has become teaching. The board said that innovation had been strangled in our schools and offered new ways or working.
People who should be brought forward with new ideas in education, are people like Dr, Chris Dede,Dr. Shirley Malcom, Dr. Norm Augustine, Dr. Paul Resta, Dr. Robert Panoff. But maybe they are not “sexy” enough. Maybe the Barbie doll syndrome even fits in education. Maybe you have to be “cute” to get a voice.
Maybe reporters don’t do their homework even through contacts with their own networks?
Food for Thought
Best Practices workshop last Thursday and Friday, December 10-11. The videos are now posted, and the links appear on the attached agenda. As a reminder, here is the link to the project site with power points.
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bota/B
est_Practices_Homepage.html Please feel free to share these links with anyone you think might be interested.
Best Practices for State Assessment Systems: Improving Assessment while Revisiting Standards
www7.nationalacademies.org
Board on Testing and Assessment The National Academies 500 5th Street, NW – 11th Floor Washington, D.C. 20001 Tel: 202-334-2353 Fax: 202-334-1294 E-mail: bota1@nas.edu
So we are on another journey to find a solution. State Standards are the New Movement.