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CAT Tracks for October 14, 2010
STRAUSS ON RHEE DEPARTURE |
As promised...
...in fact, two!
From the Washington Post...
The Answer Sheet
Rhee’s big legacy: Being a whirlwind
She came in like a whirlwind, kicking up dust wherever she went, and now, Michelle Rhee, all-powerful chancellor of D.C. public schools, is leaving after three years, securing her place in the history of D.C. public education as, well, mostly a whirlwind.
Larry Cuban, the Stanford University educator and former superintendent, had it right when he predicted on this blog last month that Rhee would wind up being no more than a footnote in a doctoral dissertation, just like Hugh Scott, the first African American superintendent in Washington D.C., who served in the early 1970s.
Why?
Because the kind of business-driven, standardized test-centric reforms that Rhee championed, with the full support of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are guaranteed not to help improve troubled schools. They can’t work because they don’t address the most basic issues confronting students and teachers.
Rhee is a leader in a school reform movement that embraces public charter schools -- even though they can't ever be a systemic answer -- and standardized tests, even though assessment experts warn about using them for high-stakes decisions.
Rhee ignored the effects that poverty has on students trying to learn how to read and to memorize Newton’s Law of Gravity. She based her assessment system -- of kids and teachers -- on standardized tests, which she was seeking to expand to every grade, a move that ignored the fact that the current obsession with testing has already unacceptably narrowed curriculum.
Real change necessary for a successful school -- great curriculum, great development for teachers, children who come to school ready to learn -- was never seriously addressed in the Rhee administration.
Certainly Rhee will rattle off a string of accomplishments as she walks out the door, but we’ve heard this sort of thing before.
Let’s look back at the last time a powerhouse of a superintendent left the D.C. school system. That would be Arlene Ackerman, who resigned in exhaustion in 2000 after a three-year tenure as chief academic officer and then superintendent.
A release was issued by the school system when she resigned, saying:
“Ackerman became Superintendent in May 1998. Since then, there have been significant accomplishments that have contributed to the national attention now focused on the District’s public schools:
"Mrs. Ackerman is especially pleased with the aggressive reform agenda that puts children first. 'I believe that we are on the right track,' Ackerman states, 'and have laid the foundation for continuous progress.' "
That's quite a list. A few years is time enough to start a lot of things, but not really to finish much. By the time Rhee arrived, nobody remembered much, if any, of Ackerman's initiatives.
By the time Rhee’s permanent successor shows up, it won’t be surprising if that little piece of history repeats itself.
From the Washington Post...
The Answer Sheet
What D.C. schools need now: A departure from Rheeism
Grand experiments certainly are grand, but they have no real place in the world of education. It’s time for them to stop and for schools to get down to the business of building strong teams to use what is already known about how to build successful schools.
There is some notion buried in our educational experiments that we still don’t really know how to teach kids, or that there is some silver bullet waiting to be discovered. We do know how, and there isn’t a magical answer. The problem is that a lot of elements go into making a school a success -- a truth that many of today’s school reformers choose to ignore.
It’s the teacher, they say, and, well, of course it is the teacher. But it is also:
The departing chancellor of D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee, has been fond of espousing the “teacher is everything” philosophy of school reform, though she did take some steps that show she knows it's more complicated.
As my colleague Bill Turque has reported over Rhee’s tenure, she dramatically expanded the number of spaces in preschool, pre-K and Head Start; opened the Early Stages diagnostic center to help flag learning disabilities in children ages 2 to 5; and piloted a program of "wrap-around" support services for at-risk middle school kids.
Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the woman who will formally become interim chancellor of D.C. public schools, takes the Rhee view that teacher quality is the most important determinant of student success. Henderson was a vice president of the New Teacher Project, a recruiting nonprofit group that Rhee founded and ran before becoming chancellor in June 2007.
The presumptive mayor of Washington, Vincent Gray, told me last week that he he believes a student’s family life is at least as important, a view more in line with education research, which shows that family income is the best predictor of student achievement.
But he also said asked Henderson to keep the school system’s senior leadership in place until at least the end of the current academic year, indicating that he doesn’t want any significant change, at least immediately.
Rhee’s and Henderson’s emphasis on the importance of the teacher is matched only by their endorsement of the use of standardized tests to measure not only schools but teachers, a system of evaluation called “value added” that she helped enshrine in a contract reached with the teachers union.
Again, Gray pointed to a different approach: He questioned whether kids can properly be judged by a test score if they come to school sick or hungry.
The big test for Gray will be how he marries two sides of education reform: the one that pushes charter schools and standardized tests, and the other that recognizes there is more to real reform.
There is no reason to doubt that both sides want some of the same things: high expectations for students, teachers and administrators, but, as one of my loyal readers wrote in an e-mail, they differ on how to “measure progress, implement change, provide support and training and really develop a full spectrum learning institution.”
The next chancellor can succeed only by trying to build a team in which all members share common goals and by communicating with the community about what he/she is doing. Rhee could have gone a lot further if she hadn’t shut out everybody who didn’t read her version of the reform bible.
Henderson was an obvious choice to take over from Rhee right now. She is thought to be a candidate as the next chancellor, but I hope Gray takes a broad view of the values he wants in the next head of the city's school system.
By Valerie Strauss
By Valerie Strauss
