Jeff Bryant
Without doubt the poster person for the reform
movement has been ex-chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system
Michelle Rhee, who rocketed to the limelight of American consciousness with her
grandiose portrayals in the popular press and the major documentary film
“Waiting for Superman.”
Rhee is known as none other than “America’s
most famous school reformer.”
But it is Rhee’s spectacular rise and fall that in
many ways symbolizes the fallen arc of the education reform movement. This
month, that trajectory sank even lower.
Despite a generation of pledges to advance American
prosperity, the economic conditions of typical Americans
continue to deteriorate: more widespread poverty among children, persistently
high uninsured rates among the elderly, more people who lack the savings to
cover basic expenses for three months if they lose their job, more wage earners
in low-pay jobs barely able to cover basic needs, and explosive growth in
income inequality.
It should not surprise anyone, then, that the same
cycle of promise-to-failure that has been at work in national economic policy
has been playing out in education policy too, most notably in the work of the
so-called reform movement that continues to promise great things for the
nation’s school children but delivers disappointing results over and over
again.
Rhee’s Reform Gambit
As PBS education correspondent John
Merrow has reported, Rhee exemplified the reform creed of
“data-driven decision making” and a “produce or else” mentality relying on
student test scores as accurate measurements of teacher performance
Simply put, in Rhee’s brave new world of education
reform, how students did on a standardized test would help determine in a
significant way if schools stayed open, if teachers and principals received
bonuses or pay increases, and if educators even kept their jobs.
The assessment system Rhee employed then, called
DC-CAS, was not the only such system in use at the time. But the significance
of Rhee’s implementation of a test-based assessment system of this type cannot
be underestimated.
As Merrow wrote, “[Rhee] knew that her actions were
being watched beyond the District of Columbia. ‘All the eyes of the country are
now on D.C,.’ she said.”
In fact, even before results of DC-CAS or similar
assessment systems were analyzed, the idea of evaluating teachers and schools
on the basis of test score data became a cornerstone of the Obama
administration’s education policy. States receiving Race to the Top grant money
and waivers of the now discredited No Child Left Behind law had to pledge to
impose teacher evaluation systems that incorporated results of student
standardized exams to some significant extent.
These assessment systems have been rolled out
across the country in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Florida, New York, and
elsewhere.
In hindsight, Rhee’s decision to embrace the “new
science” of judging teacher performance based extensively on how students
performed on tests “was a mistake,” as Merrow has observed.
“At least 25 states have adopted her ‘produce or
else’ test-score based system of evaluating teachers,” Merrow noted. “But
politicians (and citizens) in those 25 states might want to take a closer look
at what she actually accomplished. Sadly, DC’s schools are worse by almost
every conceivable measure.”
Merrow has ticked off a litany of Rhee’s failed
results:
▪
A “revolving door” personnel
situation where newly hired teachers and principals come and go at much higher
rates than the national average.
▪
A bloated central office staff.
▪
Little or no gain in academic
achievement comparing pre- to post-Rhee test scores.
▪
High truancy rates and the lowest
high school graduation rate in the nation.
▪
No change in D.C.’s rate of progress
on the National Assessment of Educational Progress – D.C.’s NAEP levels remain
at or near the bottom of the nation.
▪
A widening gap in academic
performance between low-income and upper-income students.
Nevertheless, education reform fans continue to try
to reform Rhee’s failed record.
Rhee’s Skimpy IMPACT
Before Rhee’s departure from public office to lead
a lobbying and political fundraising group called StudentsFirst, her
administration instituted a revised test-based assessment system, called
IMPACT, that “relies on a complex mix of factors to score each teacher,”
according to Education Week’s Stephen Sawchuck.
Combining “measures of student achievement” (read:
test score data) with “multiple observations” and a tiered rating system –
deeming teachers as ineffective, developing, minimally effective, or highly
effective – IMPACT was the original D.C. assessment system on steroids with
bigger rewards for teachers rated high and more dire punishments for teachers
rated low.
Left in the hands of Rhee’s lieutenant Kaya
Henderson, IMPACT “won accolades in policy circles,” according to Sawchuck,
even before any results were in.
Indeed, Rhee may be long gone but praise continues
to roll in despite her failed legacy.
As a preliminary report – a “working paper” – on
the results of Rhee’s IMPACT system were made known in the pages of Politico and The Washington
Post, reform enthusiasts were quick to assert that
the chimera of test-based accountability was definitively proven to be
“working.”
A system reliant upon “rewards and punishments” has
been proven to affect a teacher’s “performance,” a reporter in The Washington Post wrote.
But peel away the veneer of positive spin and
what’s revealed is something a good bit less promising.
Writing at the blog site for the Albert
Shanker Institute, Matt DiCarolo did the best job possible of
balancing whatever good news can be ferreted from the report with its much
heavier weight of disappointment.
This was, after all, the “first high quality
assessment of one of the new teacher evaluation systems sweeping across the
nation,” DiCarlo wrote. So surely much is at stake, and evenhandedness is in
order.
Yet what DiCarlo found seems underwhelming to say
the least: Teachers with evaluation ratings that put them on the verge of being
terminated were “substantially (emphasis original) more likely to quit,”
while those whose ratings put them in line “for a large, permanent salary
increase . . . seemed to improve their performance.”
Finding it, “not particularly surprising” DiCarlo
concluded, “It is not really shocking that the promise of a huge, permanent
raise or especially the threat of dismissal would influence teachers’ labor
market choices and behavior.
Rutgers professor Bruce Baker put it a little more bluntly: “Put
simply, what this study says is that if we take a group of otherwise similar
teachers, and randomly label some as ‘ok’ and tell others they suck and their
jobs are on the line, the latter group is more likely to seek employment
elsewhere. No big revelation there and certainly no evidence that DC IMPACT
‘works.’”
Further, any questions of the real effects these
teachers’ actions may have had on their students – “whether these behavior
changes have anything to do with … ‘good teaching,’” as Baker concluded –
seemed to have simply not been part of the analysis.
Rhee’s IMPACT In Perspective
For nearly a generation, we’ve been told that an
elaborate system of incentives and punishments would engineer improved results
in student achievement, particularly for those students who have been the most
marginalized and underserved.
This was deemed necessary in order to make schools
“accountable” – an imperative begun during the presidential administration of
Ronald Reagan, which eventually became bipartisan as conservatives convinced
left-leaning people that resources devoted to education were wasted unless they
could be balanced with a metric result showing “improvement.”
With the advent of No Child Left Behind, the
accountability had its mechanism for targeting individual schools, but with the
Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the accountability arsenal
aimed at individual classroom teachers too.
With Michelle Rhee as its celebrity cheerleader,
the school accountability movement became the perfect PR campaign promising a
way forward to ever increasing education “effectiveness.”
But all those years of promises for this:
Studies can prove that teachers are capable of being manipulated by coercive
management systems, but the wealth of improvement stemming from expensive new
assessment systems has yet to fill the account left barren by the nation’s
reluctance to invest in our children’s education.
Michelle Rhee-like accountability systems that have
been in place a substantial amount of time have done no better than the one in
D.C. A long-standing system in Tennessee, for instance, has done nothing to
improve academic achievement and has revealed “almost nothing about teacher
effectiveness.”
The most ardent reform enthusiasts now admit
to “overselling, and underthinking [sic]” their cause, even as they try to
dispel whatever is being proposed as a positive alternative.
Parents and public officials in places as diverse
as rural Virginia and uptown New York City
are more boisterously questioning the whole premise of ramping up more tests on
students to determine the value of their teachers.
As the education reform movement’s empty harvest
leads us into a winter of discontent, what’s needed are more proposals from
multiple sources for a more positive way forward.
Far beyond the media spotlights focused on reform
celebrities like Rhee, other credible voices are calling for a different course for accountability and an
agenda based on opportunity and support for learning. No
wonder more people are listening.
Read more at http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/the-empty-harvest-from-michelle-rhee/
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