The Un-Rhee-valing of Education Reform, Ravitch's Way

Diane Ravitch writes about the debate that never happened between her and Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of Washington D.C.

This is a good one!

Betsy Combier

Michelle Rhee John Merrow Comments on a “Rigged” Match: Rhee vs. Ravitch by dianeravitch LINK

John Merrow, who doggedly pursued the cheating scandal in D.C. here takes issue with someone named John Buntin who wrote of a fictional match-up between Michelle Rhee and me.

Merrow chides Buntin for ignorance of the facts that Merrow covered. He sent this letter, but got no reply:

"I have a couple of observations about your Rhee/Ravitch piece that I hope you don’t mind my sharing. The first is a minor quibble about the firing scene. We filmed that as part of my NewsHour coverage–we followed the young Chancellor for her entire three years in DC (12 NewsHour reports). Only later did we include it in our film for Frontline. I allowed Oprah to use the footage, and Davis Guggenheim appropriated it without our permission for “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” although he did eventually pay us for using it.
My second objection is substantial and has to do with Rhee’s record as Chancellor. Not long after she departed, USA Today broke the story of widespread erasures on the DC-CAS, the city’s standardized test, during Rhee’s first and second years. We covered that in our Frontline film.

"However, AFTER the film I obtained a copy of a confidential memo that made it clear just how much she knew of the erasures and how she failed to act. That is summarized here:http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232

"While “Rhee vs. Ravitch” is a compelling headline and a sexy feature, it’s a roadblock to understanding American education. Ravitch is a passionate advocate who argues from facts. In contrast, Rhee’s policies were tried, and they failed. By almost every conceivable measure, the DC schools are no better than before her tenure. In key areas of student attendance, graduation rates, and principal and teacher turnover, they are worse. Central offices in abutting districts have shrunk, but DCPS’ has grown considerably. Even DC’s most recent gains on NAEP, which began 12-15 years BEFORE Rhee’s tenure, seem to have been fueled by an influx of better-educated families (gentrification) and quality pre-school. Here’s a summary: http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6490

"I urge you to revisit this story. There is a titanic struggle going on in public education, one that is complex and deserving of coverage. Using Michelle Rhee as symbolic of ‘one side’ is misleading, unfortunately. Wendy Kopp and Teach for America might better represent one side and Ravitch another, although the issue has more than two sides."

A good response from John Merrow. Read the whole thing as it is quite interesting.

Mr. Buntin, not known to me, should have covered--or pretended to cover--the debate I was supposed to have with Michelle Rhee on February 6 at Lehigh University. She agreed to the debate, agreed to the date but then began making demands about the format. First, she demanded that we needed seconds. She chose Rod Paige, who had been Secretary of Education in the George W. Bush administration. After a long silence and no signed contract, she required that we have two partners. My choices: Pasi Sahlberg of Finland and Helen Gym, parent leader from Philadelphia. Again a long silence. Rhee then cancelled, saying she could not find a second partner. All very puzzling.

 

Refereeing a Rigged Fight

by John Merrow on 21. Jan, 2014 in 2014 Blogs

LINK

When I read “A Battle over School Reform: Michelle Rhee versus Diane Ravitch” two
weeks ago, I felt as if I had entered a time warp.  This article couldn’t be new, I remember
thinking that it must have been written a few years ago.  But no, it is dated January 2014,
suggesting to me that the author, John Buntin, relied on old news, inaccurate data and a stack
of clichés.  “Rhee vs. Ravitch” is his hook. Indeed, he writes:  “Reading Rhee (sic) and
Ravitch’s books together is like watching two accomplished pugilists fight a 15-round bout….
Think of this as an attempt to score the fight.” In one corner, Buntin has Rhee representing
‘education reform.’ And in the other corner, Ravitch represents those who oppose reform–a
semantic choice by the author that seems meaningful.  He ignores Washington’s erasure scandal
that calls into question Rhee’s claims of academic success, and he fails to mention the current conditions of public schools in Washington, two points that readers have a right to know about.
Buntin hardly seems like an impartial fight judge. He writes of Rhee’s ‘most impressive accomplishments’ while she was in Washington; however, his tone when discussing Ravitch is markedly different.  She writes ‘with grim determination’ and ‘like General Sherman marching to
the sea,’ he notes.
His real goal, we discover at the end of the piece, is not to referee a Rhee-Ravitch bout but to find
a new heavyweight champ.  And so he urges us “….to step back from Rhee and Ravitch’s specific disagreements and consider the ingredients of educational excellence from a different perspective. That is precisely the strategy pursued by journalist Amanda Ripley in her new book, The Smartest Kids in the World (And How They Got That Way).”
Rhee and Ravitch are both wrong, he says, although–because Rhee believes that teacher quality matters (and Ravitch doesn’t?)–Rhee is apparently less wrong than Ravitch: “In the world
described by Ripley, Ravitch’s complacency is misguided. But so is the reformers’ narrow focus
on standardized testing. The best way forward is likely more nuanced, and more complicated. ^[1]
Upset by his factual errors and the central argument of the essay, I wrote Mr. Buntin, as follows:

Dear Mr. Buntin,
I have a couple of observations about your Rhee/Ravitch piece that I hope you don’t mind my sharing. The first is a minor quibble about the firing scene. We filmed that as part of my NewsHour coverage–we followed the young Chancellor for her entire three years in DC (12 NewsHour reports).  Only later did we include it in our film for Frontline.  I allowed Oprah to use the footage, and Davis Guggenheim appropriated it without our permission for “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” although he did eventually pay us for using it.
My second objection is substantial and has to do with Rhee’s record as Chancellor. Not long after she departed, USA Today broke the story of widespread erasures on the DC-CAS, the city’s standardized test, during Rhee’s first and second years.  We covered that in our Frontline film. However, AFTER the film I obtained a copy of a confidential memo that made it clear just how much she knew of the erasures and how she failed to act.  That is summarized here:  http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232
While “Rhee vs. Ravitch” is a compelling headline and a sexy feature, it’s a roadblock to understanding American education.  Ravitch is a passionate advocate who argues from facts.  In contrast, Rhee’s policies were tried, and they failed. By almost every conceivable measure, the DC schools are no better than before her tenure. In key areas of student attendance, graduation rates, and principal and teacher turnover, they are worse.  Central offices in abutting districts have shrunk, but DCPS’ has grown considerably. Even DC’s most recent gains on NAEP, which began 12-15 years BEFORE Rhee’s tenure, seem to have been fueled by an influx of better-educated families (gentrification) and quality pre-school. Here’s a summary: http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6490
I urge you to revisit this story.  There is a titanic struggle going on in public education, one that is complex and deserving of coverage.  Using Michelle Rhee as symbolic of ‘one side’ is misleading, unfortunately.  Wendy Kopp and Teach for America might better represent one side and Ravitch another, although the issue has more than two sides.
Thanks for reading this,
John

He has not replied.
The magazine that published Mr. Burton’s article, GOVERNING ^[2], describes itself as “the
nation’s leading media platform covering politics, policy and management for state and local government leaders. Recognized as the most credible and authoritative voice in its field, GOVERNING provides nonpartisan news, insight and analysis on such issues as public finance, transportation, economic development, health, energy, the environment and technology.”
The magazine, which first appeared in 1987, says its core readers are “elected, appointed and
career officials in state and local government, including governors, mayors, county executives,
city and county council members, state legislators, executives of state and local agencies, and
those holding professional government positions…”
Those men and women ought to have accurate information. Perhaps they get it when the
magazine reports on transportation, public finance, energy and other key issues, but GOVERNING let its readers down when it published Buntin’s superficial piece about public education.
GOVERNING claims to have 85,000 readers. This blog does not always reach that many readers every week, so I hope you will share this post.
Superficial opining like Mr. Burton’s muddies the waters, not a good thing at a time when clarity
is needed.
—-

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

1. 1. Here’s the link, if you’d like to check it out for yourself:
   http://www.governing.com/topics/education/gov-michelle-rhee-versus-diane-ravitch.html↵
2. 2. For more about the magazine and its publisher, the Governing Institute, go here: http://www.governing.com/about↵

Campell Brown Hides Husband Dan Senor As She Attacks Teachers

Campbell Brown

Who's Really Behind Campbell Brown's Sneaky Education Outfit?

The former CNN anchor says her nonprofit seeks to protect kids from predators in the classroom. Its real agenda may be union-busting.

LINK

Early one morning in July, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, pen in hand, notes fanned out in front of her. Viewers might have mistaken her as a fill-in host, but Brown had swung by 30 Rock in her new role as a self-styled education reformer, a crusader against sexual deviants in New York City public schools and the backward unions and bureaucrats getting in the way of firing them. "In many cases, we have teachers who were found guilty of inappropriate touching, sexual banter with kids, who weren't fired from their jobs, who were given very light sentences and sent back to the classroom," Brown, the mother of two young sons, explained.

Brown was there to plug her new venture, the Parents' Transparency Project, a nonprofit "watchdog group" that "favors no party, candidate, or incumbent." Though its larger aim is to "bring transparency" to how contracts are negotiated with teachers' unions, PTP's most prominent campaign is to fix how New York City handles cases of sexual misconduct involving teachers and school employees—namely by giving the city's schools chancellor, a political appointee, ultimate authority in the process.

Shortly after it was launched in June, PTP trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual misconduct. When several Democratic candidates declined, perhaps fearing they'd upset organized labor, PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack adquestioning whether six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and Anthony Weiner, had "the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions." The spot stated that there had been 128 cases of sexual misconduct by school employees in the past five years, suggesting that nothing had been done in response. "It's a scandal," the ad's narrator intoned. "And the candidates are silent."

PTP spent $100,000 on an attack ad questioning whether candidates like Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota had "the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions."

Before founding PTP, Brown raised this issue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July 2012. But what she failed to disclose was that her husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of the New York affiliate of StudentsFirst, an education lobbying group founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Washington, DC, chancellor. Rhee made a name for herself as public enemy No. 1 of the teachers' unions and has become the torchbearer of the charter school movement. In 2012, her "bipartisan grassroots organization" backed 105 candidates in state races, 88 percent of them Republicans. (Senor was also thespokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of Iraq and served as a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012.)

Writing in Slate, Brown, a veteran journalist, confessed to being naive about the standards for revealing a potential conflict of interest: "If you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in." She still managed to get in a few digs at the unions. "I failed to disclose," she wrote, "because I stupidly did not connect the teachers' unions' opposition to charter schools to their support for a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct."

But there is much more about PTP that is less than transparent, including its sources of funding and its overall agenda. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, PTP may keep its donors' identities secret and spend money in electoral campaigns, so long as political activity doesn't consume the majority of its time and money.

Despite its nonpartisan billing, Brown's nonprofit used Revolution Agency, a Republican consulting firm, to produce the mayoral attack ad. Its partners include Mike Murphy, a well-known pundit and former Romney strategist; Mark Dion, former chief of staff to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.); and Evan Kozlow, former deputy director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The domain name for PTP's website was registered by two Revolution employees: Jeff Bechdel, Mitt Romney's former Florida spokesman, and Matt Leonardo, who describes himself as "happily in self-imposed exile from advising Republican candidates."

Brown failed to disclose that her husband sits on the board of the New York affiliate of Michelle Rhee's education lobbying group.

Another consulting firm working with Brown's group is Tusk Strategies, which helped launch Rhee's StudentsFirst. Advertising disclosure forms filed by PTP list Tusk's phone number, and a copy of PTP's sexual-misconduct pledge—since scrubbed from its website—identified its author as a Tusk employee. (Tusk and Revolution declined to comment. Brown referred all questions to her PR firm—the same one used by StudentsFirst.)

What about Brown's allegation that the New York schools did nothing about 128 cases of sexual misconduct? It turns out that in 33 of those cases, the employee in question had been fired, the New York Timesreported. Many of the others were disciplined.

Brown's group paints the unions as the main obstacles to a crackdown on predators. Yet Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, says that the union's New York City chapter already has a zero-tolerance policy in its contract, and that AFT only protects its members against "false allegations." New York state law also mandates that any teacher convicted of a sex crime be automatically fired. It is the law, not union contracts, that requires that an independent arbitrator hear and mete out punishment in cases of sexual misconduct that fall outside criminal law. The quickest route to changing that policy may be lobbying lawmakers in Albany, not hammering teachers and their unions.

Before Brown left CNN three years ago, her evening news show carried a memorable tagline: "No bias. No bull." She can't say the same for her foray into the education wars.

ANDY KROLL

Reporter

Andy Kroll is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips and insights at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. Follow him on Twitter here. RSS | TWITTER