Is the NAACP’s Charter School Moratorium an “Edge” for a “Political Machine”?
Richard Whitmire is a former editorial writer for USA Today. He has written several books. Among them is one about education leaving males behind; highly controversial former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee wrote the foreword for this book. Whitmire then decided to write a book about Michelle Rhee, The Bee Eater, described in brief as “the inside story of a maverick reformer with a take-no-prisoners management style.”
I too wrote about Michelle Rhee, both on my blog and in my first book. I describe her as a sociopath who dodged any accountability for suspiciously rising DC test scores that plummeted once she was no longer DC chancellor.
Still another of Whitmire’s books is on Rocketship charter schools. In June 2016,NPR wrote about Rocketship Education, and it cited Whitmire’s book:
“Students rotating into Learning Labs meant employing fewer teachers,” Whitmire writes. “Thus a school such as Rocketship Mosaic could successfully serve 630 students with only 6 teachers plus aides.”
Whitmire is impressed with the Rocketship model. However, NPR also mentioned very large numbers of children left under the supervision of incompletely trained adults and describes the turnover of these “learning lab supervisors” as “”chronic.”
NPR also noted that Rocketship students are discouraged from using the bathroom to such a degree that kids “were getting urinary tract infections.” Not to worry: What it disallowed in bathroom breaks Rocketship made up for in computerized test retakes, so much so that at one Rocketship campus, “superiors found retesting to be so rampant that they disabled the refresh button the following year.”
Finally, Whitmire just published another book, this one called, The Founders: Inside the Revolution to Invent (and Reinvent) America’s Best Charter Schools.
On October 17, 2016, education blogger Jennifer Berkshire interviewed Whitmire about his Founders book, which is available on Kindle as of August 28, 2016, and Is the NAACP’s Charter School Moratorium an “Edge” for a “Political Machine”? | deutsch29: