Michelle Rhee

[Anonymous]

I may be sorry to have started this thread. I'm begging you all in advance to keep it civil.

My DD is a few years away from starting school and we are just in the preliminary stages of learning about our options.

I have been following Rhee's school reforms efforts through the news (mostly the WP) and my take was that she was an often abrasive person taking on an extremely difficult but necessary task to some positive effect. However many on this board seem to think that she is doing harm to the system and not improving it.

Could I get some thoughtful and measured responses to this. If you do not support her efforts, why? Details please. Generalities about her personality are not what I am looking for.

Also please leave out her recent statements about firing teachers who had sex with children etc. We can all agree that was crazy.

In the short term I am wondering if I should support Fenty. In the long term, I'm a believer in Public Education and want to be comfortable sending my daughter to DCPSs when the time comes.

[jsteele]

Rhee most likely won't be here by the time your child is ready for school. She is getting married to the mayor of Sacramento, California in September. I would imagine that transcontinental flights will get tiring eventually.

You should look beyond a single personality. Also, specific policies opinions will vary school by school. If you list what schools your child might be attending, you will probably get more helpful responses.

[Anonymous]

OP here - Thanks for your response.

I actually have found a lot of valuable info about specific schools which has been very helpful. But there is rarely a discussion on this board that doesn't contain some sort of derogatory or snide comment about Rhee. That is what I am trying to learn about. What makes a good school chancellor in a historically poor school system?

In learning more about her, and the reasons the community may be dissatisfied, I hope to be a more informed parent, whether she is the Chancellor or someone else is.

[Anonymous]

One area I believe that she did a great job in was in closing schools. For whatever reason, these schools had continued to operate year after year sucking money from the budget to maintain buildings and pay teachers and staff in these significantly underutilized and under-performing schools.

A different discussion is how these school buildings should have been made available to Charters - but for the limited focus on operating the schools, she did a good job.

[Anonymous]

I am an east of the park parent about to send a kid to public school. Don't know where yet. Here is my impression of the situation.

DSPC is a mess. Fixing it is going to be a huge issue and take many years.

Before I started the school process my opinion was that one critical step to improving the schools was to get the middle and upper class parents back into the system. The racism and bifurcated nature of our city makes this a harder job than it would be elsewhere because white parents don't want to send their kids to schools that are overwhelmingly black -- even if those schools are good. This is racist, but its a fact of life here. On the other hand, I think the black community is tends to react to effort to raise standards as some kind of attempt to take away "their" schools. And there is the added problem of the black community seeing the school system as a source of "high" paying jobs, so any attempt to get rid of deadwood is seen as an attack on the black community even if really does improve the schools.

So, basicially, WOW, does Rhee have a hard job. Its hard enough without the racial overtones, but the racial overtones can't be ignored.

I originally thought she was doing a good job, standing up to the union and cleaning house downtown. But, now sitting here east of the park without any improvement in my schools, I have a slightly different take on the matter.

I think she is trying to create a system that will bring the middle/upper class back to the public schools. I.e. she is trying to gets whites back into the system. Getting the middle/upper classes back into the system will improve test scores because those students are better prepared. Hopefully it will also help the other students because they'll be more challenged in class and will have peers doing well in school. It will also help by getting more money and parent involvement into the schools. Look at the upper northwest elementary schools, they are doing fine.

The problem I see with her approach, and I think it will be the reason she ultimately fails at bringing about real improvements, is that she seems to be using the neighborhood model to get more whites into the schools. She is throwing resources at the schools in white neighborhoods to get parents into those schools. An interesting example is starting pre-school at Francis-Stevens this year. That is an overwhelmingly white neighborhood school with an almost entirely OOB student body. She it trying to set up a PS class and letting neighborhood parents have a say in teaching philosphy etc. This about the consequences of that. If suddenly in boundary Francis-S parents start using that school it will become a "white" school. Scores will probably go up. And, a bunch of Dupont circle/east G-town parents will be very happy not to pay for private school. But, did it improve the educational opportunities for anyone? (Ask yourself why parents at other schools are not given an opportunity to dictate how a pre-school will be run and what will be taught? I'll tell you why, parents in other neighborhoods don't have options, they'll use the school no matter what you offer them).

Rhee does not seem to be attempting to improve schools in black/poor neighborhoods. And, I don't see a real effort to improve those in neighborhoods where a school could really be diverse based on the in-boundary demographics (Shepard, West, Cooke, Thompson, Tubman, Bruce-Monroe, Garrison, Marie Reed). In my view, those schools are the ones that a ripe for really turning things around, why not put magnet type programs or special programs in those schools to draw in middle class neighborhood parents AND help the poorer students who live in those neighborhoods.

I think the reason she doesn't is b/c it is a much harder job. There is a "tipping point" problem. She has to get enough white parents in that no one feels like they are sending their precious baby to be the only white kid in the kindergarten class (though I doubt the little kids notice that stuff). And, I think there is resistance in those neighborhoods to improvement efforts b/c the "long-time" residents (and the teachers and principals) at the school see efforts to bring in whites as "taking away their school. (This seemed to be a big problem at Ross a few years ago as dupont circle parents attempted to improve the school, though there I think most of the students were OOB).

The city seems very leery of any kind of enrichment or magnet program b/c those programs are seen as excluding blacks. I think this is self defeating on the part of the black community, I know plenty of black kids in this city who can compete on par with the brightest white kids I know). But, I think the only way to improve the public schools is to make them work for everyone (now they really are not working for anyone except a few upper northwest neighborhoods). This is going to mean attracting educated well-off parents into the system and into the whole system, not just JKLMO.

To do that, she is going to need to focus on the schools in the mixed neighborhoods and give white parents (and I wish I didn't have to keep saying "white", but it is true and I think the issues would be far easier to deal with if we were only talking about an economic divide and not a racial AND economic divide) back to the schools. That is going to mean putting special programs (like the Eaton Chinese classes) at places like Thompson and Cooke, creating workable dual language programs like Oyster east of the park (get the drug dealers off the Bancroft payground anyone?), creating magnet programs in the "mixed" schools and especially in the schools that are now close to 100% black.

She needs to give white parents a reason to come back to public schools -- I think the recession is helping her with that. To some extent she is doing it, but she is only doing it in the areas where it is easy, i.e. segregated white neighborhoods. So the end result is white in-bound kids enter public schools and that means OOB black and other minority kids are just pushed back to their underperforming schools.

She is not doing it in schools that are not in majority or near-exclusively white neighborhoods. I don't know why. But, I suspect there are a few reasons:
1) she is picking the low-hanging fruit to make herself look good. She is really good at making herself look good. And, when she is looking for a job in San Diego, no one is really going to understand the racial divides in DC and see through the improvements in the scores as nothing more than a population shift rather than a real school improvement.

2) I think the minority population in DC and the teachers union and the overall racial animosity in the city (there is racism going both ways folks) make any kind of effort to attract whites to historically minority schools a mine field. So maybe she tried and learned early not to go there. If, for example, there was suddenly a push to make Tubman in Columbia Heights a magnet school for math and science or Chinese immersion, I'm guessing there would be a lot of neighborhood "activists" (including probably Fenty buddy Sinclair Skinner and his ilk) undermining the effort. Because, a sudden influx of white kids in that school would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable. And a sudden influx of type A white parents would probably make a lot of teachers at the school uncomfortable (I have no real knowledge of this, the Tubman teachers could all be gems for all I know). But, a sudden influx of white students and white parents would probably be good for the kids at that school. Not because they are white (though a little diversity is good for everyone) but because they are educated and wealthy -- they can bring resources to the school and insist on raising standard, which would help everyone. And, I think it would be great for the white kids in the neighborhood to go to school with kids who are a different race and different economic class instead of getting dragged across the park every morning.

But, Rhee is too self-interested to do the hard work. She thinks she has hit on a formula that will look like success on paper and all the white upper NW parents who have better schools and saved $$$$ on privates will talk about how great she is to all their powerful friends and someday she'll be secretary of education.

And, the population of DC is too divided and defeatest to let her improve the schools even if she originally set out to really improve them.

[Anonymous]

My Neighbor Don claims that there are drug dealers at Bancroft, but I've never seen it.
I have seen drug dealing across the street from Capital City. on 15th. rough neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am an east of the park parent about to send a kid to public school. Don't know where yet. Here is my impression of the situation.

DSPC is a mess. Fixing it is going to be a huge issue and take many years.

Before I started the school process my opinion was that one critical step to improving the schools was to get the middle and upper class parents back into the system. The racism and bifurcated nature of our city makes this a harder job than it would be elsewhere because white parents don't want to send their kids to schools that are overwhelmingly black -- even if those schools are good. This is racist, but its a fact of life here. On the other hand, I think the black community is tends to react to effort to raise standards as some kind of attempt to take away "their" schools. And there is the added problem of the black community seeing the school system as a source of "high" paying jobs, so any attempt to get rid of deadwood is seen as an attack on the black community even if really does improve the schools.

So, basicially, WOW, does Rhee have a hard job. Its hard enough without the racial overtones, but the racial overtones can't be ignored.

I originally thought she was doing a good job, standing up to the union and cleaning house downtown. But, now sitting here east of the park without any improvement in my schools, I have a slightly different take on the matter.

I think she is trying to create a system that will bring the middle/upper class back to the public schools. I.e. she is trying to gets whites back into the system. Getting the middle/upper classes back into the system will improve test scores because those students are better prepared. Hopefully it will also help the other students because they'll be more challenged in class and will have peers doing well in school. It will also help by getting more money and parent involvement into the schools. Look at the upper northwest elementary schools, they are doing fine.

The problem I see with her approach, and I think it will be the reason she ultimately fails at bringing about real improvements, is that she seems to be using the neighborhood model to get more whites into the schools. She is throwing resources at the schools in white neighborhoods to get parents into those schools. An interesting example is starting pre-school at Francis-Stevens this year. That is an overwhelmingly white neighborhood school with an almost entirely OOB student body. She it trying to set up a PS class and letting neighborhood parents have a say in teaching philosphy etc. This about the consequences of that. If suddenly in boundary Francis-S parents start using that school it will become a "white" school. Scores will probably go up. And, a bunch of Dupont circle/east G-town parents will be very happy not to pay for private school. But, did it improve the educational opportunities for anyone? (Ask yourself why parents at other schools are not given an opportunity to dictate how a pre-school will be run and what will be taught? I'll tell you why, parents in other neighborhoods don't have options, they'll use the school no matter what you offer them).

Rhee does not seem to be attempting to improve schools in black/poor neighborhoods. And, I don't see a real effort to improve those in neighborhoods where a school could really be diverse based on the in-boundary demographics (Shepard, West, Cooke, Thompson, Tubman, Bruce-Monroe, Garrison, Marie Reed). In my view, those schools are the ones that a ripe for really turning things around, why not put magnet type programs or special programs in those schools to draw in middle class neighborhood parents AND help the poorer students who live in those neighborhoods.

I think the reason she doesn't is b/c it is a much harder job. There is a "tipping point" problem. She has to get enough white parents in that no one feels like they are sending their precious baby to be the only white kid in the kindergarten class (though I doubt the little kids notice that stuff). And, I think there is resistance in those neighborhoods to improvement efforts b/c the "long-time" residents (and the teachers and principals) at the school see efforts to bring in whites as "taking away their school. (This seemed to be a big problem at Ross a few years ago as dupont circle parents attempted to improve the school, though there I think most of the students were OOB).

The city seems very leery of any kind of enrichment or magnet program b/c those programs are seen as excluding blacks. I think this is self defeating on the part of the black community, I know plenty of black kids in this city who can compete on par with the brightest white kids I know). But, I think the only way to improve the public schools is to make them work for everyone (now they really are not working for anyone except a few upper northwest neighborhoods). This is going to mean attracting educated well-off parents into the system and into the whole system, not just JKLMO.

To do that, she is going to need to focus on the schools in the mixed neighborhoods and give white parents (and I wish I didn't have to keep saying "white", but it is true and I think the issues would be far easier to deal with if we were only talking about an economic divide and not a racial AND economic divide) back to the schools. That is going to mean putting special programs (like the Eaton Chinese classes) at places like Thompson and Cooke, creating workable dual language programs like Oyster east of the park (get the drug dealers off the Bancroft payground anyone?), creating magnet programs in the "mixed" schools and especially in the schools that are now close to 100% black.

She needs to give white parents a reason to come back to public schools -- I think the recession is helping her with that. To some extent she is doing it, but she is only doing it in the areas where it is easy, i.e. segregated white neighborhoods. So the end result is white in-bound kids enter public schools and that means OOB black and other minority kids are just pushed back to their underperforming schools.

She is not doing it in schools that are not in majority or near-exclusively white neighborhoods. I don't know why. But, I suspect there are a few reasons:
1) she is picking the low-hanging fruit to make herself look good. She is really good at making herself look good. And, when she is looking for a job in San Diego, no one is really going to understand the racial divides in DC and see through the improvements in the scores as nothing more than a population shift rather than a real school improvement.

2) I think the minority population in DC and the teachers union and the overall racial animosity in the city (there is racism going both ways folks) make any kind of effort to attract whites to historically minority schools a mine field. So maybe she tried and learned early not to go there. If, for example, there was suddenly a push to make Tubman in Columbia Heights a magnet school for math and science or Chinese immersion, I'm guessing there would be a lot of neighborhood "activists" (including probably Fenty buddy Sinclair Skinner and his ilk) undermining the effort. Because, a sudden influx of white kids in that school would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable. And a sudden influx of type A white parents would probably make a lot of teachers at the school uncomfortable (I have no real knowledge of this, the Tubman teachers could all be gems for all I know). But, a sudden influx of white students and white parents would probably be good for the kids at that school. Not because they are white (though a little diversity is good for everyone) but because they are educated and wealthy -- they can bring resources to the school and insist on raising standard, which would help everyone. And, I think it would be great for the white kids in the neighborhood to go to school with kids who are a different race and different economic class instead of getting dragged across the park every morning.

But, Rhee is too self-interested to do the hard work. She thinks she has hit on a formula that will look like success on paper and all the white upper NW parents who have better schools and saved $$$$ on privates will talk about how great she is to all their powerful friends and someday she'll be secretary of education.

And, the population of DC is too divided and defeatest to let her improve the schools even if she originally set out to really improve them.

I think you make a lot of good points. However, as a representative of a Black middle income family (in another part of the country upper-middle),I think you are way off-point when you assert that the Black community do not want change in the DCPS. If that was the case, so many parents would not send their children half-way across town to OOB schools when given the opportunity. If the Black parents did not want change, they would not have jumped out of DCPS and into Charter in record numbers. We are not interested in retaining high paying salaries for teachers. Those teachers do not reside in the District. We are frustrated that Rhee has only taken an interest in those schools west of the Park. It would have been so much easier to enrich the Chinese language program at Thompson opposed to Eaton, but Eaton is the school West of the partk. I think you make a very broad generalization when you basically assert that Black families care less for their children's education because of the fear of a White takeover. I also believe that it is more of an economic divide than a racial divide. If you look at the sought after Charter schools, the students entering these schools represent every race and color. As for the assertions regarding White families intent, they can speak for themselves.

[Anonymous]

Very interesting comments, pps! Thanks!

OP, I'm one of those people who is really pissed at Rhee but I'm not going to take aim at her here. I think you need to focus in on individual schools. Middle and upper middle class families have survived in DCPS by supporting individual schools -- either within their neighborhood or by attending out-of-boundary. Rhee has been meddling in some of those schools (which is why I am angry) but while she has done some unfair things I don't think she has by any means destroyed those schools.

I wouldn't enroll my kid in DCPS based on having faith in the Chancellor. I would look instead at the families, teachers, and administrators at the schools your child might attend. Is there a good supportive community in place? My dc attended schools where that was the case and it made all the difference in the world.

[Anonymous]

The 13:55 PP makes some interesting points; on many of them I concur. But she/he's also missing the fact that there's a pretty substantial black upper-middle class population that either never sends their kids to DCPS or sends them for elementary and then moves to private. These parents (I'm one of them) need to buy into the system as well, and Rhee isn't appealing to them on any level. Fenty may be sending his kids to DCPS for now to make some political points, but many of his friends aren't, or they bail after elementary.

[Anonymous]

Here are some of the reasons I'm discouraged with Rhee.

She is mean. She likes to say shocking and outrageous things (comment on teachers having sex, for example).

She is driven by the data, of the wrong type. My DD's 1st grade class had a bar chart with DIBELs assessment data on the wall. All classrooms in our former DCPS school (now charter) had bar charts on the wall with DC-BAS / DC-CAS scores for the class, the school as a whole data was plastered over the entrance way. Children spend 18 days a year taking DC-BAS / CAS tests. During these tests, even the younger grade levels that don't take the tests are in "lock down" mode with no art, PE, library. These specials teachers are proctoring exams. . . . And I simply don't believe that the DC-CAS scores are at all related to mastery of educational material, like critical thinking skills.

She does not build collaborative communities, instead she is divisive.

I agree with PP that the individual school community makes a huge difference. But the chancellor has a lot of influence on how the system works. Two summers ago Rhee fired all teachers who were not "highly qualified" yet had no process in place for replacing the fired teachers. Turned out at our (former) school, one of the much loved teachers was highly qualified, but downtown had lost her paperwork. by the time it was straightened out, the teacher had taken a position at a charter. Another fired teacher returned, after an exception was made to find some of the experience allow him to claim highly qualified status. And also after a week with no teacher, so about half a dozen kids moved out to parochial/charter schools. These types of disruptions from downtown (my examples, summer of 2008, then you have RIF of fall 2009), destabalize, demoralize, and start to define schools.

She is more interested in her own ego than in anyone else.

Hopefully, she'll move to the WEst Coast very soon, and we'll get someone with the skills and qualifications of say, Clifford Janey??? Every now and then I read the Newark NJ school system website, where he is now collaboratively building up a school system, and I'm jealous.

Also, thankful for charters, if only Fenty would stop giving city property away to his developer buddies. . .

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One area I believe that she did a great job in was in closing schools. For whatever reason, these schools had continued to operate year after year sucking money from the budget to maintain buildings and pay teachers and staff in these significantly underutilized and under-performing schools.

She closed schools that needed to be closed, yes, but she hasn't re-drawn school boundaries--see this pdf http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/Files/downloads/SCHOOLS/Boundary%20Maps%20-%202009/DCPS-Attendance-Zones-Elementary-Grades-September-2009.pdf , which has large blue zones that were once in-boundary for closed schools. I was delighted when the dreadful elementary school a block from my house in Petworth was shut down. But instead of being zoned for the pretty-good school five blocks away, my son is now zoned for a school a mile-long walk down Georgia Ave.

I think that any attempt to re-draw boundaries will be met with howls of protest from upper NW parents who bought on one side of the street or the other simply to be in-boundary for a good elementary school. Their anger makes sense to me--it seems unfair to change the elementary-school rules after a house has been bought. But it's not fair to my son, either, or to the thousands of kids whose schools were closed and are now being assigned to under-enrolled schools, rather than the school that's actually closest to their house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The 13:55 PP makes some interesting points; on many of them I concur. But she/he's also missing the fact that there's a pretty substantial black upper-middle class population that either never sends their kids to DCPS or sends them for elementary and then moves to private. These parents (I'm one of them) need to buy into the system as well, and Rhee isn't appealing to them on any level. Fenty may be sending his kids to DCPS for now to make some political points, but many of his friends aren't, or they bail after elementary.

I fit in this category too and it is so true!

[Anonymous]

@16:13 and others. I am the poster of the long 13:55 rant. And, I apologize for the tone of my screed that implies that black families do not care about the education of their children. They do. Middle class and the poor, I'm sure they do, I know they do. That is why many use the OOB process and charter schools or move to the suburbs or whatever it necessary. I do think, however, there is a "activist" class (for lack of a better word) in DC that benefits from divisions. Its the same folks who keep railing on the list serves against "gentrification" whenever anyone tries to stop drunks from peeing in the parks or hoodlums from throwing rocks at cars -- the "it was like that when you moved here, so shut up and take it or move to Arlington" argument -- I sense something similar regarding schools. And, my impression is Rhee does not want to fight it. (But, like opposing rock throwing and public urination, my guess that the vast majority of parents of all races are for real school reform).

My more important point was, that Rhee seems to have decided to focus on getting more families into neighborhood schools where the neighborhood families are guaranteed to be upperclass regardless of race (but we all know that mostly benefit whites). The downside of this is two fold, it pulls resources from needier schools and also limits OOB slots so even fewer kids from outside those rich enclaves have an opportunity to attend those schools. If more in-boundary parents go to JKLMO fewer people who can't afford those neighborhoods have good school options.

And at 17:49 points on the black upper middle class if even less bought into the reform than whites. At some level I'm guessing that is because the black upper middle class is more likely to live in the neighborhoods where she is not trying to improve the schools (Col. Heights, Petworth, Crestwood etc.).

[Anonymous]

13:07 Janey closed a bunch of schools and Rhee continued that process. Please do not give her credit where credit is not due.

I agree with 17:03. She doesn't seem to realize that children read the papers and TIME Magazine. She disses teachers, parents in print -- oh, her own daughters' teachers, too ... she is simply not an effective leader. Arne Duncan did a great job in Chicago by bringing people together. I suspect she associates niceness with weakness.

[Anonymous]

OP here - Thank you all for the thoughtful responses. There are all interesting and valuable perspectives.