‘Frontline’ raises questions about test-score tampering under Rhee

[ElboRuum]

21. When thinking about what Michelle Rhee is doing...

I have to remind myself that my generation (Gen-X) was probably the last or one of the last to go through our public school system when it was an effective entity.

The first thing I ask myself is, "Is Michelle Rhee serious in wishing to reform/fix the educational system in this country?" I would like to hope that, since she was educated at the same time, that her desire is in earnest. It is bothersome to me to see the education I received when compared to that received today, and I know that when I talk about this subject with others of my generation, that they are indeed aware of this disparity and that they are similarly unsettled.

However, seeing her contempt of "ineffective" teachers, and the reliance on testing as almost the sole metric of success, I suspect her motives are more aligned to making the case for full privatization (in a subsidy framework of course, wink, wink) of the educational system... of course, holding behind her back the whole time a ready-made product to sell us to replace what she'd made the case against.

If I judged by results alone, I'd say that "teaching to the test", if we look around the to the more successful educational systems around the world, is widely regarded as ineffective. Numbers are data, and testing is useful in creating numbers, and therefore data, however, data is just that without an effective manner of interpretation. So testing has its place as one of the metrics we use to determine if the process of education is effective, but should neither be the most important metric, the sole metric, nor should be used as a proxy for honest common sense.

Once I saw her methods, I doubted very seriously that she was or is interested in anything but reducing headcount and cost, and selling a particular idea to people, that teachers, alone, are the problem.

The fact of the matter is that teaching is very much a "rubber meets the road" process, and I would seriously doubt the credibility of someone who believes they have the answer if they are willing to sacrifice or replace the people who are at the direct point of interface in the education process, rather than listening carefully to the problems that exist from those same people. Any person calling themselves a reformer should realize that the real point of reform is to put teachers back at the center of the educational process, rather than be beholden to absolutist requirements like No Child Left Behind or rote standardized testing. A reformer would look at the now dysfunctional adversarial relationship between parents and teachers/administrators and look for ways to turn that back into a collaborative effort. A reformer would understand the specific difficulties of anyone doing their jobs with no control or remedy and then being held solely responsible for a poor result.

Now, we have this. Something which looks from the outside as a clear breach of trust, a contemptuous slap in the face from a person who KNOWS precisely what she is doing. She is selling a shit product, sure, but she certainly has ambition for herself, which has little to do with whether people take anything away from their education or not.

It sickens me to think that the only way Rhee gets taken even remotely seriously is the amount of anti-teacher and anti-union propaganda which is floated by the GOP and repeated by the media. If she had come up a scant 30 years ago, she'd have been run out of town on a rail on her very first day. Not now. Now we have to deal with the apparent cultural axiom that teachers are lazy and feckless and are concerned only with protecting their jobs and positions. We have to deal with the tired refrain that their unions are the problem. We have to deal with the concept of an adversarial relationship between teachers and parents. We have to deal with the idea that teachers, because they even chose to BE teachers, must not be good at anything in the private sector, something about "those that can, do..." well, you know the rest. You've heard it for a long time.

That some even still talk about her in anything but a facetious or sarcastic manner is what I think requires explanation. She is a fraud, and anyone who is interested in making education work in this country again shouldn't have to be told this. Hopefully, this investigation will run her out of education entirely, but knowing our media and their obeisance to their anti-teacher, anti-union GOP masters, it will only be cast as those nasty teachers trying to ruin a "reformers" credibility.