Teaching and the Measure of Greatness

The other day I saw a brief interview with Michelle Rhee, in which she defended her stance on the apocryphal sign she claims to have seen in a school, "Teachers cannot make up for what parents and students will not do". If I believed the sign existed, I might point out that it's true. Rhee would be correct in arguing for nuance - teachers can't make up for everything that's missing at home, some parents and students are lazy, and teachers can only do so much, but problems outside of the school are not an excuse for not making the strongest effort possible to close the gap. But Rhee uses the sign (which, again, I'm not convinced that she actually saw) as a basis for a blunt attack on the teaching profession.

Rhee claims that she can attest to the power of great teachers because, on an apocryphal occasion when she visited a school, she talked to some teenagers who told her that their teacher for their first period class was wonderful. After... I guess it was roughly an hour-long visit to the school, after that class ended, she saw them walking out of the building after their first class. "Where do you think you're going," she asked. "Our first teacher is great, our second teacher isn't, so we're outta here," they replied.

Rhee argued that these kids weren't lazy - you might see them cutting class and think, "What a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who won't amount to anything", but Rhee assures us that they were sufficiently motivated to get to their first class so... I guess the rest is on the teachers.

But I couldn't help but wonder, why didn't Rhee ask the obvious follow-up questions? "What's great about your first period teacher?" Or, "What don't you like about your second period teacher." She simply assumed that the teacher for the first period class was a gifted, extraordinary educator, and the teacher for the second period class was not.

Back when I was in high school, if you were to hear a similar group of kids talk about how a teacher was "great", a follow-up question, "What makes him great," might result in the answer, "All we do is watch movies." Or, "We just talk the whole time." Or, "She lets us hang out in the back of the room and talk with our friends." I don't recall ever encountering a student who displayed the casual attitude toward attendance that Rhee describes indicating that a teacher is "great" because you work hard, learn a lot, have high expectations, no excuses accepted.... In my experience, that's going to inspire a different descriptor, "His class is hard."

In Rhee's anecdotes she seems to believe that kids will go to school for what kids of my era described as "hard" classes, and go home instead of staying for the classes they then described as "great". I don't think it's that kids have changed - I think the problem is that Rhee asked the wrong questions, and as a result drew the wrong conclusions.

I don't want to diminish Rhee's accomplishments with the D.C. schools, but at this point I continue to see her successes as largely administrative. For example, creating a new, efficient system for the distribution of textbooks. Yet she has refused to take any responsibility for the cheating scandals inspired by her high-stakes testing, for the accounting irregularities that had money magically disappearing and reappearing in the school budget, or for the successful lawsuit brought by teachers she defamed. In her view, is that living up to a standard of "No excuses" - ignore your mistakes so that you never have to talk about them, and you can't be accused of making excuses for yourself?

If so, alas, she continues to personify what is wrong with educational administration in this country - administrators, well-intentioned though they may be, engage in what amounts to wholesale experimentation on kids and who, after leaving or being forced out, blame everything that continues to be wrong on the size of the job they faced, or their successor.

The story of education reform goes pretty much like this: Every ten years we embrace educational reform. We throw a lot of money into the reform ideals. They fail. Lather, rinse, repeat. Rhee and the high-stakes test seem to be yet another entry in that recurring story line. The problem as I see it is that the high-stakes testing, the diminishment of teaching as a profession, and the wholesale effort to privatize schools, break teacher's unions, lower teacher pay and reduce their benefits is likely to have a profound, long-term negative impact on schools. Why be part of the problem?

Pay No Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain

Powerful, one might say overwhelming evidence of cheating behind D.C.'s improvement in standardized test scores under Michelle Rhee.

McGraw-Hill's practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman's terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.

In 2008, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) — the D.C. equivalent of a state education department –– asked McGraw-Hill to do erasure analysis in part because some schools registered high percentage point gains in proficiency rates on the April 2008 tests.

Among the 96 schools that were then flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out so-called TEAM awards "to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff," as the district's website says. Noyes was one of these.

When questioned about the evidence of cheating and her administration's apparent indifference to the issue and disinterest in conducting a meaningful investigation?

When reached by telephone, Rhee said she is no longer the chancellor and declined to comment further.

What about the current D.C. administration?

D.C. officials declined to let USA TODAY visit schools or talk to principals, including Adell Cothorne, the principal who succeeded Ryan at Noyes for the 2010-11 school year.

Typical of government, and unfortunately it increasingly appears to also be typical of Rhee, the taking of responsibility and the acceptance of consequences for ineptitude are important for others but not for themselves. Self-adulation based upon exaggerated or even false claims of accomplishment, on the other hand, are par for the course.

Giving Michelle Rhee Credit Where It's Due (And Only Where It's Due)

I've been thinking about some of the post-mortems on Michelle Rhee's tenure at the D.C. Schools, now that she has decided to quit instead of trying to find a way to work with the incoming mayor. At Tapped, Monica Potts wonders if Michelle Rhee's abrasive style would have been tolerated had she been a man. I don't think the problem was her abrasiveness; I think the problem was that she had a tin ear for politics and didn't know when to soften her approach or bite her tongue. Given that Mayor Adrian Fenty, not Rhee, was the one voted out of office, and that he shared some of the same problematic personality traits, I don't think it's a gender thing. Politicians can have their tempers and their abrasive moments, but they must nonetheless smile for the cameras and kiss the (figurative) babies.

Potts endorses the view that

...it was Rhee's disdain of collaborating with teachers and getting the community on board with school reforms that helped contribute to her abrasive reputation. But on the merits, Rhee's probably right. There's something odd about the idea that parents who aren't trained in education should have equal input in how their children's schools are run. And that's where the divide between Rhee and everyone else really lies. Rhee viewed her job as a technician would, as a CEO might, someone who is charged with getting results, even if doing so is hard.

Yet Rhee's abrasiveness was not contextual. Potts links to an article that recounts an example,

Yet one of her less-famous moments sticks with me. It was tucked inside an Atlantic profile by writer Clay Risen. In the piece, Risen was trying to make the point that Rhee does "not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise." Here's how he supported that contention: "When I asked her how she would characterize her ideal relationship with parents, she replied, 'That’s a great question. So often reporters ask me stupid questions. I had one interview yesterday, and I was like, ‘Okay, you are not smart.’"

Her general attitude appeared Manichean. If you didn't understand what she was doing, you were stupid. Disagreement, no matter how well-placed, seemed to be interpreted as malice.

Further, it's the height of arrogance to suggest that parents are not positioned to question, let alone have a say in, how their schools are run. We're supposed to simultaneously praise parents for being concerned about their children, wanting better schools, involving themselves with their children's schools, etc., but they are to be dismissed as know-nothings the second they question the goals of the system's top bureaucrat? In a sense, that's an extension of the "sit down, shut up, do as your told" model that school administrators often seem to view as perfect classroom management, but it's presumptuous and rude when directed at concerned parents.

Further, parents had valid cause to question some of Rhee's methods and priorities. She carelessly fired hundreds of teachers then claimed, "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school." How would you feel if your child's teacher was fired, a teacher you liked, and you knew none of that was true about the teacher? How would you feel about the disappearing, reappearing money trick that was used to justify the firings? How would you feel if your school continued to crumble, but huge amounts of money appeard to be directed at schools that you perceived to be Rhee's pet projects? How would you feel if your school district's funding were so dependent upon corporate contributions, with an associated threat to withdraw money if they didn't approve of the district's management or performance, that you had to ask, "How 'public' is it when Wal-Mart can blackmail D.C. voters?"

Potts argues that it wasn't Rhee's job to "nurture":

It was Rhee's job to hire and fire teachers, to ensure the curriculum would teach students, and to revive D.C.'s beleaguered school system.

If Rhee found being respectful and accountable to parents and others inconsistent with managing D.C.'s schools, perhaps she belongs in the charter movement in which school administrators can insulate themselves from accountability to parents, let alone voters. Or perhaps she can move back to an advocacy group. Because last I checked, public schools are supposed to be accountable to parents and voters.

The aforementioned article lists what it describes as Rhee's accomplishments, and some of them are very real. She made the first day of school (and no doubt, many of the days that followed) much less dramatic and much more efficient. She negotiated a contract with the teacher's union that allows for greater teacher accountability. She took a modest stand on nutrition by banning flavored milk from schools.

The article also praises her for raising "standards, expectations, and test scores", but I think she can be better praised for her effort than for her accomplishment. As the article linked to document a rise in test scores indicates, this past year test scores went down.

Researchers in the field say that it is the nature of standardized tests that they rise from year to year when the same design of a test is given in the same schools. And they go down when a new design is given, or when a different demographic of students takes the test, or a bunch of kids in a class had a cold, or... well, you get the idea.

There are too many variables that can affect the scores of a single test to make the result completely reliable, which is why scores should never be used as a sole measure for any high-stakes decision.

By quitting now, Rhee puts herself in the position of claiming credit for a return to rising scores and blaming her successors if the scores continue to drop, although I would hope she would show more grace than to try to do either.

It's also reasonable to note that at their peak, the test scores remain deeply troubling.

Rhee said she and her team would “dig into the data” to find out why the elementary reading proficiency rate, which had risen 11 percentage points from 2007 to 2009, fell 4.4 points, to 44.4 percent, and why, after rising 20 percentage points from 2007 to 2009, the elementary math proficiency rate dipped 4.6 points this year, to 43.4.

The proficiency rate is essentially a measure of the portion of students who pass the tests.

Those scores indicate how much work remains to be done. They also highlight a problem I have with Rhee's "blame the teachers" approach to school reform. A more mature perspective would be, "Homes and communities make a huge difference in student performance, but we can't control those. All we can control are the schools and classrooms, so we have to proceed as if homes and communities don't matter." Instead she attempted to write children's lives outside of school out of the equation.

When done correctly, raising standards and expectations can be a very good thing. If you can convince a student that she needs to take ownership of her education, that her home life may make it difficult to study and succeed but she can succeed and even excel despite those obstacles, you've taken a strong first step toward making it happen. You then have to provide the necessary resources and support within the school environment (and outside, when possible) to make it happen. In an inner city environment's easy for teachers to become jaded or cynical - it's probably hard not to - and to let kids slide through the system without challenging them to reconsider their expectations for themselves and their understanding of their own capacity. When all you do is blame teachers, you shift the onus away from the students and effectively depict learning as a passive activity.

The article also argues that "Rhee stopped the skid in enrollment", pointing to a 1.6% rise in enrollment following two years of decline. That would be more compelling if the rise weren't associated with a severe recession that appears to have brought about similar rises in many other communities. This argument also seems inconsistent with the conception that it was parents' anger at Rhee that caused them to vote Mayor Fenty out of office.

Finally, the article credits Rhee for her new teacher rating system,

Rhee piloted IMPACT, a new method for evaluating teachers. Some say it's unfair and impossible to implement. But who's going to stand up and applaud the old system, whatever it was? Let's call this a start.

Fair enough, it's a start. But recall, if we're going to be judging teachers by a single year's test scores, why can't we judge Rhee's performance last year by the same measure?

But school administrators aren't to be judged by the same standards as teachers, are they. They negotiate the terms of a contract with the teacher's union, sign on the dotted line, then blame the union for seeking to enforce the terms they agreed to. They fail to monitor newly hired teachers such that issues of performance and classroom management aren't noticed before the teacher gets tenure, and then blame the teachers and their union for it's being difficult to fire teachers for their poor performance. Typically when they contractually agree to give teachers a raise, they happily give themselves the same or a larger raise. When they contractually provide teachers with generous benefits, insurance, sick time, personal days, etc., they typically reward themselves with the same or greater benefits. But how often are they willing to look into the mirror? The problems of our nation's inner city schools did not arise in a vacuum.

Accountability for Thee....

Another round of "accountability for teachers but not for administrators"?

According to the DCPS IMPACT Guidebook, the actual growth is a student’s scaled score at the end of a given year minus his or her scaled score at the end of the prior year. If a fifth-grader received a scaled score of 535 in math and a score of 448 on the fourth-grade test the previous year, his actual gain would be calculated as 87 points.

Subtracting one score from another only makes sense if the two scores are on the same scale. We wouldn’t, for example, subtract 448 apples from 535 oranges and expect an interpretable result. But that’s exactly what the DC value-added approach is doing: Subtracting values from scales that aren’t comparable.

By assuming that the difference between a student’s score in one year and his or her score in the following year is a definite (and precise) quantity, the DCPS value-added scheme assumes that the scaled scores are measured on an interval-level scale, in which the difference between a score of 498 and a score of 499 represents the same difference in performance as the difference between 499 and 500.

But this simply cannot be. The difference between 498 and 499 is a tiny difference among very high achievers in the fourth grade. But the difference between 499 and 500 is the difference between the highest performing fourth-grader and the lowest performing fifth-grader; and there are many fourth-graders who outperform low-scoring fifth-graders.

And heaven help the poor teacher who is teaching a class filled with students who’ve been retained in grade.

A fifth-grade student who got every question wrong on the reading test at the end of fourth grade and every question wrong at the end of fifth grade would show an actual gain of 500–400=100 points.

A fifth-grader repeating fifth grade who had a scaled score of 510 the first time through, and a scaled score of 530 during his or her second year in fifth grade, would show an actual gain of just 20 points. DC’s value-added methods may, of course, simply exclude students who are retained in grade from the calculations, but that sends an unpleasant message about whose scores count when teachers are evaluated.

I'll leave open the possibility that the D.C. Schools' calculation of value-added scores was not as incompetent as it seems from the data they've released so far, but....

Whether or Not Rhee Stays Or Goes....

This level of ambiguity about the future funding of salaries is unacceptable:

There's been wrangling over how to pay for raises and bonuses that teachers could earn if union members vote to approve the contract. Private foundations might reconsider their support if Ms. Rhee left. City budget officers worry that they might then get stuck with an unexpected bill. As we've written, both concerns are understandable; as we've also said, the obstacles seem small enough to be overcome with some ingenuity and goodwill. But there's a larger point that needs addressing.

You don't actually need much ingenuity to see the solution - a binding contract, enforceable against the entities committing money to Rhee's experiment, irrevocably locking them into their five year commitment.

To Rhee's credit, I have not heard her raise the Washington Post Editorial Board's implied threat - that if she leaves her job, the compensation package she just got through negotiating will collapse. When it occurs, that type of extortion that should lead to an executive's being asked not to let the door hit her in the posterior on her way out. But a similar issue arises with outside entities that have promised funding - they should not be permitted for the duration of their commitment to threaten to bankrupt the district or cause massive disruption of teacher compensation if they don't happen to like who the Chancellor is or what she does. If that's allowed, it's not just a question of whether Rhee stays or goes, but whether she does what they want, whatever the wishes of students, parents, teachers, other administrators or the school board. If they can yank their funding on a whim, the situation is not acceptable.

The Disappearing, Reappearing D.C. Schools Budget Deficit

It's enough to make your head spin. First the D.C. Schools have a serious budget deficit and must lay off teachers. Then they don't have a deficit at all, and can use the money to fund their new teacher contract. Next thing you know, after a lot of (justified) criticism over what is at best fiscal ineptitude, the deficit has reappeared.

This raises the obvious question of whether D.C. can presently afford its new proposed teacher contract, even with the private contributions that are necessary to carry it through its first five years. Meanwhile, the litigation that this type of budget ineptitude made inevitable is under way.

Inevitably, the Washington Post is concerned with "saving" the new contract. But if the contract can't be certified as financially viable by C.F.O. Natwar M. Gandhi, it's a dead letter.

What Are the Three R's, Again?

Is it Fred Hiatt's conceit that "The best offense is a weak defense?"

We shouldn't expect a school chancellor to understand arithmetic? Even when everybody who isn't vested in her agenda has been screaming for months, "Your numbers don't add up"?

Following her revelation of the best little deficit in D.C., the Washington Post, in an unsigned editorial, is putting up its best defense of Michelle Rhee. Maybe they should have slept on it?

Fact No. 1: Ms. Rhee does not control school finances.

Um... and the President doesn't control federal spending. Except he kinda does, because he's the chief executive, is involved in the budgeting process and has to actually sign off on the budget.

Seriously, she is the boss. And if somebody goes to the boss with a budget that requires serious blood-letting, it's part of her job to try to figure out how things went wrong. "Let's see... income's not down that much but, whoah, spending is way up. For teacher salaries. How did teacher compensation jump 15% in a year?" If she can't read a balance sheet, I'm sure there are many people in the administration who can - and, in fact, who are paid to do so, to audit for errors, and to make sure the numbers are correct. They truly all fell down on the job? What happened to Rhee's famous devotion to accountability and the firing of incompetent employees?

Moreover, with the former CFO fired, when it came time to slash the budget once again nobody was able to figure out how to use the real numbers? The "before" and "after" budget pictures were both created with the same erroneous, inflated salary data instead of the real thing?

Fact No. 2: Last August, Noah Wepman, the chief financial officer assigned to schools, told Ms. Rhee the schools faced a shortfall of $21 million. Ms. Rhee had no choice but to respond in some way; in September she opted for the layoffs rather than the cuts to summer school that some D.C. Council members preferred but which she believed would be more harmful to students.

Because laying off teachers doesn't harm students? They flourish in overcrowded classrooms, and when teachers are suddenly replaced or grades are merged? Let's be honest - Rhee picked the option that was most disruptive because it best advanced her agenda:

She made no secret at the time that in laying off teachers, she would try to get rid of those who were not effective -- as we would hope she would.

Right. And I'll accept that she did focus on getting rid of some of the worst teachers - although it is beyond question that she also eliminated the jobs of teachers who had good performance reviews. As long ago as October, there was a shadow over the layoffs:

But questions remain about the severity of the crisis Rhee has described, in light of the growth of the school budget. The $779.5 million spending plan for 2010 represents a net increase of $14.9 million over fiscal 2009, according to an analysis by Gray's office.

Critics suggest that Rhee has contrived the shortfall to pursue her long-term goal of replacing most of the city's teacher corps, especially veteran instructors -- a charge she denies. Last fall, she directed principals to notify teachers they regarded as underperforming that they faced dismissal at the end of the 2008-09 school year unless they improved. About 80 instructors were terminated. ...

In a Sept. 23 interview, a week after announcing the layoffs, Rhee said the budget crunch was legitimate but acknowledged that she intended to use it as an opportunity to continue removing under-performing teachers from the system.

And now we know that, in addition to being exaggerated by Rhee's hiring of 900 teachers over the summer, the budget crisis was not legitimate. The question becomes, what did Rhee know and when did she know it?

The layoffs were challenged in court; their legality was upheld. No one questioned their financial foundation.

The layoffs were challenged in court, yes. But in the very Washington Post article to which Hiatt's crew links it is stated,

A D.C. Superior Court judge on Tuesday upheld Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's decision to lay off 266 public school teachers and other educators to close a budget gap, flatly rejecting union arguments that she contrived financial problems to rid the system of older instructors.

So tell me again how "No one questioned [the layoffs'] financial foundation". The judge's ruling was predicated upon the reality of the deficit - "a reversal of the layoffs would only force Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) to make other cuts." Except now we know it wouldn't have, or would have required only minor cuts.

Fact No. 3: In February and March, George Dines, who replaced Mr. Wepman as the chief financial officer's deputy for schools, provided Ms. Rhee with information that the system was spending less than forecast on teacher salaries this year, generating what appears to be a $34 million surplus.

In other words, Rhee knew about the budget reality not later than March, probably sooner. So why didn't we hear about it before now?

Whether this should have been obvious to the CFO before the September layoffs would be a useful question for the council to ask and for Mr. Gandhi to answer. It is clearly not a question that is properly posed to Ms. Rhee.

Why is the word "clearly" so often used when the speaker wants to beg the question. Why is it improper to ask Ms. Rhee what she knew and when she knew it? It would appear that she negotiated with the teachers unions throughout the entire time at issue with knowledge of what future budgets would have to look like - how is it that she "knew" that the money that was supposedly absent from the school budget would reappear next Fall to fund her the new contract? She's truly that bad with numbers?

Does the council want to move forward, affirming a contract that will promote teacher quality and morale? Or would it like to obfuscate the facts surrounding this latest development and try to score political points?

Act like mature adults, or act like Fred Hiatt's editorial board... tough choices indeed.
----------------
1. Writing that, I cringe at how strained the notion of "the three R's" is... Three words, each containing an "r" sound....

Tax Pledges

For years, Republicans have led the charge to mindlessly sign on to the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, with about 70% of their candidates promising not to raise taxes (but also not to cut corporate welfare). So it's no small wonder that Fred Hiatt and his crew offer up an unsigned editorial aimed at... a pretty much irrelevant tax pledge requested by a teacher's union back in 2006.

In 2006 the union, known as the Montgomery County Education Association, included this question on its questionnaire for candidates seeking its endorsement for the Montgomery County Council: "Would you support a tax increase, if necessary, to fund the school budget and the negotiated agreements [setting salaries and benefits for teachers]? If so, in what way would you increase taxes?"

Asking a politician if they would raise taxes if necessary to fund schools? The horror!

It should be noted in this regard that the Washington Post has been squarely behind Michelle Rhee and her unsustainable plan to reform teacher pay. In another of the Hiatt crew's unsigned pieces,

Minimally effective or ineffective teachers would lose job security. In addition to the generous pay raises -- which would give the District a competitive edge in hiring -- teachers would also benefit from a rich offering of new opportunities for professional development as well as enhanced policies on school security and discipline.

To finance the contract, Ms. Rhee was able to attract $64.5 million from foundations that hope the District will serve as a national model.

I don't know if they haven't put down the crack pipe long enough to realize that not every school district in the nation is going to get private concerns to donate tens of millions of dollars per year to help them pay salaries that cannot be sustained by taxes. I'm not sure that they put it down long enough to ask what will happen in D.C., five years from now, when that money runs out. But it is clear that Hiatt and his crew would whine incessantly if D.C.'s teachers dared to ask if elected officials would "support a tax increase, if necessary, to fund the school budget and the negotiated teacher salaries and benefits", even though there's no reason to believe that the private money will fill the huge financial void that will exist when current commitments expire.

It's no surprise, given that the Washington Post Company's principal profit center is Kaplan, that they are much more concerned with getting public money into private hands than in ensuring that public schools are sustainable. In that light, it's similarly no surprise that Hiatt and his crew can't muster even a word of criticism toward the tax pledges that the vast majority of Republicans and some Democrats sign onto every year, even if it makes it effectively impossible to balance the federal budget. But to the extent that the Post pretends to care about education, why isn't it fair to ask politicians how they plan to pay for schools and teachers when the economy turns bad, or when private charities can be found to fill multi-million dollar holes in school board budgets - because the overwhelming experience of school districts in the current recession is that they are experiencing significant budget cuts.

"Show Me The Money!"

The Washington Post continues its love-in with Michelle Rhee, with this editorial from Richard Whitmire. The editorial points out that with the rise of charter school enrollment (28,000 students) at the expense of public school enrollment (44,000 students), there's danger that Rhee won't be able to "maintain a viable-sized school district". But if charter schools are everything they're cracked up to be, why is that a problem?

The advantages enjoyed by charters, which can pick and choose their staff, are considerable. Among the 1,500 schools in New York City, the top-ranked one on the city's 2007 progress report was Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. There's just one secret to its success, says Evan Rudall of the Uncommon Schools network, which runs Williamsburg: high-quality teachers. "The best way to find such teachers is by using the latitude granted to charter schools: interviewing hundreds of candidates, both certified and uncertified, to find out if they know their material, are enthusiastic about their subject matter, and can maintain classroom control."

The author also mentions KIPP schools. What goes unmentioned is the sacrifice that some of these teachers make to keep up with the demands of their schools. As EducationSector points out,

The big question is whether the new models can be scaled up to reach the many students who need help. The answer is, not easily. In a decade, education entrepreneurs have created at most a couple hundred very strongly performing schools, serving perhaps 55,000 of the nation's more than eight million urban students. Among the major obstacles to a broader effort: Talented teachers and principals are hard to find and burn out quickly; the schools' longer calendar and other features that are key to their success are expensive; and most of the schools have to pay for their own buildings and often receive less than their full share of state and local education aid. Lacking large infusions of philanthropy, many of the schools would founder financially, and the economic downturn has made the schools' plight even more precarious. The Harlem Children's Zone recently cut staff in the face of diminishing donations.

Talk all you want about "highly qualified teachers" motivation, school quality... but it comes back to this: You're not going to convince teachers unions to give up job security so that their teachers can work more and earn less. It's great that a handful of schools can maintain a sufficient flow of applicants that, as their faculty members wear out and burn out, they can replace them with a new set of motivated teachers. But that model doesn't scale.

Also, let's not forget that this is a model we only propose for the inner cities. I am not aware of any middle or high SES school district that is looking at KIPP and saying, "We should follow that model." Maybe they should be. Maybe they should be looking at alternate modalities such as Waldorf or Montessori and trying to figure out what those approaches do correctly. Maybe they should be looking to offer an array of choices instead of "the same" and "more of the same" (most "school reforms" after all speak of doing the same thing, but "better" or with a longer school day or school year). But interest in "what works", at least with the loudest voices for "reform", seems to be pretty much limited to the retrospective study of standardized tests, and I see little sense that they're really looking for innovation - or that most parents even in "failing schools" are demanding innovation, as opposed to school safety and order in the halls.

For all this talk about top rated schools in the public and charter school systems, let's not forget that we're still not talking about the schools our nation's political and economic elites will choose for their own kids. Before they'll consider such a thing, many will plunk down $30,000+ per year for Sidwell Friends. With diminished private donations for even the best charter schools, and the further erosion of the tax base for public schools, who's going to pay for reform? Talk is cheap in D.C., but the best schools are not.

Budget Cuts and the D.C. Schools

A newly hired D.C. teacher describes an unfortunate turn of events in a letter to the Washington Post:

Then, on Friday afternoon, I was laid off. In a last-minute attempt to balance the budget, Rhee and the city opted to cut more than 200 teachers during the most critical period of the academic year - just when students were getting acclimated to their new environments.

My immediate concern was about what would happen to my students, because I was the only third-grade teacher at my school. My principal informed me that my students would be mixed in with the fourth- and second-graders. Yes, these are tough economic times, but does that justify providing a poor educational experience for these children? Simply reassigning them in this way will greatly degrade the educational experience for my third-graders, not to mention those in the classes into which they must be integrated.

There are two obvious problems to this approach to a funding shortage:

• If your goal is to attract motivated, highly qualified graduates to teach in the D.C. schools, laying them off a month into the school year and putting them out of work (or turning them into desperate substitute teachers) for the balance of the year is counter-productive, not just in terms of the new recruits but in terms of whether future graduates fear the same will happen to them.

• If Rhee can't afford the teachers she has, why should they or their union believe that if they give up tenure and job protections they'll be rewarded with lavish raises? If current staff levels aren't sustainable, how can her proposed compensation scheme possibly be sustainable?

I don't hold Michelle Rhee responsible for staffing cuts made necessary by budgetary constraints, but I do think she now owes us an explanation of how her proposed replacement compensation scheme is even slightly viable. If she has donors lined up willing to subsidize such a scheme, why aren't they helping her right now? If they've decided that they have other priorities for their money, or are only interested in funding a scheme that busts the union, it again speaks to the unsustainability of her plan.

Also, I think this highlights what I mentioned the other day, - lip service, including the strong lip service of Fred Hiatt's editorial page, pays for zero teachers. Where's the Post's call for a school funding increase that will allow schools to sustain their present staffiing levels, let alone to improve them and where does it propose that money will come from?

What if a School Principal Acted Like This

Rhee apparently won't talk to the Washington Post reporter who is primarily responsible for reporting on school issues.

It's not uncommon for public officials to temporarily slam the door on reporters who upset them. But this is unusual. Rhee's effort to transform the public schools is arguably the biggest story in the District and has gained national attention. Her pique has lasted months. Turque is the only reporter who covers her full time. And he works for a powerful hometown newspaper whose coverage is essential to taxpaying readers with a stake in the issue.

"Basically, she just stopped talking to me," Turque said. "She never gave me a direct explanation. I've had to sort of piece it together indirectly."

How does Rhee explain the brush off?

I e-mailed Rhee and asked her to specify her complaints about Turque. I also asked whether she wants Turque replaced on the education beat and why she would talk with Mathews and not him. She referred me to her spokeswoman, Jennifer Calloway, who said Rhee doesn't want to "rehash" the past.

The Post's ombudsman observes,

Rhee's reaction to The Post's coverage strikes me as petty and thin-skinned -- and perhaps calculated. She has been uncommonly cooperative with national media reporters who parachute in for big-picture profiles. But she has been overly sensitive when Turque, and Post education reporters before him, have pursued more granular coverage that is so essential to local readers.

But it also seems to me to be a fair question, would Rhee tolerate this kind of behavior if it were directed at her?

It's About Time?

The Washington Post is concerned about negotiations between D.C. teachers union and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. It asserts,

Maybe it's time for parents to get a look what's going on in these closed-door talks. More than pay scales are at stake. Every aspect of classroom life - from the size of bulletin boards to teacher planning times to when principals can ask to look at lesson plans - is being decided. Given that secrecy hasn't helped Ms. Rhee and Ms. Weingarten work out their differences, why not give the public more than a glimpse and some sound bites about the competing proposals? Each side claims to have a plan that will further the interests of students. Let them prove it.

Well, great.... Except why didn't this matter to the Post during the many times in the past it advocated strongly in favor of Rhee's secret package of reforms?

Given it's history, the Post may well hope that the details of the discussion - class planning time, equipment to be provided to classrooms, etc. - overwhelms the big picture. I suspect they're hoping that disclosure will enable Rhee's supporters to try to hide the forest by pointing to trees, real or imagined - "Look, they want to have a contractual right to a large bulletin board" - rather than on the issues central to the negotiation. The devil may be in the details, but what would be most beneficial would be a point-counterpoint on the issues Rhee deems most necessary to effecting her reforms. If a dispute over the size of bulletin boards is on the list, or is even competitive for last place, I won't be left with much faith in Rhee. (But it won't be.)

Telling Tales Out of School

I stumbled across some pro-"tort reform" pablum from George Will - a pretty standard, "I read a book, accepted its allegations without question, and here's what it said"-type analysis typical of far too many columnists coming up on a deadline. The column opens with the usual array of anecdotes that's supposed to scream out for "reform":

Called to a Florida school that could not cope, police led the disorderly student away in handcuffs, all 40 pounds of her 5-year-old self. In a Solomonic compromise, schools in Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess. Long Beach, N.J., removed signs warning swimmers about riptides, although the oblivious tides continued. The warning label on a five-inch fishing lure with a three-pronged hook says "Harmful if swallowed"; the label on a letter opener says "Safety goggle recommended."

This sounds like pretty standard tort-reform propaganda - take anecdotes from around the nation (and, in the case of "funky warning labels" actually the world), strip them of context, provide no dates, and pretend that they're typical. It's what I've characterized as Readers Digest reasoning, as it's the "biased sample" approach many of that publication's columns have historically taken to convincing its audience of some great wrong that must be righted. I'll get to the school example later, as Will references a couple of others in his next paragraph.

• In a Solomonic compromise, schools in Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess - Apparently in 2005, Broward County posted signs around playground equipment stating "no running" but according to Safety Director Jerry Graziose, the Broward County official who ordered the signs, the issue was that "It's too tight around the equipment to be running."

  Had Will done his homework, he would be pointing out that the rule was short-lived, and Broward County's published rules do not have anything even slightly resembling a "no running at recess" rule for any grade level. (See, e.g., the 2007-2008 Playground Handbook (PDF).¹) But you know, that would involve checking the school district's website or picking up a phone and calling them - way too much work.

• Long Beach, N.J., removed signs warning swimmers about riptides - This was apparently recommended by their lawyer in 2004, based upon the theory that they did not have to warn of natural dangers and that providing an inadequate warning could create liability where none otherwise existed. There's no indication I can find that there was ever any actual litigation over the adequacy or inadequacies of the warnings. I can find no indication that this is a trend, or that it got much of any notice outside of the community of pro-tort reform propagandists.

• The warning label on a five-inch fishing lure with a three-pronged hook says "Harmful if swallowed"; the label on a letter opener says "Safety goggle recommended" - So what? Most likely, the guy assigned to making warning labels was sitting at a desk in China, had no clue about western law, and ended up writing a silly label - or copied one from another product because it was easy, or because he didn't understand enough English to compose his own (the author of the label didn't know enough English to pluralize "goggles"). If the suggestion is that lawyers made those labels necessary, quite the contrary - had the manufacturer consulted a lawyer, it would have been told that they were not.

  The fishing lure story appears to date back to 2004, when a story about it first appeared on a pro-tort reform propaganda website. Outside of pro-tort reform websites and credulous columns like Will's, I can't actually find evidence that these labels exist. They probably did exist at one time, but they're anomalies.

So a policy from 2004 in one New Jersey Township that may or may not still be in effect, a playground policy from a single school district in 2005 that appears long-abandoned, and a couple of wacky warning labels that date back many years, haven't been adopted by any products currently on the market, and can't be independently verified.... What an overwhelming case for "tort reform".

Will continues,

No official at the Florida school would put a restraining arm around the misbehaving child lest he or she be sued, as a young member of Teach for America was, for $20 million (the school settled for $90,000), because the teacher put a hand on the back of a turbulent seventh-grader to direct him to leave the classroom. Another teacher's career was ruined by accusations arising from her having positioned a child's fingers on a flute.

The first anecdote is true, dating back to 2006 - it may be that under the school's policies, no teacher could touch the child and thus nobody would do so. But that's not because of the law - it's because of rules imposed by school administrators. The first issue is legislative - when legislatures wish, they can authorize corporal punishment in schools, to the point of severe beatings, with none of the teachers or staff involved needing to be in any fear of being disciplined or sued. The second problem is that, when addressing this type of issue, school administrators tend to be lazy cowards. They implement policies that make it less likely that they will have to make decisions or deal with angry parents, then they blame fear of litigation for their own fecklessness. But one way or another, Will's again referring to a years-old example, an exceptional anecdote that in no way represents either common practice or a trend.

The "flute" story, I suspect to be fiction - or so far divorced from the facts as to amount to fiction. No details are provided, no names, no locations, so it's impossible to even attempt verification.

The remaining story, that of the Teach for America corps member who was sued for allegedly striking a student, caught my eye. Will is again going back quite a few years, to 2001. The TFA member, Joshua Kaplowitz, gives his version of events from his second grade classroom here:

The afternoon of June 13 started with the usual mixture of disorder and disrespect. This time, a boy named Raynard, a particularly difficult child, whom I had seen punch other students and throw things in the past, was repeating over and over, “I got to go to the bathroom. I need some water.” The rest of the class tittered as I told him in my sternest teacher voice that we would be having a class bathroom break once everyone was quiet and in his seat.

“I got to go to the bathroom. I need some water.”

Frustrated, I led him to the classroom door with my hand on the small of his back. I nudged him into the hall and closed the door. He would probably spend the remainder of the day roaming the halls with the rest of the troublemakers at Emery, but at least he would be out of sight, so I could get the rest of my class under control. I had given up on teaching for the rest of the day; my class was slated to watch a movie with Ms. Perkins’s first-graders across the hall.

Once Raynard left, I guided my students through a characteristically raucous bathroom break and filed them into Ms. Perkins’s room, where they lapsed into a rare TV-induced calm.

After 15 minutes, the school security guard appeared at the door and beckoned for me. My stomach hit the floor, as I guessed what this meant: yet another corporal-punishment charge. But this time was different. Chaos reigned in the main entranceway as police officers swarmed into the building. Raynard’s mother, I was told, had been in school for a meeting to place her son in a class for emotionally disturbed children. Raynard had told her that I had violently shoved him in the chest out the door of my classroom, injuring his head and back. His mother had dialed 911 and summoned the cops and the fire department. The police hustled me into the principal’s office, where I sat in bewilderment and desperately denied I had hurt Raynard in any way.

He ended up being charged with misdemeanor assault, and the school settled the lawsuit filed over the incident. A part of me wants to sympathize with Mr. Kaplowitz, but a larger part of me can't get past the self-serving, self-justifying tone of his essay. It's what psychologists call "external locus of responsibility" - everything that goes wrong is somebody else's fault - but his bad attitude toward teaching, his colleagues, his sponsoring organization, and his students oozes out of every word.² Could that have influenced the decision to settle?

What sort of witness testimony might have come up in a civil suit against Mr. Kaplowitz. Calling to the witness stand, Mr. Nick Ehrmann, a fellow TFA corps member who taught in a nearby classroom. Yes, things were difficult at the school:

We all faced incredible challenges throughout our first year - administrative turnover, lack of school discipline, and the resulting transfer of power to disruptive students who exploited this vacuum of administrative accountability. My classroom was frequently a stage for fistfights and tears. The difficulties that Josh describes were painfully real, and we all experienced them in similar degrees.

Despite the difficulties, which include frequent, false accusations of corporal punishment against teachers, and which appear quite extraordinary, Mr. Ehrmann found ways to work with his students and parents. Back to Mr. Ehrmann:

So why was Room 308, just two doors down, the scene of almost constant chaos?

I can’t pretend to know what happened inside those four walls. But I did witness moments that Josh does not mention in his article. I did witness Josh argue with and interrupt our principal during one of our first faculty meetings of the year. I did witness Josh berate a lone student in the hallway, his anger clearly uncontrolled. I did witness Josh place his hands upon this student’s shoulders and shove him against the wall while yelling in his face. Good intentions should not be an excuse for bad decisions.

Cross-examination, Mr. Kaplowitz?

Nick’s creativity is evidenced by the dramatic license with which he describes a hallway incident I omitted from my article - far more exciting in his retelling than in reality.

That's it? "Dramatic license"? The implication that there's more to the story? But no explanation of how Mr. Ehrmann's statement is inaccurate, misleading, or mischaracterizes a flagrant violation of the school's rules against corporal punishment?

Are you beginning to sense why the case settled?

Yet even as the lawsuit dragged on and the legal cloud over me caused me to lose a job opportunity I really wanted, I refused to entertain Raynard’s mother’s offers to settle the case by my paying her $200,000 - a demand that ultimately diminished to $40,000. The school system had no such scruples; it settled the mother’s tort claim in October 2002 for $75,000 (plus $15,000 from the teachers’ union’s insurance company—chump change compared with the cost of defending the litigation).

George Will says that translates into the case settling for $90K. But it sounds like, despite his scruples, Mr. Kaplowitz may have chipped in an additional $40K.

That was a long digression from Will's editorial, but it is illustrative of the problem. To hold the Kaplowitz story up as an example of a trend, or something that makes tort reform necessary, is absurd. Faced with unsympathetic facts, school administrators and teachers who were aware of Mr. Kapolowitz's difficulties with his classroom and students, and at least one known incident of inappropriate, angry physical contact with a student, it wasn't a good case to take to trial. And like every one of the stories in Will's parade of horribles, it occurred many years ago.

The sad part is, this is what you routinely get from tort reform advocates, and those like Will who choose to repeat their claims without care, thought, or investigation. If there's such a compelling case to be made for tort reform, why is it so hard to find a "tort reform advocate" who will approach the subject with so much as a whit of honesty?³
___________

1. Note to Broward County: "Helmit" is not an acceptable alternative spelling of "helmet".

2. The biggest problems Mr. Kaplowitz faced in the classroom appear to be that he was completely aware of what teaching actually involves, had no classroom management skills, and was placed in a "sink or swim" environment. His story's old, but it probably merits a more thorough and sympathetic examination in a future post.

3. Will's editorial continues with more "horribles", some of which are, well, judge for yourself:

In Indiana, a boy did what boys do: He went down a slide headfirst -- and broke his femur. The school district was sued for inadequate supervision. Because of fears of such liabilities, playgrounds all over America have been stripped of the equipment that made them fun.

So... how exactly can you break your leg by going down a slide head-first? Do you suspect that, if the story has any relation to the truth, Will's again leaving out some crucial facts and context? And where, exactly, can I find school playgrounds where they've removed the slides?

What's So Hard About Putting It In Writing?

The Washington Post is in a tizzy because the D.C. teacher's union is skeptical of proposed meetings between school administrators and teachers about Michelle Rhee's alternative compensation proposals:

Teachers should ask who benefits by shutting out Ms. Rhee. Certainly not teachers, who could receive some of the highest salaries in the country with the compensation plan she proposes. Under the proposal, teachers get a choice: Stick with the traditional pay scale with small raises, or forgo many tenure and seniority protections and get big money based on effectiveness in the classroom.

But why are meetings necessary to educate teachers about the proposals. It's fair to assume that most D.C. teachers can read. So why not put the proposal, in its full glory, up on a website? If it's that important to the Post, why not publish the details in the paper for all to see?

I really would like to see the details. If this is such a great deal, why the secrecy?

D.C. Education Policy - Six Of One and Half A Dozen Of The Other

Today the Washington Post presents two self-interested voices to speak about the problems of the D.C. public school system, the new Superintendent, Michelle Rhee, and the chairman of the board for a charter school, Mark Lerner.

Ms. Rhee speaks positively of the school district's ability to overcome some pretty standard obstacles, such as hiring new teachers, dealing with unexpected staffing shortages, fixing up school buildings, and improved textbook delivery. She describes problems with student registration, and the need for significant improvement in the current system. The editorial closes with the suggestion that although "the first week of school was the best yet ... there is much more work to do, and we have many more changes to come."

Student success is our highest priority, and with the support of parents, guardians, teachers and principals, our schools will be among the best.

If you were to judge this editorial by its omissions, I would note that the crumbling school infrastructure (a significant problem in most large cities) and corruption aren't mentioned. I don't mean to be unfair to D.C. by suggesting that it has problems of corruption in its school administration, but I doubt that there is a major urban school district without significant problems of fraud, corruption and waste. There's also no mention of student safety issues, an unfortunate but necessary issue that must be tackled by any school district which encompasses "inner city" schools.

Mr. Lerner does not expect the D.C. schools to overcome their bureaucratic problems and "dilapidated school buildings". Instead, of course, he lauds charter schools:

Charter schools, fighting for their lives to find facilities in the costly D.C. commercial real estate market, do not operate in buildings where the bathrooms are falling apart and water fountains do not work. You do not find paint peeling from walls and air conditioners that do not cool. And these schools are safe.

Obviously a new charter school is not going to seek out space in a crumbling building. A charter school has the benefit of being able to set its own maximum enrollment, lease as much (or as little) space as it wants, expect its students to travel to its location, and abandon that space or even shut down completely at the end of its lease. Public schools have none of those luxuries.

If you wish to offer neighborhood schools, or something reasonably approximating them, you need to have specialized school buildings throughout the city, and although in theory you can talk about privatizing that process (calling upon third parties to build and own schools while leasing them to the school district) you can expect that to both substantially increase cost and create a risk that an owner will decide at the end of a lease to find a different use for the property - with no realistic options available for a school board that wants to move to different premises. If the tax base is insufficient to pay for upkeep, maintenance, and building obsolescence, you will inevitably see students in crumbling schools.

Even if you abandon the notion of neighborhood schools, you need money for new buildings, increase transportation costs, and create commute time for every school child. Even assuming new school buildings somehow build themselves, I doubt that there would be a cost savings over replacing neighborhood schools, and there may in fact be a cost increase.

Lerner argues that a profit motive leads charter schools to offer a better product,

The power of ownership provides strong incentives to invest time and money into these schools. The power of school choice results in strong incentives to provide a product better than the one down the street.

Which, of course, is why charter school students so consistently outperform public school students, right? Except they don't. (I recognize that Lerner's school is for the performing arts, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that he so capably dances around the facts.)

Instead of trying to fix the D.C. public school bureaucracy, we should turn all of these schools into institutions of choice. With all the money we allocate to educating kids in the city (through DCPS, charters and the Opportunity Scholarship Program), we could provide each student with a $12,000 scholarship to a private school. Or, for a lot less money then we are currently spending, we could convert every school to a charter.

This is doubly duplicitous. First, there isn't room for every D.C. school student in a private school. Second, although average spending per pupil may be $12,000, that does not mean that spending is equal for all students. If Lerner has any students with special needs - academic or physical - I am sure his school already gets additional support, resources, and perhaps even staff provided out of the public school budget. Private schools do not have to accept students with learning disorders or behavioral problems - two classes of student for whom per pupil funding is vastly above the $12,000 average. Public schools have to serve any kid who makes it through the door.

Yes, working day and night, Rhee and the mayor may have some limited success. Then they will move on, and their replacements will take their eye off the ball. And then the children of the nation's capital will be back to square one.

Here, unfortunately, he's probably correct. While I attribite it to self-interest, not naievete, that he pitches privatization and charter schools as the answer to all of D.C.'s problems, it is exceptionally unlikely that Ms. Rhee will be able to achieve the magnitude of reform necessary to truly transform the D.C. schools. I sincerely wish her luck.