michelle rhee

Michelle Rhee Misreads "Shift Among Democrats" On Education

Jeff Bryant — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:44:27 -0400

In her recent Washington Post op-ed, Michelle Rhee ruminated over the outcome of the Chicago Teachers Strike and concluded that not only were the Chicago teachers "never about the kids" but also had made a practical, political mistake by not being in step with the rest of the Democratic party.

Her contention seems to be that teachers who use a contract dispute to protest increasingly deteriorating conditions in public schools defy the "shift" among most Democrats who she believes increasingly favor the policies that Chicago Mayor Rham Emanuel wanted to enforce on teachers.

But putting aside Rhee's tenuous arguments about who is really "for the kids" in this dispute, what evidence is there that teachers erred strategically by "isolating" themselves from the rest of the Democratic party? And is it true that the only practical lesson for Democrats to draw from the Chicago teachers strike is that they should side against teachers unions and their supporters?

Rhee: "Reformer" Or Lobbyist?

First, let's be clear about Rhee's role in this debate. Although Rhee heads an organization called Students First, most of what she actually does is to advocate for specific types of legislation, i.e. lobby. In Chicago, Washington DC, New York City, and numerous state capitals, Students First has focused its considerable resources—including many hundreds of thousands in donations to candidates for public office—on passing laws and promoting politicians that advance policies which restrict teachers' collective bargaining rights, tie their job security and pay to scores on students' standardized tests, and allow more public taxpayer money to be redirected to privately run entities such as charter schools.

As reported by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the source of many of the bills Rhee campaigns for is the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), a corporately backed nonprofit that drafts "model bills" that favor the interests of the organization's funders, which include many of the largest corporations in the U.S. as well as conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation. For every piece of legislation Students First backs, ALEC has a model bill.

State lawmakers are also members of ALEC, and those who join are "overwhelmingly conservative Republican," CMD observes.

So Rhee is essentially a lobbyist working principally for the interests of conservative Republicans and corporations. Although colluding with conservative Republicans on public policy could be an example of "crossing the aisle," not very many Democrats have chosen to make that crossing. In fact, according to the website of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, 49 Democratic state lawmakers who did belong to ALEC recently dropped their memberships due to ALECs controversial model bills.

So Rhee's self-purported ability to read the winds of change in the Democratic party seems questionable to say the least.

Most Democrats Backed The Chicago Teachers Strike

But back to Rhee's contention that the Chicago teachers are "isolating" themselves from other Democrats, what evidence can she offer for this?

Not much, apparently, except her supposed intuition.

Looking at the evidence, it appears that the teachers had a significant percentage of Democrats, and the general public, on their side. In a survey of registered voters conducted by the Chicago Sun-Times, while the strike was taking place, only 39 percent of Chicago voters opposed the teachers, 47 percent backed them, and only 6 percent strongly supported mayor Emanuel.

Another poll found that 66 percent of parents of Chicago Public School students supported the strike, with 55.5 percent of Chicagoans in general supporting the strike and 40 percent opposed. Interestingly, that second poll was conducted by We Ask America, "a generally Republican pollster," according to Laura Clawson, labor editor at the blogsite Daily Kos.

Perhaps it was that kind of public support for teachers that influenced, President Obama, his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Democratic State Legislators in Illinois to stay out of the fray?

For sure, there were left-leaning and centrist pundits who criticized the striking teachers. But there were certainly very many prominent and outspoken supporters of the teachers, including >The Washington Post's very own Eugene Robinson who wrote that there is "a brie-and-chablis 'reform' movement" in education that is "portraying teachers as villains" while "ignoring the reasons for the education gap in this country."

Prominent education expert Richard Kahlenberg, at The Century Foundation, writing in the pages of The New Republic, concluded that the Chicago teachers strike "may ultimately be good for Democratic education policy, which for too long has aped right-wing rhetoric in the name of education reform."

Could it be that the "shift" Rhee sees in the Democratic consensus on education is in the exact opposite direction she surmises?

Rhee Wrong About Movies Too

Shortly after Rhee's op-ed appeared in the Post, she was interviewed on the far right wing blogsite Red State, essentially making the same argument, that winds of change were blowing Democrats toward agreement with Republicans on education. She added to her claims an endorsement of the new movie "Won't Back Down," which depicts a parent, played by actress Maggie Gyllenhaal who organizes parents in her child's public school to defy the local teachers union and turn the school into a charter school.

The subject material is based on legislation called "Parent Trigger" laws—another ALEC model bill—that allow a group of parents in a school to take a vote on whether to close their school, replace the teachers, or turn the school over to a private charter management group. These laws have been rarely enacted, extraordinarily divisive, and have never actually "improved" a school. Nevertheless, Rhee is a big backer of the Parent Trigger.

Just as Rhee was singing the accolades of the movie, blog posts were popping up at entertainment sites all over the Internet reporting that "Won’t Back Down" had quickly bombed at the box office, setting a record for worst-opening of a major motion picture, despite a huge publicity campaign involving promotion by NBC’s Education Nation and full-page ads in major newspapers.

Education Ann Coulter

No doubt, Rhee will continue to be a force in the debate about how to preserve and improve America's great system of public education. With the significant backing from Rupert Murdoch, the Walton Family of Walmart fame, and deep-pocketed hedge-fund investors (are these typical allies of Democrats?), Rhee will be able to sustain the income stream that propels her lobbying and campaign donor activities.

The media will quite likely keep her in the limelight as well, as she has become a lightning rod for attention—a sort of "education Ann Coulter" who delights in outrageousness: modeling to little school kids how an adult can eat a bee, taping her students' mouths shut, firing school personnel live on camera for a national broadcast, and posing on the cover of a major news magazine, broom in hand, to convey her intention to "sweep out" experienced school teachers as if they are so much trash.

But without her fortune and fame, it's not hard to imagine that it would be Michelle Rhee, and not school teachers, who would be isolated from the Democratic party.

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We Need Democrats To Act Like Democrats On Education

Jeff Bryant — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:37:22 -0400

[My guest writer today is Cynthia Liu, PhD. Cynthia launched member-supported K12NewsNetwork.com to amplify grassroots education news and provide a national platform for people to use sophisticated online organizing tools to better improve and strengthen public schools. It's "MoveOn" for school communities. K12NN's relaunch was funded by a Ford Foundation grant to re-envision journalism and civic engagement. Site tools are currently being used to organize supporters to fund California schools through key ballot initiatives and parcel taxes.]

While at the DNC, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small gathering of public education supporters with Governor Dean and Randi Weingarten, who heads the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). I'm a tremendous fan of Governor Dean -- in fact, I was a Deaniac before there was a netroots. I still think he's fantastic on so many issues close to the hearts of progressives. And I love the "50-state strategy." In fact, had I not had a second awakening as an engaged citizen and activist, inspired by Governor Dean's work, I probably wouldn't have been at the DNC at all. I'm grateful that he took the time to speak with us. Here's my recollection of what took place at the meeting.

When I heard about the meeting, I invited several allies and activists to attend. (I think we may have all heard about the meeting from different sources.) There was a large group from Florida in attendance (all delegates to the DNC) who were keen to deny Jeb Bush's education privatization plans in that state. Florida parent groups and others had successfully banded together to stop a "parent trigger" law from passing in the legislature in the spring of 2012. Many of the Floridians at the Charlotte meeting were veterans of that campaign. Another group of parents were from Charlotte, NC, and had staged several demonstrations countering pro-charter school "parent trigger" mythology shown in the film Won't Back Down. Another parent is active in MomCongress and has worked with other parents in her community to strengthen the local schools and push back on Tea Party candidates and agendas.

The meeting unfolded with opening remarks by Ms. Weingarten and Governor Dean. I won't recap as David Atkins has summarized that portion over at Hullaballoo and I'd only add that I really love the AFT's McDowell, WV effort to uplift the entire community using schools as a focus. We've featured those reports on K12NN previously as an outstanding example of community support that enables parents and students to seize hold of school governance, have input on key policies, and work in a coordinated way with business leaders from McDowell, townspeople without children, and of course, the teachers and school administrators.

Governor Dean spent time outlining how we know what solutions to pursue, but frustratingly, thanks to GOP-touted austerity scares and general obstructionism, we're not currently in a place where we can even fund Head Start, public precshool, or 0-3 post-natal enrichment care and training for new parents. He also stated that he is most definitely against conservatives' favorite GOP tool, voucher plans that would give a fixed sum of public money to parents to use at private schools.

After a few softball, ice-breaker questions from the Nation reporter and other bloggers there, I had the strong feeling parent voices were not being heard and wouldn't be if we continued along in this vein. We were at 40,000 miles altitude far above daily issues. We needed to get back to ground level: from the grassroots up, from inside the classrooms and schools up.

So I jumped in and directed my comments to Governor Dean on his support of charter schools.

I pointed out how many charters have drifted from their original mission, becoming "hedge fund wolves in sheep's clothing."

I said many charters de-fund and de-populate district schools by skimming the least expensive students to educate and tossing more challenging and expensive to educate special ed or English learner or severely disabled children back into the district public school pond. (I wish I'd added that boutique charters like Bullis Charter School in Los Altos de-fund districts by pressing expensive law suits that cost $1.3 million in legal fees and up to resolve [figure taken from this source]. How many art programs or special ed aides could Los Altos School District have funded for that amount?)

I said charter parents are being pitted against each other in co-location battles in NY and Los Angeles, and that with charter schools, it always comes down to real estate. In California, for example, charter trade associations are cleverly lobbying and exercising power through lawsuits using Prop 39 to force existing school districts to give public school facilities to charter schools by claiming that charters are on the downside of school equity in physical plant.

And I also said "charters are an unfunded mandate -- a federal solution firehosed onto the states from Race to the Top and other policies -- unfunded because strapped state and local government have no parallel effort to fund the building of new schools." It's dangerous to say more schools should be created but leave facilities to house those schools in the hands of "market forces." Why? Because it leads to government exercise of privileges like eminent domain to seize land for public purposes and build public schools, but in hijacked fashion, so those buildings are then turned over to and controlled by semi-private or wholly private charter management organizations, as has happened in Los Angeles under the School Choice program.

What I wish I'd also said: that charter schools create a two-tier public school system where charters are "excused" from many of the rules and regulations regular public schools have to follow, such as educating ALL children regardless of preparation, parent motivation, special ed needs, or socio-economic status. And within charter schools, there's another two-tier system springing up wherein boutique or "vanity" charters tend to educate middle class/mostly white and Asian kids but "no excuses" charters tend to educate African American and Latino kids. How is segregation, "choice without equity," good? How is that egalitarian?

What I did say, ultimately, that I'm sure was very angering for Governor Dean, is that "we need Democrats to act like Democrats on this issue."

And what I mean by that is this: too many Democratic mayors, groups like Democrats For Education Reform, and self-appointed, self-identified Democrats like plushly-funded ed reformer Michelle Rhee, have been too eager to partner with the "moneybags right and the religious right" to use parent triggers and school choice as a wedge for favorite right-wing policies like vouchers and charters that have at their root the decimation of public schools. When you follow the money, you see the same high dollar donors profiting from school privatization as you see donating to political campaigns big and small. We parents know it's expensive to run a political campaign. We just don't want electeds to do so on the backs of our kids.

Why are Democrats providing aid and comfort to the enemy in support of one of the most cherished goals of conservatives, to end what they sneeringly call 'government' schools?

I'll use a health care metaphor I'm sure Dr. Dean would appreciate, but I didn't have a chance to say to him then: right now our public school system is the equivalent of Medicare, or Medicare-for-all, that imaginary single-payer system we keep aiming for and trying to turn into reality. Why would we want to use charters and allow the right-wing language of "school choice" to make education a patchwork of unequally accessible services available to only people who are lucky enough to afford it? Why would we want to go from near-universal public education of all school-aged children (admittedly at varying levels of quality) to quality education for only a lucky few (and the school-to-prison pipeline for the rest)? Why are we throwing out the improveable existing system 'baby in the bathwater' for an unproven, market-driven one?

Using another medical metaphor differently that only occurs to me now: charters were, in a different time, like the sun. In small doses, sun exposure is a healthy dose of vitamin D. With unchecked and indiscriminate exposure, it's melanoma. What we have right now is moneyed right-wing interests allying with extremely wealthy liberalish reformers with no background in education to create an unhealthy situation for public schools because there's no filter on charters as the proposed solution, no sense that they may only be good for very specific, limited situations. It's just too tantalizing to cash in on New Markets Tax Credits that benefit charter school funder-operators.

After I had my say, Governor Dean pushed back on my charter school comments. He said he agreed with Randi Weingarten that some good can come out of them and that they're a necessary way to foster "innovation" in schools. Moreover he was vehement that inner city children have been neglected and discarded for decades -- an unacceptable state of affairs. (I agree with Governor Dean's vehemence and energetic critique of what Jonathan Kozol has called "savage inequalities," but obviously my idea of solutions differ from his.) Finally Govenor Dean made some concession that charter schools are too varied to be described by the single term 'charter', a point a member of the Florida delegation reinforced later in the conversation.

I then posed a final question to Governor Dean's second round of comments: "For boutique charters like Bullis, how is a semi-private charter school partially funded by taxpayer money different than a private school receiving school vouchers?" What, exactly, is public about a 'public charter school'? It's a question more and more parents who support the public school system and insist that it be a democratizing, egalitarian force in public life are beginning to ask. Looked at from the school funding/financing point of view, what is the real difference? Are charters simply "voucherized" semi-private schools made palatable with civil rights rhetoric to Democrats who'd reject them otherwise? A civil rights rhetoric that is peculiarly missing any anti-poverty programs or measures to address chronic school underfunding and unequal resource allotment?

The question didn't go anywhere, but it needs to be discussed more openly.

For those who have time, I highly suggest listening to the entirety of Karran Harper-Royal's recent presentation on how some education reformers and civil rights leaders got on the wrong side of ed reform. (She is a parent and community advocate for public schools speaking from where she lives: the heart of New Orleans and the wreckage of Governor Bobby Jindal's disaster capitalism experiment in privatization in that city and state.) I've included video of her talk below:

SOS12 Karran Harper Royal: How [some] African Americans and Civil Rights Leaders Got on the Wrong Side of the Ed Reform Movement from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

My intent was never to offend Governor Dean, but to speak directly, clearly, and with urgency as a parent of a child attending public schools to raise these issues. Increasingly more parents are asking the questions I raise. I am not the only one. Over 500,000 parents in Florida stood up to defy Jeb Bush's (and ALEC-backed) parent trigger bill. The Washington state PTA along with the Washington State League of Women Voters have seen the ugly competition and divisiveness charters have sown in other states, and the corruption that surrounds non-educators with a Gold Rush mentality as they launch corporate charter chains, and they are strongly against a ballot initiative that would open Washington state to charter schools. (Washington state voters have opposed charter schools three times times previously.) Other parts of the progressive coalition such as the People for the American Way and the national League of Women Voters have issued warnings against public school privatization in the context of overall privatization of the public sector.

These are not middle class parents trying to shut out opportunities for low-income kids. We want excellence and opportunity for all children in ways that align with our small-'d' democratic form of local and school governance. These are parents from all SES levels starting to question the rhetoric with real, on-the-ground examples of how charters aren't working. When it comes to innovation in school curriculum and pedagogical approach, there's more than one game in town: magnet schools are an promising, unfinished in-district experiment that demonstrate several years of proven results and use residential desegregation to try to balance resources equitably. Community and alternative schools also operate within school districts and are viable models for improving and strengthening public schools. (The AFT's work in MacDowell is a tremendous example of community school support that draws from the surrounding town and in return uplifts the local economy.)

Should Governor Dean or his aides come upon this post, I'd urge him to read and listen to the interview I did with two Alameda Unified School District parents who worked to convert their "failing" Title I school into a magnet school that gives the many low-income in-district children first priority at attendance. For an indication of the potential for success of magnet schools, one need only look at the example of our brilliant First Lady Michelle Obama, a proud graduate of a Chicago Public Schools magnet school. We need in-district solutions for curricular innovation and resource equity that strengthen the entire public school system.

We parents who volunteer countless hours in our kids' schools, fundraise through booster clubs or parent-teacher organizations to make up for state budget shortfalls, and support our teachers in the classroom are on the front lines. Democratic Party electeds and policymakers at 40,000 feet must listen to us, or they risk helping to further an agenda they'd never sign onto otherwise.

Let me absolutely clear on this: I am fully committed to re-electing President Obama and Vice President Biden. But this discussion of education reform -- its on-the-ground flaws, moneyed interests, and unholy alliances using "civil rights" language as a marketing strategy -- is an ongoing conversation I am looking forward to having with the White House and the Obama administration after the inauguration of President Obama for a second term.

You Can't Waive The Reality Of Our Public Schools

Jeff Bryant — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:28:47 -0400

So much for the "New Washington Consensus on Education".

Education policy, we were told by conservative leaders merely six months ago, was a " redeeming feature" of the Obama administration that would provide DC policy makers with a tranquil eddy amidst the whitewater of American politics.

The New Consensus was forged on the idea that federal policies governing the nation's schools could enforce “tight” restrictions on what we expect public schools to make students and teachers "do," as long as the governing policies remained "loose" about how we make them do it.

The last glimpse of this glorious, technocratic vision slipped out from an embargoed presser in the wee hours of Monday morning, when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan admitted that the once heralded goals of No Child Left Behind were unachievable and that states could blow them off as long as they could persuade a yet-to-be-announced group of peers that they were adhering to a yet-to-be-defined definition of "accountability."

The announcement was in every way a rendering unto the "tight, loose" edicts of the New Washington Consensus. Yet even this vague illusion of a policy -- an administrative excuse, really, for the complete and utter failure of NCLB -- was met with resounding disapproval from all sides in the once still-waters of edu-policy.

Republican education policy leaders had already expressed opposition to waivers with conditions. And Republicans from states with large populations of rural schools have already declared that the Obama "Blueprint" for education policy, which many speculate that Duncan's waiver requirements will draw from, is basically unworkable in their states.

Even education policy makers in the Democratic party have expressed skepticism about waiving NCLB "growth targets" for specific student populations. And Duncan's announcement generated only tepid expressions of "understanding" of "where Duncan is coming from." This hardly constitutes a strong base for strong-arming policy through a reluctant legislative body.

Secretary Duncan's once-reliable "reform" backers, true champions of the New Consensus, were mostly vehement in their criticism -- slamming it as a "back door" strategy, a grasp for "greater presidential authority," and a "gambit" pleasing no one. It seemed the best support that Duncan could get from the self-anointed reformers would be the incoherent declaration from loyal ally Michelle Rhee that waiving NCLB "accountability" is okay only if the government enforces "rigorous accountability." (Huh?)

And those who've long opposed NCLB were uniformly and unsurprisingly critical of the waiver plan.

So in the place of the New (now Old) Washington Consensus on Education, what we're left with is a truly ungovernable stalemate in which the rudderless ship of state founders on the shoals of entrenched political positions in DC while waves of budget cuts lash at the gunwales and privateers plunder the hold.

Teacher and edu-blogger Doug Noon correctly likens the situation that education policy finds itself in to the "Doom Loop" determining our nation's economic policy:

With a slight adjustment, Paul Krugman’s analysis of the S&P downgrade works for education reform as well.
Krugman:
"1. US debt is downgraded, sparking demands for more ill-advised fiscal austerity
2. Fears that austerity will depress the economy send stocks down
3. Politicians and pundits declare that worries about US solvency are the culprit, even though interest rates have actually plunged
4. This leads to calls for even more ill-advised austerity, which sends us back to #2"
Applied to education reform:
1. US schools are criticized, sparking demands for ill-advised standardized testing
2. Fears that testing is dominating the curriculum send confidence in schools down
3. Politicians and pundits declare that teacher effectiveness is the culprit, even though instruction is focused on tested material
4. This leads to calls for even more ill-advised testing, which sends us back to #2
And back to Krugman for the zinger, “Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence.”
Really, how much of an appetite for this shit do we have?

Apparently, quite a lot. Already, plenty of states have lined up for the chance at a waiver even before the requirements have been spelled out. Short-term grasps at straws, it seems, are what our political leaders are willing to accept.

But there is a real consequence of this short-term gaming in place of long-term leadership to all of us down here on the ground. As my colleague Dave Johnson has so insightfully observed here on this blog, "government spending cuts don't cut, they shift costs." And as the first wave of school openings rolls out this week and next, the "shift" is going to hit the fan in our nation's school hallways and classrooms.

How this new reality for the nation's schools works is that parents get hit for costs they never had to pay in the past, children who are the most in need -- such as poor kids with no access to books and children with developmental issues -- get blocked out of early childhood programs, kindergarten programs are closed, and families who live in remote areas are told to take a hike if they care about getting their son or daughter to school.

The reformist joke of a solution is to recommend that the nation adopt the education policies of the state with the highest percentage of failing schools.

But what we really don't need is another Michelle Rhee-type grand plan for "innovation" that, "after replacing 50% of the teaching staff in the regular public schools, paying huge fees and salaries to self-described experts, and shipping over one-third of the student population to essentially unregulated charter schools," produces "basically, nothing." (hat tip: Tom Hoffman)

What we need instead is, first, for the broadcast media's staging of "back to school season" to shun the Michelle Rhee's and Bill Gates'es of the world and take a look at the real, hard truth of the nation's disinvestment in public education. Listen instead to this LA teacher who explains why she can't be "excellent" when school cuts and teacher lay-offs force her to deal with a class of "31 students, including two with learning disabilities, one who just moved here from Mexico, one with serious behavior problems, 10 who flunked this class last year and are repeating, seven who test below grade level, three who show up halfway through class every day, one who almost never comes, [and a] brainiac who's so bored she's reading 'Lolita' under her desk."

Instead of running more puff pieces on "wonderful" charter schools that the edu-philanthropists shower with money, follow edu-blogger Nancy Flanagan as she gives an eyewitness account of the decay we've allowed our traditional public schools to fall into:

And then there was the building itself, which reeked, literally, of neglect--from broken, filthy blinds (essential for shutting out the hot glare of the sun) to gummy floors to mismatched windows with security mesh embedded. The kindergarten "playground"--a crumbling concrete square--looked like a prison yard, and the auditorium floor was littered with broken glass. Boxes of unused teaching materials, ordered decades ago, were stacked everywhere. The principal told me that 90% of her workday since she was hired, in June, has been taken up with a frustrating quest to get some action on urgent and critical facility needs.
Teachers were hauling years' worth of dusty trash into the hallways, armed with disinfecting wipes, spray cleaner and contact paper. Interactive white boards had been used as bulletin boards; teachers were exchanging tips on removing tape residue and whose husband had the power drill to put up shower board from Home Depot over old, cracked chalkboards.

And what we need is real leadership -- real leadership like what we just saw from North Carolina's gutsy governor Bev Perdue who announced yesterday that she will defy the state Tea Party inspired budget that blocks at-risk children from early childhood programs. It's sad but true that standing up for the welfare of children in the face of rapacious greed from the most powerful people has now become the hardest thing for leaders to do in our society. But there you have it.

Only that combination -- confronting truth and real leadership -- can get us out of this Doom Loop we find ourselves in. Waivers won't help.

On School Reform, Michelle Rhee, and Democracy

Jeff Bryant — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:59:41 -0400

On Tuesday Sam Seder and I had a brief discussion during his daily web broadcast The Majority Report that touched on some points I made in my post here last week The Empty Rhetoric of School "Reform" (with broken links fixed – my apologies). We ventured into other topics related to education policy as well, including the news story in Monday's USA Today about a cheating scandal in Washington, DC that occurred during Michelle Rhee's tenure as leader of that school system.

I invite you to listen to the discussion and then return to my comments . . .

Just a brief back story and follow-up on Ms. Rhee: Rhee has been lionized in print and in film as the "warrior woman" who would "save DC schools" mostly by firing teachers and closing schools based on standardized test scores.

But according to the USA Today investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, during much of her tenure, there were a number of schools that had "extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones." The fact that during her reign there was such a high rate of erasures on standardized bubble tests now makes her supposed record of achievement in the District highly suspect.

In her initial response to the USA Today article, in an interview with Tavis Smiley , Rhee made it appear that there was just a problem with one school, Crosby S. Noyes, and that the USA Today story was "distorted" and "unfounded."

But as the article states, "Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools." Also, the report notes that three years ago, upon the urging of DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, the test-maker McGraw-Hill did an “erasure analysis” and found that “among 96 schools 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.'"

My point to Sam was that the prevalence of cheating is inevitable when you impose a public policy system where devotion to a single metric – like scores on standardized tests – ends up distorting how all the active players in the system do their work. As Jim Horn at Schools Matter explains, this is:

a classic case study of what happens when high stakes, high pressure, and big bucks corrupt social policy, per Campbell's Law, which states that
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Not only have social processes been corrupted, but children have been damaged, too, as noted in this remarkable news story.

(emphasis his)

As I said to Sam, all this distortion, scandal, and acrimony is an outcome of these top-down mandates – such as high-stakes tests and enforced firing of teachers and closing of schools based on their results – that continue to be enforced on our schools by an out of touch establishment of elites in Washington DC and Wall St. As I said to Sam, the process of public education should be essentially democratic. And right now, it's sadly becoming less so.

One of the reasons that America has a system of public schools that most countries of the world, such as China, try to emulate, is because of the bottom-up, generally democratic process that is the backbone of successful neighborhood schools. Without a doubt, it is America's most widely shared collaborative endeavor.

True, the federal government has a role to play, primarily in ensuring that education services are distributed to children equitably and that creating and improving our schools remains fundamentally democratic and fair. Unfortunately, right now, what our leaders in DC are doing is mostly the exact opposite.

When the progressive educator Deborah Meier looks out across this current landscape of confusion, what she sees in Michelle Rhee and other self-anointed "reformers" are not people with good intentions with just mistaken notions or unclear agendas; she sees something far more "villainous."

If collective action—unions—seems un-American, why do the rich create institutions in which they, too, pool their wealth with their peers in order to lobby for their self-interests and bargain with their legislators for more favors?
We do them a favor to call it merely hypocrisy. It's more villainous.

Faced with such inequality, our current government demurs to act and continues to blame public schools for not addressing the widening gaps between rich and poor. This is not only unfair, it's cowardly. Sure, public education, operating under the principles of democracy, has a role to play. But standardization and high-stakes testing aren't going to be the enablers of a better education system. As Meier concludes:

[Public education] can offer the "capital" needed to make sense of the world as it is, and recognize when we are being conned and stupefied—something we do not yet have any "objective" test for measuring. The best we can do is place our unwarranted trust in the school community, within the widest and least onerous boundaries. There is not a single "best" curriculum nor a single best way of governing democratically. Out of such diversity we will learn, although we may never find consensus on the details, nor need we.