Tag Archive for 'Michelle Rhee'

Turnaround Without Turmoil, Part II

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 12, 2009 in Education Leadership and Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher set tongues in motion last week with his piece about Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, a high-poverty school, which has reversed its performance in the last few years by raising expectations and cooperating with its teachers union.  In a promised follow up column, Fisher looks in on Truesdell Educational Center, a Washington, DC school demographically similar to Broad Acres.  “Could a similar turnaround happen in a D.C. school,” Fisher asks, “and does Rhee’s more confrontational approach make that kind of change more or less likely?”

As at Broad Acres, Truesdell principal Brearn Wright believes half the battle is persuading teachers that kids from dysfunctional backgrounds must be held to high standards, Fisher notes.  “He screened inspirational scenes from the movie ‘Miracle,’ about the 1980 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team.  But when Wright asked teachers to mark down what percentage of Truesdell kids should be making the proficient grade in reading, only a few dared to write 100. Most wrote numbers such as 55, 65, 68 or 69,” Fisher reports.

In the classrooms, in stark contrast to many D.C. schools, students seem engaged and eager to progress. The atmosphere is still colder and more militaristic than in more successful schools; a teacher wins quiet by announcing, “Work harder,” to which the children respond, in Pavlovian fashion, “Get smarter.” But there are creative projects in nearly every room. In the third-floor hallway, two fifth-grade boys take notes on a clipboard; they are finding fractions — a door half-open, a coffee cup four-fifths empty, and so on.

“Test scores aren’t in yet, and no one expects miracles,” Fisher concludes. ”‘We’re not there,’ Wright says, ‘but we’re getting there. Kids are learning.’ At Truesdell, in part because of the chancellor’s confrontational ways and in part in spite of them, it feels like a revolution is brewing.”

Fisher’s original column drew both praise and scorn around the blogs, and started an interesting thread of discussion on the optimal unit of currency — the school or the district — in reversing low achievement. “Single schools like Broad Acres really can be saved,” commented 30-year veteran teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan, “because tools like professional development, better curriculum, more time and community-building commitment actually can work at that level, where people area not anonymous cogs and individual kids’ progress can be carefully tracked.”

My own sense is that enthusiasm for change (which equals fidelity of implementation) is enormously important.  Lack of staff buy-in for any program, curriculum or flavor of reform is almost certainly its death knell, which is why leadership is so important.  I hope Fisher revisits these schools and reports back from time to time.

Turnaround Without Turmoil

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Education Leadership, Educational Policy and accountability. 8 Comments

Are conflict and confrontation necessary ingredients in a school turnaround?  Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher files a provocative column about a Maryland school that is succeeding without the kind of bare knuckle brawls that are drawing national media attention to Michelle Rhee and the nearby Washington, DC school system.

Fisher goes to Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring where scores were so low eight years ago that a state takeover loomed. Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry Weast and Principal Jody Leleck negotiated with the teachers union to add extra hours to the work week for extra pay. “Teachers would offer no more excuses about poor kids from dysfunctional families; expectations would soar. About a third of the faculty left; Leleck hired 27 veteran teachers that first summer” he reports. 

Rhee’s faceoff with the Washington Teachers’ Union creates a dynamic different from the cooperation between Weast and Montgomery County Education Association President Bonnie Cullison. She said she hears Rhee telling teachers, ” ‘You’re not doing the job,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s work together.’ You cannot make it happen in a district where you set up conflict”…Weast won’t criticize his D.C. counterpart, but he will say that narrowing the achievement gap is about expecting all children to work hard and love learning. “You can do it anyplace if you treat people like you want to be treated,” he says.

Today, 81 percent meet reading proficiency standards this year, up from 47 percent in 2003. “Broad Acres did this without Rhee’s reform tactics,” Fisher points out. ”No young recruits from Teach for America, no cash for students who come to class, no linkage of teacher pay to test scores.”  And what’s happening inside the classrooms?

Too often, schools desperate to boost test scores become grim factories in which children are force-fed rote skills. But at Broad Acres, teachers coach each other to keep kids engaged in rich material for its own sake. In Andrea Sutton’s fifth-grade class, 16 kids sit on the floor, jumping up to explain to one another the roots of the American colonists’ grievances with the British. The teacher’s voice never rises above a stage whisper as she plies the class with questions that would fit nicely in a high school course.  With all the pressure from No Child Left Behind, it’s so easy to cut out history and science,” Bayewitz says. “But these kids are going to need those complex skills in high school and college. And these kids are going to college.”

Claus von Zastrow at Public School Insights observes that Fisher’s piece reminds us “that school improvement does not necessarily require a death-match between high-profile ‘reformers’ and the education ‘establishment.’” Fisher is promising a follow-up column Sunday on ”a D.C. school that matches Broad Acre’s population, put presumably not its methods.  Stay tuned.

2008’s Education Person of the Year: Michelle Rhee

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 1, 2009 in Education Leadership. 24 Comments

To whom much is given, much is expected.  And Washington DC’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been given quite a bit:  control of one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, a broad mandate for sweeping reform, and the unequivocal support of her boss, Washington mayor Adrian Fenty.  She’s also been given an inexhaustible work ethic, a hardcore “no excuses” management style, and an apparent immunity to criticism or the opinion of others. 

Now, much is expected.  Everything, in fact. 

She is, in the apt description of The Atlantic, “the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide.”  Her rise in the last 18 months from relative obscurity to the cover of Time Magazine earned her the top spot in our poll to determine the most influential person in education in 2008.   It wasn’t a close contest. 

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post was one of many of our panel of observers to put Rhee at the top of his list of the year’s most influential people in education, citing her status as “the most visible educator of the year, pushing the discussion toward rewarding teachers and ending tenure.”  The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation likewise placed Rhee atop their ballots.  Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools.net, cited Rhee’s “radical new way of thinking about the teaching profession, including tenure and compensation.”

“Love her or hate her, she is redefining the very definition of an urban superintendent,” said Patrick Riccards, author of the blog Eduflack.  ”She has changed the way teachers, families, the community, and businesses think about DC Public Schools.  For the first time in a long time, people have hope for schools in the District.”

Rhee’s paradigm shattering proposal for DC teachers–way higher pay in exchange for giving up seniority and tenure-has pushed her to the forefront of the national dialogue about teacher quality and compensation.  In the process she has become, perhaps inevitably, the most polarizing figure in education.  Her brand of education reform strikes a nerve-and a chord.  She has clearly tapped into the energy and idealism of younger teachers who are often mystified by union politics and fiercely committed to closing the achievement gap.  Rhee’s proposal is not intimidating, but welcome to many of the “Rhee-volutionaries” she’s attracting to the nation’s capitol.  Perform or perish?  Bring it on.  ”If I worked my butt off, did everything I could, and got fired by an administration like Rhee’s who deemed my teaching ineffective, I would tip my hat, sigh of relief, and find a new career or job,” a first-year Teach for America corps member commented on this blog in response to the Time Magazine cover story about Rhee.  A Newsweek profile, one of dozens of national news stories about the Chancellor in 2008, noted “Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets.”

KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on.

A fight over the teachers’ contract looms in 2009. The Washington Teachers’ Union has brought in the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten to address the stalled negotiations. The stakes and the rhetoric are high.  “I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats,” union vice-president Nathan Saunders told Newsweek. “I believe this contract is going to pass.  And I believe it is going to have a huge impact,” said Rhee. “Even if it didn’t, it would not stop me.”

That’s precisely the kind of don’t-mess-with-me rhetorical flourish that divides Rhee fans from her detractors. “Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly,” notes columnist Julia Steiny. ”Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.”   

In the final analysis, Michelle Rhee is, as The Atlantic correctly concluded, carrying the very viability of education reform on her shoulders:

Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform-not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community. The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all.”

Note:  Thanks to our panel of education observers and pundits for their time and help in making the Education Person of the Year series possible: Sol Stern, Jay Mathews, Bill Jackson, Andy Rotherham, Diane Ravitch, Mike Petrilli, Jay Greene Michael Shaughnessy, Nancy Flanagan, Patrick Riccards, Corey Bunje Bower and Dan Brown.

Poverty Matters vs. No Excuses

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 3, 2008 in Opinion and accountability. 18 Comments

One of the best and most interesting recent articles about education disappeared beneath Thanksgiving leftovers and holiday shopping last Friday.  It needs to be read and discussed.  The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews tells the story of a young teacher who was rejected by the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program, apparently for questioning the orthodoxy that good teachers should be able to raise the achievement of even the poorest kids. ”How do we address the outside influences if we pretend they don’t exist?” asks would-be teacher Erika Owens.  Mathews is firmly in the “no excuses” camp, but to his credit he took Owens question seriously. ”It is too easy to make one side think they are being called racists and the other side think they are being called bullies,” observes Mathews, who opens his prodigious rolodex to ask a range of leading lights “Should teachers ignore poverty?”

“Full personal responsibility for student achievement and refusing to blame other factors does NOT mean we ignore the other factors,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg wrote to Mathews. ”It simply means we view other factors as challenges and problems that require solutions, and we view the possibility of solutions as fitting inside our personal sphere of influences vs. shrugging our shoulders and giving up.” 

“You have to know the challenges our kids come with, take them seriously, try to provide resources to address them but at the end of the day they CANNOT be an excuse for low achievement levels. That’s the bottom line,” writes Michelle Rhee, ever the lightning rod.  “If a teacher doesn’t believe it’s possible for a teacher or school to overcome those factors, that is actually okay. Those teachers should teach in Fairfax County or somewhere where the challenges are not as great.”

As in most debates on education, there’s a false dichotomy at work.  Surely there is a difference between the teacher who walks into the classroom assuming poor children can’t learn, and simply ascribing every student failure to a bad teacher.  Poverty matters, clearly.  And just as clearly it is unacceptable for a teacher to lower his or her expectations of a student’s capabilities based on economic status.  But where this laudable belief leaves the rails is when you hold the teacher accountable if she fails to get every child to proficiency. 

I think we would agree, that America would be well served if we could clone Rafe Esquith, the legendary Los Angeles 5th grade teacher and author of Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, and put him in every classroom.  But listen to this great and heroic teacher speak heresy:  “People who believe that ‘all children will learn’ have watched too many Hollywood movies about teachers,” says Esquith.  “The idea that all children will learn sounds wonderful, but these words need to be surrounded with a little bit of realism.”  Based on this attitude alone, Esquith likely would have been rejected by the same program as the young would-be teacher who wrote to Mathews.  It should go without saying that this is pure lunacy.   “Never stop trying,” is an essential character trait for a teacher.  “Never fail,” is a silly and ultimately self-defeating standard.  Plan A is to hound our best and hardest-working teachers from the profession not for failing to believe they can work magic, but for actually failing to do so? What’s Plan B?  

As Mathews correctly observes, attitude matters.  But there is a world of difference between filling struggling schools with fiercely committed teachers willing to take on the hardest challenge in education, and labeling them as failures if they do not succeed with every child.  By that standard, Rafe Esquith, arguably the best teacher in America, is a failure. 

Finally, I can’t help but be struck by Mathews own take on the debate.  “The prevailing view that impoverished children cannot be expected to learn as much as affluent children is poison in any classroom,” he writes.  Sure, but let’s be clear about this:  One of the reasons — perhaps THE reason — poor children don’t learn as much as affluent children has nothing to do with teacher attitudes. 

The reason poor children learn less is because they are taught less.

Michelle Rhee Is Scaring Me

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 1, 2008 in Education News, No category and Opinion. 59 Comments

I have never met Michelle Rhee.  Like many people in education, I’ve seen her speak on panels and at conferences, and I’ve read about her extensively.  And let me say clearly, immediately and unambiguously that I support most of what she stands for.  Furthermore, I am in absolute agreement that a profound lack of patience is the only reasonable response to a failed and sclerotic urban school system.  I get it. 

Michelle Rhee is starting to make me nervous.  I don’t mean giddy-excited nervous, but wincing, “uh-oh” nervous.  With her appearance on the cover of Time Magazine this week, she’s now officially the face of education reform in the U.S.

That face is wearing a scowl.  America, say goodbye to Wendy “One Day, All Children” Kopp.  Meet Michelle “I don’t give a crap” Rhee.  Education reformers, say hello to your new cover girl:

In many private encounters with officials, bureaucrats and even fundraisers–who have committed millions of dollars to help her reform the schools–she doesn’t smile or nod or do any of the things most people do to put others at ease. She reads her BlackBerry when people talk to her. I have seen her walk out of small meetings held for her benefit without a word of explanation. She says things most superintendents would not. “The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn’t respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

Saying ”the thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely” is kind of like saying, ”The thing that kills me about accountancy is that it’s so detail-oriented.”  I’m as data-driven as the next guy, but education is now and always will be — must be — a people-driven enterprise.  People are the product.  The desire to successfully develop the capabilities of others is what gets teachers out of bed in the morning.   

Even people who work for her seem to agree.  By coincidence, the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews has a piece in today’s paper about Brian Betts, Rhee’s hand-picked principal of Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson.  And Jay has him sounding downright touchy-feely. 

Students and parents told Betts that many teachers they knew at Shaw and Garnet-Patterson didn’t care about them. “Nothing that I have ever seen trumps personal relationships at this level,” Betts said. “The kids in this building who can be absolutely horrible in one person’s class can be angelic in another because they have formed a relationship with that teacher.”

Full disclosure:  I worked at Time Magazine long enough to know that a taste for “thesis journalism” is practically stamped on newsmagazines’ genetic code.  Maybe that’s what’s happening here.  The reporter decides the direction she’s taking the story, and piles on the quotes and anecdotes to paint the picture of Michelle Rhee, hard-charging, no excuses type.  See Rhee scowling at a teacher; see Rhee walking out of a meeting punching text into her Blackberry without so much as a “good day.”  She’s on a mission, dammit, and niceties aren’t on the agenda!  Even the cover — especially the cover — See Michelle Rhee with a broom!  She’s the new broom!

Here’s what worries me: accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, the increasingly confrontational, impatient, blunt, even rude public persona that’s affixing itself to the Washington, DC schools chancellor runs the risk of getting in the way of what Michelle Rhee wants to accomplish.   I’ll put it bluntly: piss off enough people whose help is essential to your success, and your failure becomes inevitable, a consummation devoutly to be wished.  Then for years to come, the answer to the reforms anyone proposes becomes, “Oh yes, we tried that in Washington under Michelle Rhee and you remember how that worked out.” If she fails, Michelle Rhee’s failure will not be hers alone.  At worst, she runs the risk of damaging the ed reform “brand” for a generation. 

The bottom line:  Most people want to see Michelle Rhee succeed.  But some would like nothing more than to see her go down in flames.  It’s important not to upset that balance and add boxcar numbers of people (you know, people and whatever) to the those who are already sharpening long knives.  That’s not being touchy-feely.  It’s being pragmatic.  A lot of other people’s dreams, plans and hard work are riding with Michelle Rhee on that broom.  And it’s a long way down.

Brinksmanship in DC Schools?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 16, 2008 in Education News. 2 Comments

Washington, DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee have drafted a plan to dramatically expand their effort to remove ineffective teachers from DC schools by seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a state of emergency–a move that would eliminate the need to bargain with the Washington Teachers’ Union, reports the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the plan under the Freedom of Information Act

If adopted, the measures would essentially allow the District to begin building a new school system. Such an effort would be similar to one underway in New Orleans, where a state takeover after Hurricane Katrina placed most of the city’s 78 public schools in a special Recovery School District. About half of the district’s schools are charters, and it has no union contract.

The Post’s report notes the plan was drawn up in a statement for a news conference in September where “Rhee and Fenty were scheduled to present a series of steps they could take under existing regulations to rid the system of teachers deemed ineffective.”  The news conference was cancelled and the statement never made public.  But that doesn’t appear to mean Rhee and Fenty are having second thoughts. “The Mayor and the Chancellor will continue to keep these and all ideas on the table,” a spokesperson tells the paper. 

“The moves could force a major confrontation with the union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which has denounced the changes in New Orleans,” the Post notes.

My hunch is that Rhee and Fenty are using the threat of a state of emergency to force the teacher’s union to let its members vote on their plan to give teachers hefty salary hikes in exchange for waiving tenure. 

Update:  Eduflack is also on this and takes the long view.  “At the end of the day, once Rhee has gotten all of the change and reform she’s seeking, she actually has to work with those left standing to deliver on her promise to boost student achievement and close the achievement gap,” he writes.  “That means parents and families.  It means teachers and principals.  And it certainly means the Washington Teachers Union.  Rhee’s ultimate success will be determined by the effectiveness of the teachers and the union that supports them.  And there is no working around that, no matter how hard you try.”

The Strength of the Wolf is the Pack

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Influential Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews is no fan of merit pay, warning that Michelle Rhee’s plan to pay Washington, DC high-fliers up to $20,000 extra a year has the potential divide teachers, instead of getting them to work together for struggling kids

The idea troubles me, because it is at odds with what I have learned from charter leaders who have made great achievement gains in their independent public schools. Their staffs thrive on teamwork. Everyone shares lesson plans, swaps ideas and reinforces discipline to help each child. Won’t big checks to just a few members of the team ruin that?

“Teams with all players pulling hard are also more likely to attract more committed people,” Mathews correctly observes, “happy to escape schools where co-workers make fun of strivers.” He quotes several leaders of successful, high profile urban charter schools, each of whom takes issue with the idea off rewarding individual teachers for gains made by their students

Dave Levin, co-founder of the KIPP school network, said, “Given the interconnectivity of teaching kids, the best incentives are school incentives which the school itself can then decide how to allocate.” His fellow KIPP co-founder, Mike Feinberg, quoted Rudyard Kipling: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”

Pay Me My Money Down

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 5, 2008 in Education Practice. 4 Comments

Merit pay is back in the news.  For kids, that is, not teachers.  Washington, DC’s Michelle Rhee is the latest to float the idea of paying 12-year-olds to act in their own best interest.  Fordham’s Liam Julian thinks it’s a bad idea, preferring the stick to the carrot.  But he makes the emotionally satisfying argument:

It is expected that students will complete assignments and work hard; it is legally demanded that they come to school. When these obligatory activities are rewarded with cash, what was once mundane becomes exceptional. Standards of right behavior take a prima facie tumble. The student who shunned class is paid to be there, which makes a mockery of the rules, and the pupil who already came to school on time now receives money for it and learns the false lesson that punctuality and conscientiousness are extraordinary and noteworthy. 

I’m not immune to this line of moral hazard reasoning, although I remain agnostic and willing to consider any reasonable idea to boost performance.  Still, I have a hard time arguing incentives are bad when I know darned well that there are affluent kids who are routinely bribed — er, rewarded — for good report cards with everything from a ten dollar bill to a new car in the driveway.  Add the fact that many inner city families have learned not to expect much from their education, and it becomes hard to ask them to take our good word for it that education is its own reward.

Greg Foster nails it at Pajamas Media.  “Admit it,” he writes, “you don’t care about whether it works nearly as much as you care about whether it’s just inherently wrong. This policy is the sort of thing people respond to purely by visceral reaction.”  He then goes on to explain why it’s not wrong.

Joanne Jacobs, as usual, is the voice of reason:  “If foundations want to fund pay-for-performance schemes,” she writes, ”I suggest they put the money into college (or job training) scholarship funds for hard-working students. Connect doing tomorrow’s homework with a brighter future down the road.”