The sooner one recognizes that Michelle Rhee’s brand of “school reform” is simply a smokescreen to promote the privatization of public schools the sooner one recognizes that in general the charter school movement as pushed by the Student’s First crowd is a fraud.
Rhee’s most recent ranking of states by “best education policy” put Louisiana (home of Creationist teaching) and Florida - both very low performers in student achievement - at the top–no coincidence that both states are led by Republican charlatan governors who are pushing privatization. Most of the top states for student performance were rated at the bottom–and of course most of those states are not interested in the privatization of public schools.
Iowa, whose students have led the nation for years in SAT and ACT scores, gets an “F” under Rhee’s system of rankings. I suppose they need to dumb things down in order to improve.
For those wondering what StudentsFirst’s real priorities are (spoiler alert: it’s not students) their criteria in awarding these grades are useful to look at:
Notably, the correlation between Rhee’s report card and NAEP test results is quite weak and in the wrong direction. Basically, a bunch of Wall Streeters funding an organization to sell people on the idea of crushing teachers unions and raiding their pension plans as somehow being good for students. If you don’t understand, just repeat “choice” over and over until it makes sense.
The second link in my post mentions that Massachusetts has the highest rate of teacher unionization and the highest NAEP scores. The five states that have teachers’ unions aren’t known for their spectacular outcomes (I can’t recall which states they are offhand, other than Virginia, which does fairly well on the NAEP, but recall seeing them all clustered in the bottom ten on SAT scores). I’m not trying to claim that teachers’ unions necessarily help students. The prime beneficiaries of teachers’ unions are obviously teachers. I am claiming that Michelle Rhee’s organization is primarily concerned with weakening unions, cutting pension plans, and privatization, and that the whole “students first” rhetoric is misleading.
Sort of. They are paid for out of tax dollars but they sometimes get to pick and choose their students. In those cases they don’t have to deal with special needs students and can expel discipline problems back into the other schools.
Because everybody knows that teachers’ unions are just awful, because people like Rhee and her very wealthy backers, and all the press they can buy, keep telling us so.
Education would be so much better if we could just get rid of all the teachers. I know, let’s break their unions so we can treat them even more like shit than we do already, and drive all the teachers out of teaching. Then truly talented people are bound to flood in to the job and make everything wonderful. And they will be cheaper!
I think it’s fair to say that if teachers’ unions are a factor in failure of education systems, people wouldn’t need to fake test scores to prove it (assuming there isn’t some other reason for the drop in scores referenced in the OP).
Let’s get this straight: I’m not a union basher. Unions are not inherently different than businesses or agencies: some do a wonderful job, most do a good job, and a few are disasters. I do not believe that unions and their membership are above scrutiny; no more than I believe that corporations and their executives are beyond reproach.
But let’s also get this straight: DC teachers agreed to a 20% pay increase if they agreed to have evaluations of their work carried out, with full knowledge that those who did not perform would be out of a job. The vote was 1,412 to 425. So, the idea implied, if not outright expressed, by BigAppleBucky that Rhee sought the privatization of public schools and njtt’s comment about union busting, are simply bullshit. DC teachers agreed to be evaluated in exchange for a huge raise, and many came up short. I’m not going to cry for bad teachers.
One must think for a moment, if teachers’ performance was in part based on student test scores, and the scores are being inflated; then it must follow that teachers signed up to an evaluation system that even more of them are failing. In fact, the articles kind of imply that teachers were part of the bogus test results: shouldn’t we be holding them accountable? We blame Rhee because some teachers may have been helping their students cheat?