Rhee's D.C. cheating scandal 'heats up'
Written by M. Catherine Evans for the American Thinker. Read the original here.
“Top educator Wayne Ryan of Noyes Education Campus in Washington DC resigned his post after having been promoted by super school reformer Michelle Rhee. What precipitated the change? Following a timeline going back three years reveals questions which cannot be explained away. The story involves possible cheating on tests by “erasure corrections,” bonuses handed out to those teachers and principals overseeing the testing, and Rhee’s feigned innocence about the matter.
A year after StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee assumed the Chancellorship of DC schools she told Charlie Rose that standardized test scores should be given “the greatest weight” in performance-based teacher evaluations. That was 2008. Her nonprofit website bio makes the audacious claim that “under her leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double digit growth in state reading and math scores.”
If Rhee’s “double-digit growth” numbers sound too good to be true they probably are. A March 2011 report in