To Amanda Ripley: A Second TIME Article on Rhee is Long Overdue
Michelle Rhee has failed as a test-driven education reformer.
Rhee taught for three years (1992-95) in Baltimore as part of Teach for America (TFA). By her own admission, her first year was terrible. She taped students’ mouths and made them bleed, and she dropped a student off after a filed trip at an unverified residence. For her second and third years, she taught as part of a team. Her students’ test scores were very low (Rhee’s first year: 20th percentile in reading and math on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills–CTBS; second year: reading, 15th percentile, and math, 38th percentile; third year, with notably fewer test taker than other district schools: reading, 45th percentile, and math, 55th percentile).
Contrast this to Rhee’s bragging that she raised 90 percent of student scores to the 90th percentile.
All of the above on Rhee is documented in chapter four of my book, A Chronicle of Echoes. The origins, mission, and funding of TFA are documented in chapter three.
Following her TFA stint, Rhee decided to “found” a teacher-training nonprofit, The New Teacher Project (TNTP), in order to train “great” teachers– which she herself never was according to her own definition of “great” as one who produces high student test scores. She was with TNTP until 2007. Information on the origin and claims of Rhee’s TNTP are documented in chapter sixteen of Echoes.
Then comes her time in DC.
Three and a Half Years as Chancellor Rhee
New York City Chancellor Joel Klein recommended Rhee as DC chancellor. A lawyer by trade, Klein himself was appointed as chancellor by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Klein’s accomplishments include lying about his “poor” upbringing; giving free public school space to hedge-funded charter schools; creating a “leadership academy” that was a joke for its “products, including Principal Andrew Buck, who refused to provide teachers with textbooks and bordered on illiterate as evidenced by his written communications with teachers.
Klein also groomed a number of protégés for positions of leadership nationwide. Their agenda was the common one for education privatizers, the centerpiece of which was making the entire life of a school system hinge upon standardized testing outcomes.
I discuss Klein in detail in chapters one and two of Echoes.
Rhee was not a Klein protégé. According to Rhee, she and Klein had “known each other for some time and worked closely together.” Apparently Klein had employed thousands of uncertified teachers in NYC, and Rhee (during her time at TNTP) had To Amanda Ripley: A Second TIME Article on Rhee is Long Overdue | deutsch29: