Suspicious test scores

Michelle Rhee took a corporate-reform approach to getting better test scores and graduation rates from her students. It involved the firing of many teachers and the elimination of tenure. Unfortunately, it also meant that Rhee did not have any education professionals within her leadership circle, nor was anyone experienced at running urban school systems. It appears to have worked, but in April 2013, it turned out that in her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC, she knew that there was a considerable amount of cheating, erasures of student answers on tests and substitution of correct answers. Reports of this happening went back to November 2008. The ral problem was that the erasures “suggested widespread cheating by adults.”

Unfortunately, that's a predictable response to high-stakes testing that isn't difficult to manipulate. Could she have taken a better approach once cheating was discovered? Perhaps, but “a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own 'Produce or Else' approach to reform.“ Rhee strongly denied that she was pressuring principals to produce results regardless of whether students were actually learning more, but it appears that's exactly what was happening.

Has her system actually improved teacher retention, a key measure of job satisfaction? Actually, no. “For teachers, DCPS has become a revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the national average is said to be between three and five years.”

Sadly, “Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.”

[April 2013]