Monday, April 4, 2011
This Week In Education: Rhee: Reading This Week's Tea Leaves
This Week In Education: Rhee: Reading This Week's Tea Leaves
How to tell that things are really going badly for Michelle Rhee during the next few days? There are two main signs -- none of which involve her critics weighing in gleefully and predicting her downfall as they have been doing for several days now. The first is a flurry of quotes and comments from funders and paid cheerleaders (Broad, Gates, Duncan, Rotherham) saying that she's doing a "great job" and has a lot to offer American education. That's usually the sign that (a) reporters think there's blood in the water and are pressing hard for comments and (b) supporters think that there's something serious enough going on that they have to pipe up. Otherwise they would just ignore, emailing and texting among themselves instead as they were doing all last week. The other sign that
Rutgers' Bruce Baker, at School Finance 101, has been sounding the alarm that the low-income students served by charter schools in New Jersey are not as poor as the low-income students served by neighborhood schools. He cites the research of Gordon MacInnes showing that the gap in student performance between students receiving "free lunches" and "reduced lunches" can be as large as the difference between "reduced lunches" and affluent students. (After all, many teachers' kids could be eligible for "reduced lunches.") We have long known that the real education challenges come from intense