I haven't seen Waiting for Superman yet because I don't want to give them my 9 bucks (senior citizen, ya know).
If you read my post yesterday (O Canada, So Inglorious and Untrue), it seems the movie is not doing as well as expected. I expect Broad/Gates/Murdoch to buy air time on every TV station in the world to show the movie in an endless loop for weeks at a time. Or have 10 billion dvds made and give them away in cereal boxes. Or have one mailed to every person in the world - and even to some of those new planets they are discovering. You wouldn't want any sign of life to miss the message that tenure has to end for anyone to learn anything in school.
If you find grammar or speling mistakes, that must be my problem - I was taught by tenured teachers.
When I get to see WfS for free, Michelle Rhee going down in flames will make the movie so delicious. As will the NY Times piece yesterday on Geoffrey Canada.
Inundated with Rhee speculation all over the place, we decided to do a small compilation from scattered sources.
Rethinking Schools
The Proving Grounds: School “Rheeform” in Washington, D.C.
Fall 2010By Leigh Dingerson
Washington, D.C., is leading the transformation of urban public education across the country—at least according to Time magazine, which featured D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on its cover, wearing black and holding a broom. Or perhaps you read it in Newsweek or heard it from Oprah, who named Rhee to her “power list” of “remarkable visionaries.”
GFBrandenburg's Blog
Rhee’s presence was extremely divisive here in DC, largely along class and racial lines. Many wealthy whites thought she was wonderful, because they thought she was ‘reforming’ a corrupt, incompetent, black-run and black-staffed school system, and because they saw her replacing black veteran teachers, staff members, and administrators with brand-new, young white and Asian replacements. (I am not exaggerating.)
More at Rhee’s Legacy and the Future of Education in DCPS
Pre-Rhee and Post-Rhee
For those of you who believe that Michelle Rhee’s resignation today will hurt the achievement gains experienced by the DC school system; take a look at these charts with DC NAEP scores from 2003-2009.
Read Leonie's entire post at:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2010/10/pre-rhee-and-post-rhee.html
Candi is aways Dandy when it comes to Rhee
Breaking News!
Featuring Candi Peterson, blogger in residence and candidate for WTU General Vice PresidentThe Washington Post reports that Chancellor Michelle Rhee will announce on Wednesday that she is resigning at the end of October. Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson will serve as the interim Chancellor. What do you think led to Rhee's abrupt resignation?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/12/AR2010101205658.html
Valerie Strauss (MUST READ EVERY DAY) at 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?
Continue reading this post »
Michelle Rhee's greatest hits
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee gave us many reasons to remember her when she is gone.
There's the schools she closed. The teachers she fired. The contract she signed with the Washington Teachers Union. Her frequent use of the word “crap.”
Here’s some quintessential statements that Rhee made as chancellor. Thanks for many of these to my colleague, Bill Turque, who often stood alone in his strong coverage of Rhee’s tenure.
I think my favorite is the one about taping students' mouths shut.
Let me know what I’ve missed.
Continue reading this post »
Gary Imhoff in themail:
October 13, 2010
Severance Pay |
Michelle Rhee resigned today. See her resignation letter at http://www.dcpswatch.com/dcps/101013.htm. This, of course, leaves us with the top question on our minds: how much are the taxpayers on the hook for; how much do we have to pay her to go away? Bill Turque, the Post education reporter, says he’s trying to find out. Is there anything we can learn from her contract, http://www.dcpswatch.com/dcps/070703.htm? Not much.
Rhee was hired on July 3, 2007, at an annual salary of $275,000 a year. She was guaranteed an annual cost-of-living raise, so her salary is now considerably higher than that. Paragraph 6 of her contract says that, “should you choose to terminate your appointment for a good cause, you shall receive a severance payment of up to 12 weeks of your base salary, plus any accrued leave, as well as an additional 12 weeks of administrative pay.” That’s about a half-year’s salary, give or take. So has she terminated her appointment “for a good cause”? Does her not wanting to work with Gray count as a good cause? If Peter Nickles really wanted to protect the taxpayers from being fleeced — which is the excuse he uses for fighting so hard to deny equitable settlements to DC citizens who have been mistreated by the city — he would argue that her contract doesn’t call for her to be paid any severance allowance, and he would fight hard against paying her an extra dime. But Rhee is part of the Fenty team; Fenty will determine what she gets paid in severance; and Nickles will rubber-stamp whatever Fenty wants, even above the contractual ceiling.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
More from Gary, though I don't necessarily agree about Baltimore since Alonso is from the Kloth of Klein -and Randi is working with him - which we know means teachers will get screwed - and I'm betting kids will too. But on the other hand, Baltimore doesn't have mayoral control - yet.
NEW FEATURE- I'm inserting a jump break for the first time to cut down on the length of this post - so click to read on.
October 10, 2010
Cooperation and Collaboration |
Why are you reading stuff on the Internet when it’s coming on to the third day of a three-day holiday weekend, and the weather has been beautiful? So I’ll keep it short.
You’ve read the poorly written and content-free argument published in today’s Washington Post as “How to Fix Our Schools: A Manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and other Education Leaders,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html. Usually foolish education fads are abandoned only after they have miseducated one or two generations of schoolchildren; remember the “New Math”? But the manifesto raises my hopes that this fad may have already peaked and be on the way out. If the empty rhetoric that this manifesto represent is all that this round of “education reform” has to offer, it won’t be around much longer.
The sixteen “education leaders” who signed the manifesto write as though wanting to have good teachers in schools is a new, innovative, approach to education that they have invented, and that others oppose them because they are want to hire good teachers. Actually, all that is new in this movement is the belief that building good schools doesn’t come about through cooperation and collaboration with a dedicated teaching force but through confrontation, contention, and conflict with teachers. Valerie Strauss has already published a fuller takedown of “The Bankrupt ‘School Reform Manifesto’ of Rhee, Klein, Etc.,” http://tinyurl.com/3y4nwyh, and it’s well worth your time even on a holiday weekend.
Robert McCartney’s column on Thursday, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/06/AR2010100607123.html, compared Rhee’s reign as chancellor in Washington with Andres Alonso’s time as the chief executive of Baltimore’s school system. McCartney is no critic of Rhee’s, and in this column he sympathetically treats the argument for her methods. But he’s not blind to the stronger argument for Alonso’s cooperative style: “However, Baltimore’s experience demonstrates that Rhee’s tactics aren’t the only ones that yield results. Some experts say a more collaborative, low-profile strategy is more successful in the long run because it preserves trust and confidence with teachers and the community. ‘What Baltimore shows is that you can bring real change to urban schools without a lot of acrimony,’ said Jack Jennings, president of the independent Center on Education Policy. ‘The national foundations and some reform groups have made [Rhee] into a poster girl because they just want change, and she’s a highly vocal advocate for change. But others have brought about just as much change as she has, and I would guess that their reforms would last longer.’”
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
September 26, 2010
Waiting for a Superhuman Facade
Dear Waiters:There will be a lot more discussion this week about today’s Meet the Press, which had a segment featuring Chancellor Michelle Rhee; Robert Bobb, DC’s City Administrator under Mayor Williams; US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/#39368957). Courtland Milloy was quick to write a column about it, “Rhee Needs to Take a Look in the Mirror,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/26/AR2010092602992.html, which has a smart take: “She readily accepts credit for success while always attributing failure to the shortcomings of others. . . . DC residents who pushed back were just uncomfortable with change and would rather have ineffective teachers in the classroom. Such distortion is nothing new for Rhee. In fact, lots of young, hard-charging reformers in all fields find it easier to blame their clients rather than take responsibility for failures. The stakeholders really didn't want to change, they claim. The problem with owning up to a mistake is that it might cause the reformer's superhuman facade to crumble, revealing some emotionally vulnerable, in-over-their-head inner child.”
Rhee has nothing to complain about. She specialized in firing teachers on grounds that were arbitrary and capricious, and proceeded to fire and move teachers because they weren’t on the Rhee team, because they questioned her questionable educational theories and methods. Rhee’s one completely true rule is that teachers should be held accountable for their work; she ruined even that by pretending that she was the only person who ever felt that way. All employees are held accountable for their work. Teachers should hold students accountable, principals should hold teachers accountable, superintendents should hold principals accountable, and boards of education should hold superintendents and chancellors responsible. If there is no Board of Education that can hold a chancellor accountable, if the chancellor is accountable only to a mayor who indulges her and does not hold her responsible for her work, then both the chancellor and the mayor need to be held responsible by the electorate. If Rhee feels that the electorate’s evaluation of her and her job performance was arbitrary, capricious, and ill-informed, then perhaps she can finally sympathize with the teachers of DC Public Schools, and appreciate how they have felt for the past few years.
Failing Schools Blog
Michelle Rhee’s newly created twitter account
October 13, 2010
John Merrow - who gets funding from Ed Deformers - has focused on Rhee over the last few years. What will he do for content now? He may be right about altering the debate about how teachers are paid in the future. But the answer to his question "What will take its place?" is NOTHING THAT WILL WORK! But have fun boys ruining the next gen of education with schemes and gimmicks. Go ahead! Take away tenure - return to the 19th century teacher scandals that brought tenure into existence – threaten teachers with firing over test results and see where you are.
Michelle Rhee Resigns: What’s in store for DC schools now?
The sudden resignation of Michelle Rhee actually makes perfect sense. It was inevitable, so why wait around? It’s easy to imagine Ms. Rhee coming to that conclusion once she recognized that she and the next Mayor, Vincent Gray, would not be able to work together the way she did with the current Mayor, Adrian Fenty.
What happens next in Washington is the big story, although most of the attention will be on Ms. Rhee. She’s a national figure, subject of much speculation. Will she go to California if Meg Whitman wins the gubernatorial race? What about New Jersey? Iowa? Funny how the Republicans love her to death now, even though she was chosen by an ardent Democrat and has been praised to the skies by President Obama.
We’ve followed Ms. Rhee closely during the three plus years she’s been in Washington, airing a total of 12 segments about the changes she’s made there. Scores and enrollment are up locally, but, make no mistake about it, she has altered the national conversation about how teachers are paid and evaluated. No one can defend the current system, which bases everything on years in the classroom and number of graduate credits, as appropriate or rational. That’s history, even though it may take years for it to be removed for good.
What is going to replace the old way is now the question.
What happens next in Washington is the big story, although most of the attention will be on Ms. Rhee. She’s a national figure, subject of much speculation. Will she go to California if Meg Whitman wins the gubernatorial race? What about New Jersey? Iowa? Funny how the Republicans love her to death now, even though she was chosen by an ardent Democrat and has been praised to the skies by President Obama.
We’ve followed Ms. Rhee closely during the three plus years she’s been in Washington, airing a total of 12 segments about the changes she’s made there. Scores and enrollment are up locally, but, make no mistake about it, she has altered the national conversation about how teachers are paid and evaluated. No one can defend the current system, which bases everything on years in the classroom and number of graduate credits, as appropriate or rational. That’s history, even though it may take years for it to be removed for good.
What is going to replace the old way is now the question.
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