Still cleaning up Rhee's Value-Added mess in D.C.

Seattle teachers protest Rhee-forms.

They're still cleaning up the debris from Michelle Rhee's signature reform in D.C.. Her top-down imposed Value-Added IMPACT system of teacher evaluation has long caused havoc in the system here and elsewhere. Remember, it's also a central piece of Arne Duncan's Race To The Top.

The teachers union should have never agreed to IMPACT and evals based on student test scores.  The formula for tying every student's test score bump or dip directly to an individual teacher is so complicated and inherently error-ridden that it's bound to confuse parents and negatively affect teachers and students.

Monday's Washington Post reports that faulty calculations of the “value” that D.C. teachers added to student achievement in the last school year resulted in erroneous performance evaluations for 44 teachers, including one who was fired because of a low rating. School officials described the errors as the most significant since the system launched a controversial initiative in 2009 to evaluate teachers in part on student test scores.

Half of the evaluations for the 44 teachers were too high and half too low, said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for D.C. Public Schools.

Current WTU Pres. Elizabeth Davis, called the disclosure disturbing.

“IMPACT needs to be reevaluated,” Davis said. “The idea of attaching test scores to a teacher’s evaluation — that idea needs to be junked.”

Now she tells us.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Chancellor Kaya Henderson, a Rhee protege, aren't likely to junk V-A regardless of its consequences.

We should also consider the shameful role played by some academics in the imposition of value-added evals. One case in point: It was back in October when Professors Thomas Dee of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia were heaping praise on  Rhee's V-A program, calling it, effective and accurate.

D.C.'s Mayor Gray under fire for Rhee-ism without Rhee

Like President Obama, who campaigned as a critic of the war in Iraq but then continued many of George W. Bush’s military policies once in office, Gray ran as a skeptic of the reforms being implemented by Rhee but continued them under Henderson, who also has closed more than a dozen schools and fired hundreds of teachers. -- Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

D.C. students protest 2010 teacher firings.

Following up on Monday's post which was critical of WaPo's excellent education writer Valerie Strauss. Remember, Strauss was dismissive in her response to D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray's drawing parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid. I defended Gray on that one, but also pointed out that I was also critical of Gray who seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessors Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.

It was Fenty who brought in Rhee as his appointed school chancellor. In a matter of months, Rhee, with heavy backing from corporate school reformers and power philanthropists, threw the school system into financial chaos. Her regime was marked by a massive test-cheating scandal along with a successful effort to weaken the teachers union and take away many of the teachers' collective bargaining rights. Rhee fired hundreds of good teachers and regularly debased the entire teaching force, promoted vouchers for Catholic schools, and put many the district's schools into the hands of private charter operators. The list goes on. But while Rhee became the darling of the corporate school reformers,  including Arne Duncan, she drew the ire of parents and of the city's under-served black community.

Henderson and Rhee

Fortunately, both Fenty and Rhee were run out of D.C. in a populist revolt by district voters. Unfortunately, Mayor Gray, who ran as an outspoken critic of Fenty's policies, quickly appointed Rhee's deputy “for human capital” Kaya Henderson as his chancellor. She is now following in Rhee's footsteps. Back in 2010 I called it, Rhee-ism without Rhee. 

Instead of dismantling Fenty's "reforms", Gray has continued them. Henderson, has closed more than a dozen schools and has fired hundreds of more teachers and librarians. D.C. charters now have the third-highest market share in the nation, enrolling a larger proportion of students than in every city except New Orleans and Detroit

Gray is now running for a second term and like Fenty, he's coming under heavy fire from educators, parents and school activists for his Rhee(ism)-without-Rhee approach. At Monday's community meeting, Gray was confronted by a hostile crowd that packed Eastern High School's auditorium to slam his education policies and his appointment of Henderson.

The Post reports:

On Monday, upstart candidates including restaurateur Andy Shallal, the owner of Busboys and Poets, and Reta Jo Lewis, a Democrat and former State Department official, drew the biggest applause, indicting both Gray and members of the council who seek to replace him for alienating parents and teachers amid a forceful push for school reform.

It looks like the mayor is in for tough sledding in the months leading up to the election. But as we have seen, getting rid of a mayor or a corrupt schools chancellor is one thing. Getting rid of the powerful corporate interests behind them is quite another. They don't have to run for office.

WHO WILL DE BLASIO PICK?

On that point -- Now that New Yorkers have elected progressive Bill deBlasio as their mayor along with a slate of councilmen backed by the Working Families Party, all eyes are on that city to see who the new mayor will pick as his chancellor. Rumors abound that Henderson and Chicago school chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett have made the short list.

I hope those rumors are false. I'm also glad to see Valerie Strauss is back on track. Here's her take on a possible Henderson appointment in N.Y.

The white blindspot -- My response to Valerie Strauss

"We called it ‘segregation,’ they called it ‘apartheid,” it’s the same system and the same political and military and diplomatic players. We had to fight that same system running parallel.” -- Rev. Jesse Jackson

D.C. Mayor Gray at South
African Embassy (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

I never thought I would be saying this, but I'm shocked and dismayed by Valerie Strauss's column in yesterday's Washington Post ("D.C. Mayor Gray needs a history lesson on apartheid"). Let me say first that I have been a big fan of Valerie's for years and not such a big fan of Mayor Gray's. I often link to her blog and re-post most of her columns on Twitter. She has been a superb defender of public education and a thorn in the side of the corporate school reformers and privatizers, while Gray often seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessor and Michelle Rhee follower, Adrian Fenty.

That being said, yesterday's admonishment delivered to D.C.'s African-American Mayor Vincent Gray, over his daring, in a rhetorical way, to draw parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid, was almost too much to bear.

Mayor Gray reportedly said:

I think there are some parallels because we have 632,000 people who continue to live under the yoke of a form of oppression.  You know, we can’t control our own money, we can’t control our own local laws. We have taxation without representation in this city. I think there are a lot of people who see a parallel between his experience and ours.

Strauss alerts us that Gray "didn’t say it just once on Friday," but "uttered similar words at least four times during the day." I guess that's the answer to who's counting?

Gray might have added (maybe he did elsewhere) that even as we speak, D.C. residents don't even have full voting rights including voting representation in the Congress. The Constitution grants the Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the District in "all cases whatsoever" including the District's public schools. D.C. is also a city that is in the process of being whitenized as thousands of poor black families are being pushed out of the district and its schools. D.C. is no longer a majority-black city and the black population has been shrinking steadily for the past few years.

Gray could have also pointed out, as Michelle Alexander does in her book, "The New Jim Crow", that the U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South African did at the height of apartheid.

Writes Alexander:

“In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”

Now Mayor Gray never said that conditions in D.C. were exactly the same or nearly as brutal as South African apartheid. But his drawing of "some parallels" between the two resonated, I'm sure, with many of the District's black residents -- of which Strauss is not one.

They also resonated with me. I have been to South Africa and spent time in schools there as well as in D.C. and couldn't help drawing numerous parallels between them and the apartheid-like, racially-segregated school system that still predominates in cities like D.C. and Chicago.

Gray wasn't really saying anything new here. Valerie (and all of us) would do well to read "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass" by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton. I'm sure she wouldn't find much to disagree with in the author's comparisons or with their emphasis on poverty as a driving force in the so-called "failure" of American schools.

It was author/activist Jonathan Kozol (who certainly needs no history lessons from any of us) who helped popularize the parallels between apartheid South Africa and school systems in D.C., Chicago, E. St. Louis and other cities, when he titled his 2006 book "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America."

The irony here is that Strauss ran a great interview with Kozol on the eve of our 2011 Save Our Schools protest in D.C. In that interview, Kozol refers to NCLB as "an apartheid of the intellect."

NCLB, in itself, adds a whole new level of division on the basis of a child's economic class or race. An  One class enjoys the treasures of the earth and also learns to ask demanding and irreverent and insightful questions. The other class is trained to spit up predigested answers.

Valerie doesn't blink.

Obviously there are differences between the South African system of apartheid and U.S. post-slavery, post-Jim Crow, segregation. For one thing, hypersegregation here has become defacto instead of enforced by law as it was in South African and in Jim Crow America.

As Dr. King said in a 1963 speech,

"We like to draw parallels between forms of oppression to neatly summarize the experiences, but in the 1960s black Americans were recognized as human by their constitution, whereas black South Africans were not."

But the closer you are to systemic, historic, institutional racial inequities, often the harder they can be to see...for some people, even very smart people like Valerie Strauss.

The white blindspot.

Reforming Rhee-form

Some good news coming out of D.C. Mayor Gray is standing up to de-funding threats by corporate reformers. He says he's looking to reform Rhee's "reform", collaborate with the union & select permanent Rhee-placement.  

Gray's education transition team is recommending significant changes to the controversial IMPACT teacher evaluation tool created by interim Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson as a way to rate teachers and fire them on the basis of student standardized test scores.  Henderson was Rhee's assistant. But it's looking more and more likely that she herself will replaced based on recommendations from Gray's transition team which is headed by Katherine Bradley, president of CityBridge Foundation, and Michael Lomax, head of  the United Negro College Fund.

The question is, will Arne Duncan and the venture philanthropists who backed Rhee-form take revenge on the district by pulling badly needed foundation and federal dollars?

Gray's moves have conservatives like AEI's Rick Hess in a tizzy. 

...when Gray promised to stay the course on D.C.’s promising reform efforts and welcomed Fenty’s decision to name Rhee’s deputy Kaya Henderson as interim chancellor, reformers crossed their fingers and hoped (especially since Gray knows that any serious retreat from the D.C. reform agenda risks tens of millions in philanthropic support, and an equal amount in federal Race to the Top funds).

Voucher blackmail

Sen. Lieberman is already threatening to withhold ed funds from D.C. schools unless district approves vouchers for Catholic schools. Would this kind of blackmail ever happen in a mainly-white or middle-class district? Or in a city with full voting rights?  Uh uh.

Gray's choices

Broom Lady gone from D.C. but mayor's new picks don't reflect any new thinking on ed reform.

In Chicago, Mahaley, 42, led Mayor Richard M. Daley's initiative to close low-performing schools and replace them with charter-like schools...Mahaley has most recently been an executive director at Wireless Generation, a Brooklyn-based education technology firm recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (Wapo)

Rhee-ism without Rhee?

Is D.C. mayor-elect Vincent Gray strong enough to follow the mandate of those who elected him and break with Michelle Rhee's destructive approach to school reform? He knows it's the right thing to do and has been openly critical of Rhee's testing madness, her one-sided emphasis on the classroom teacher,  and her divisive anti-unionism. But it would mean risking the ire of Arne Duncan and the power philanthropists, whose largesse keeps the district financially afloat. 

Gray's appointment of deputy chancellor, Kaya Henderson, as interim chancellor is an indication that he isn't ready right now to stand up to the corporate reformers. Henderson is a Rhee acolyte who has vowed to continue the emphasis on mass teacher firings, privately-managed charter schools and standardized testing. Like Rhee, Henderson believes that poverty and racial inequities are just excuses for low test scores.

At an August meeting of school principals, Henderson offered a football-coach-style motivational talk, reinforcing Rhee's core message: that poverty and other conditions outside the classroom are not an excuse for poor academic achievement. (WaPo)

It's possible that Gray simply needs time to let the Waiting for Superman mania subside a bit, let the mid-term elections pass and consolidate his own political allies before making a clean break with Rhee-ism. Let's hope. 

* Also see Valerie Strauss' post at today's Answer Sheet, "What D.C. schools need now: A departure from Rheeism."

WaPo headline: 'Rhee appears shaken after meeting'

Duncan's for mayoral control only if he can control the mayor

Rhee & Gray

Arne Duncan is a big fan of mayoral control of the schools--or at least he says he is. In fact, when Duncan was first appointed as secretary of education, he staked his very reputation on placing many more urban school districts under one-man, top-down control by their mayors. He even told us:

"At the end of my tenure, if only seven mayors are in control, I think I will have failed," Duncan said. He offered to do whatever he can to make the case. "I'll come to your cities," Duncan said. "I'll meet with your editorial boards. I'll talk with your business communities. I will be there."

So now we have a new popularly-elected mayor in D.C., Vincent Gray, who won by a substantial margin over incumbent Adrian Fenty. Voters, especially those in predominantly black wards, made it clear that they were voting in large part against  the continuation of Michelle Rhee as schools chancellor and especially against her firings of hundred of D.C. teachers. Rhee is the very embodiment of Duncan's Race-To-The-Top reform, a strategy focused on  school closings, privately-run charter schools,  mass teacher firings, and the undermining of collective-bargaining agreements.

Duncan campaigned actively for Fenty in the days leading up to the election. He used federal dollars to shower the district with grants and awards, as well as personal school tours and photo ops with Fenty and Rhee. Never before in history had an education secretary been so personally involved in trying to shape the outcome of a local mayor's race. He, along with several of the powerhouse foundations underwriting Rhee's efforts, even threatened to withhold more than $75 million in badly-needed school dollars should Gray defeat Fenty and replace Rhee with a leader more acceptable to the community.

But those threats obviously backfired, seeming to energize D.C. voters even more against Fenty, Rhee and Duncan.

Now suddenly, mayoral control seems to have slid from atop Duncan's priority list. Cheered on by a host of Washington's rich and powerful attending the recent premiere screening of the anti-union propaganda film Waiting for Superman, Duncan went into full arm-twisting mode, repeatedly calling Gray to cajole, threaten, and demand that he keep Rhee and her failed, divisive policies in place. Voters be damned. According to Newsweek:

Duncan has some influence with Gray, since the federal department recently announced that D.C. was one of the winners of the national Race to the Top school-reform competition, and stands to win $75 million if it implements the reforms Rhee’s administration outlined in its application... Duncan said he knows that Gray “knows what’s at stake” and “wants D.C. schools to continue to make progress.”

At this point, we don't know whether or not the man the Washington Post refers to as the "presumptive mayor" will fold under the pressure from Duncan and the foundations. But one thing seems clear. For Duncan, mayoral control really means control of the mayor.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Gray vs. Rhee

"Frankly, we live in a city that has been oppressed," Gray said after a 2007 list of prospective school closings appeared in The Washington Post before the council learned about it. "In this city, more than any other, how you do something is a major factor. It is a city that has been dictated to. People are very sensitive to being left out." ("D.C. school chief Rhee's next move probably toward the door"--WaPo)

Bobb vs. Rhee

He sees at least one difference between himself and the outspoken Rhee, who alienated black parents -- and ultimately black voters -- in a racially divided election in which whites tended to support Fenty and blacks mostly backed Gray.

"I can go into an African-American community and say I grew up on a sugar cane plantation where education was the only way out. . . . I think how you relate sometimes gives you a slight edge, particularly in an urban environment," (Times-Dispatch)

Learning from Rhee's Mistakes

But Fenty's defeat isn't about race or personality. It's about bad decisions, particularly on school reform. His school reform strategies, as shoved through by Rhee, alienated the voters.(Mark Simon, WaPo)

An inconvenient Superman

Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for US dominance in the world. The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in stark grey, then a little white girl sitting at a desk is dropped in the midst of it. The text: "The fate of our country won't be decided on a battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom." (Rick Ayers --Huffington)

Alfie Kohn vs. blaming kids

Blaming students is the next logical step after blaming teachers. In fact, the two reflect the same general perspective on education, one in which commentators look down from their aeries and inform us that the trouble lies with the people in the classrooms rather than with the policies imposed on them. ("Schools would be great if it weren't for the kids"--WaPo)