Education

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January 26, 2011 | 10:29 AM | By

DCPS Bonuses Come With Strings

Flickr: Adam Holloway

According to WAMU’s Kavitha Cardoza, “Of DCPS Teachers Offered Bonuses, 40 Percent Say: ‘No, Thanks‘”:

One of former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s signature initiatives was to reward good teachers with bonuses of up to $25,000. To qualify for the full amount, teachers have to score high marks on their evaluations, teach at schools with majority low-income children, and teach a tested grade and certain subjects. Bonuses were offered to 636 teachers, but 40 percent turned down the money…

I read this and immediately wondered why anyone would turn down extra money right now. Well, because:

But these teachers had to agree to give up some job security. For example, they could lose their jobs because of program changes or enrollment declines at their schools.

Diane Terrell, a teacher at Stoddert Elementary School, refused her $5,000. She says a bonus shouldn’t come with strings attached.

“You think you can come and wave money in front of us and we will give up everything to you. I could not do that,” she says.

Two teachers were eligible for $25,000, the maximum amount. Both accepted the money.

FILED UNDER: Education, Michelle Rhee, Money, Schools
January 14, 2011 | 4:44 PM | By

Rhee and the GOP

Flickr: Mike Licht

Now reading, “Is Michelle Rhee becoming a Republican darling?” from Mike DeBonis at the Post:

Rhee’s message has been embraced by the favorite media outlets of the conservative movement. She rolled out her policy platform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and made an appearance on Fox News Channel (in addition to appearances on the Today Show and other less partisan forums). Today, a post on the Heritage Foundation’s blog calls on “opponents of sensible education reforms to put the needs of children before the demands of special interests–as Rhee’s aptly named group suggests.”

It’s not hard to explain the GOP’s embrace: Rhee’s policy agenda has long been heavy on attacking the role of teacher unions in blocking the sorts of reforms she believes are most effective — eliminating teacher “tenure,” ending seniority-based teacher transfers, evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores, etc. Democrats, with their closer ties to national unions, tread more lightly around those issues in a way that the GOP does not.

But the question for Rhee is to what extent she wants her nascent national brand to get caught up in partisan politics, especially going into a presidential election year.

FILED UNDER: Education, Michelle Rhee, Race and Class
January 3, 2011 | 2:27 PM | By

Worksheets instead of Teaching, in D.C.

Flickr: rkeohane

A worksheet.

Now reading: “The McEducation of the Negro: Franchising is an outstanding model for selling Big Macs. But it can be toxic to classrooms” by Natalie Hopkinson:

That’s how it went: rewards and punishments, then worksheets. No instruction, just worksheets. At the end of the class, Bridgers, who works as an exterminator, pulled aside the teacher, a young white male and recent graduate.

“I wanted to know when he was going to do some, you know, teaching,” Bridgers explained to me recently. “You know, like, how we used to have in school? She would stand in front of the class … “…

Of course, today the “reformers” say that that way of teaching is old school. It was fine before the days of social media and the “information revolution” and the global economy. But now, as the argument goes in films like Waiting for Superman, no self-respecting parent would ever send his or her child to a “failing” public school like the one that generations of Bridgers’ family attended in their neighborhood in Northeast Washington.

For Bridgers’ son and a disproportionate number of black students around the country, charter schools have become the preferred choice.

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FILED UNDER: Education, Charter Schools, Michelle Rhee, Race and Class
December 17, 2010 | 11:32 AM | By

Sorry, Ron Brown Middle School. Wrong Number.

alangutierrez

I think this is the robot who keeps me hanging on the telephone.

I have a problem. Relative to everything else in my life, it’s minor, but it’s still frustrating.

Every day, at least once, but often twice, I get a phone call from a local phone number. It’s a recorded message with no information on how to respond, which is what compounds my frustration.

“Hello, Brown family. There is no aftercare today. Please ensure that your children are picked up promptly after school.”

Except…I don’t have children, unless we count my puppy. And she is home-schooled. I’m also so clueless that until this week, I thought they were trying to reach a D.C. public school parent named Brown– until I realized that DCPS probably doesn’t have the resources to record every parents’ name, for precious, individualized robo-calls. “A-ha!”, I thought. The SCHOOL is named “Brown”!

I’ve had the same phone number for 12 years, ever since I moved to this city. I’m aware that because of this and a few other factors, the proclivity for me to get random phone calls is high, so I try to be patient. At the same time, I’m concerned that there’s a parent out there who isn’t getting critically important information, that will affect their kid’s future; two weeks ago, one of the messages was about attendance and needing to speak to a teacher or administrator, immediately. Was my mistakenly-attributed child cutting school? And more depressing than that– why hadn’t this parent realized that they had provided an incorrect phone number? Didn’t they realize that they weren’t getting updates? Did they…not care?

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FILED UNDER: Education, Schools
December 16, 2010 | 3:15 PM | By

Rhee: “Lack of Experience” isn’t so bad

Kaplan101

Cathie Black. Three lawsuits regarding the legality of her state-issued waiver for a lack of education credentials are pending, in New York.

This little article caught my eye when I read my New York Post, this morning:

Former Washington, DC schools chief Michelle Rhee said her appointment to the post three years ago was met with nearly identical opposition to that being faced by incoming New York City Schools Chancellor Cathie Black.

“People were [effectively] rioting in the street, saying, ‘How can somebody who’s never run a school, who’s never run a school district, do this job?” Rhee told The Post at a Manhattan Institute event in Midtown yesterday.

“And I think what I showed is that you don’t necessarily have to have been a superintendent before,” added Rhee, who launched the Students First advocacy group earlier this month.

“She’s shown in her experience in business that she can run a multibillion-dollar organization, that she can turn something around, so I don’t think her lack of experience in education disqualifies her.”

FILED UNDER: Education, Michelle Rhee
December 15, 2010 | 1:44 PM | By

Kaya Henderson to “smooth things out”

Perhaps the city residents who miss Michelle Rhee shouldn’t worry so much? Here’s the Washington Examiner on interim D.C. schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson:

“People keep asking me how I’m different from Michelle Rhee. I’m different than her because she’s a petite Asian woman and I’m a large black girl,” Henderson told The Washington Examiner.

But the style of leadership that was necessary in June 2007 is different than what people crave now, Henderson says. “Rhee had to come in and break some china,” she says. “We’re tired of breaking china.” Rhee’s job was to create a revolution of reform; Henderson’s job is to smooth things out.

So she smiles more than Rhee, and she meets with skeptical education boards in the various wards, broaching topics like “healing” and “acknowledging missteps.”

But as Rhee’s deputy chancellor, Henderson was silently pulling the strings of the most high-profile, and most controversial, reforms that Rhee — and Mayor Adrian Fenty — took the public hit for.

Henderson was D.C. Public Schools’ chief negotiator of the union contract, which allowed Rhee to fire 165 teachers rated ineffective during classroom observations. Henderson led the team that developed Impact, the teacher evaluation tool that determined those firings.

FILED UNDER: Education, Kaya Henderson, Michelle Rhee, Schools
December 7, 2010 | 10:20 AM | By

About those Charter Schools…

rockcreek

Charter School in NE

After consuming some tasty morning bytes, I’m reading this interesting listicle from Smart Money: “10 Things Charter Schools Won’t Tell You”. Here’s the first “thing”:

1. We’re no better than public schools. For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general aren’t producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know. See our earlier story, “10 Things Your School District Won’t Tell You,” for more.)

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that aren’t so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says…

And here’s a bit of #4, “Students with disabilities need not apply.”:
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FILED UNDER: Education
December 6, 2010 | 1:00 PM | By

Rhee’s Next Project: a National Advocacy Group, “StudentsFirst”

D.Clow - Maryland

Michelle Rhee

If you were wondering what Michelle Rhee is up to, head to Newsweek’s abundantly-titled “What I’ve Learned: We can’t keep politics out of school reform. Why I’m launching a national movement to transform education“:

The purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that.

What that means is that the reform community has to exert influence as well. That’s why I’ve decided to start StudentsFirst, a national movement to transform public education in our country. We need a new voice to change the balance of power in public education. Our mission is to defend and promote the interests of children so that America has the best education system in the world.

From the moment I resigned, I began hearing from citizens from across this country. I got e-mails, calls, and letters from parents, students, and teachers who said, “Don’t give up. We need you to keep fighting!”…

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FILED UNDER: Education, Michelle Rhee, School Reform
November 5, 2010 | 3:30 PM | By

Charter Schools: Like Seeing a Dentist for a Heart Condition?

Bread for the World

Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, D.C.

While I was reading anything and everything last night, to curate our morning link roundup, I stumbled across this:

If doctors were treated like teachers:

1. “Charter hospitals” could certify “smart people” as qualified to begin practicing medicine without any prior experience in the field if they had had “some business background.”

2. Since a “doctor” can “doctor” anything, a cardiologist would be on staff at a hospital in place of a urologist when there was a shortage of urologists. The cardiologist could “learn on the job.”…

3. Whenever a doctor gave a patient a prescription, the patient’s parents could come to the doctor’s office demanding he or she change the prescription since the parents “knew better.”

4. Because of a shortage of doctors, Mayor Bloomberg would institute a summer “crash course” in medicine for people who had no background in the field but “liked playing doctor” when they were little. Those who got through the six-week course would then be considered qualified to care for the most severely ill patients since no other doctors would want to do the job.

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FILED UNDER: Education, Charter Schools, Children, Schools
October 18, 2010 | 11:11 AM | By

Maybe Teachers’ Unions aren’t the Problem

IITA Image Library

I just had a thought-provoking conversation about my Georgetown Public Policy Review/Michelle Rhee interview post with a DCentric reader who was a teacher at his high school alma mater– a “failing urban public school”:

(Jambulapati’s) post is another example of the ongoing villainization of teachers’ unions, which have increasingly become the favorite punching bag of would-be urban school reformers like Rhee. While Teach for America types may position merit pay and increased accountability as the keys to saving America’s inner city youth, my time as both a student and teacher in a failing urban public school has taught me no amount of creativity or passion can be substituted for parents that take an active interest in their parents’ education.

Put simply, America’s schools are not failing because of unions. They are failing because Americans don’t value education. If you need further evidence, just contrast the way teachers and schools are revered in places like India and China with the way many Americans take pride in their anti-elitism and disdain for academics, nerds and other pointy-headed types.

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FILED UNDER: Education, Children, Michelle Rhee, School Reform, Schools