How I Scooped the Washington Post by More than 3 Years

On February 8th, Jay Mathews -- Washington Post educational columnist and author of the Post's "Class Struggle" blog -- posted a blog article titled "Michelle Rhee's early test scores challenged." Mathews described how local education blogger G.F. Brandenburg had written an article casting doubt on claims by Michelle Rhee to have dramatically raised test scores of her students at Baltimore's Harlem Park Elementary School. Mathews wrote, "He has found the missing test score data from former D.C. schools chancellor's early years as a classroom teacher, something I did not think was possible." Not only did I know that it was possible, I had unearthed the same data and written about it 3 1/2 years ago.

For most of 2007, I published a blog named "State of Columbia" in which I focused on local District of Columbia politics. Events about which I wrote included the plagiarized education plan produced by Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso, the selection of Michelle Rhee as school chancellor, and the confirmation hearings of both Reinoso and Rhee. A particular area of my interest was Rhee's experience teaching at Harlem Park which was part of a failed experiment in for-profit management of public schools.

Rhee had made much of her Harlem Park experience and her resume included the following claim:

"Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90% of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher."

When questioned about this achievement, Rhee could provide no documentation -- the test scores were said to be no longer available -- and said she had simply been told that these results were correct. However, during my own research, I stumbled across a University of Maryland at Baltimore City report that included limited test scores from exactly the classes that Rhee taught. My analysis of the report concluded that, "Based on the UMBC data, which was obtained from McGraw-Hill data tapes, Rhee's students' reading scores would have improved from a 27 NCE to a 45 NCE over the two-year period. This is not a bad achievement, but far from the 13-90 percentile increase her resume suggests."

Coming on the heals of the plagiarized education plan and then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's failure to follow the law regarding the involvement of a review panel in his selection of Rhee, I thought the fact that Rhee's resume contained a false claim should be sufficient to cause her to withdraw her nomination. I could not have been more wrong. Nobody other than me seemed to be able to find the UMBC report and nobody other than me seemed to care about my findings. The Council accepted undocumented assurances from Rhee's former principal at Harlem Park that Rhee had made great test score advancements.

However, despite the fact even Rhee acknowledged that her claim could not be documented, she continued taking credit for achieving such results. In May 2009, Rhee told Politics Daily, "In my second and third years of Teach for America-I taught a group of 70 kids there with another teacher-we took a group of kids who were performing at the bottom and took them to the top."

Let's just be clear. The available data suggest that this is not true. Not only G.F Bradenburg and I -- two lowly "bloggers" -- came to this conclusion, but Jay Mathews and Nick Anderson -- two professional journalists -- came to this conclusion. Mathews responded to a critic of his post saying, there is "no doubt in my mind that the 13th to 90th percentile gain that Rhee claimed several times could not be right." Anderson writes, "The reading scores, when converted to percentile rankings, indicate that students moved from about the 14th percentile as second-graders in 1993-94 to the 46th or 47th percentile as third-graders the next year."

What is most discouraging is that this is only getting publicity now, long after Rhee has moved to greener pastures. To me, this was a colossal failure by almost all parties. The reason Washington Post reporters didn't uncover the UMBC report in 2007 wasn't because it was impossible to find -- I found it. They didn't find it because they weren't interested in looking. The Post had abrogated its duty for objective reporting in exchange for exclusive access to Rhee before her selection was announced. Indeed, most Washingtonians, including most DC Council members, learned of Fenty's choice from the Washington Post's one-side article revealing Rhee's nomination. Throughout Rhee's chancellorship, the Post would act as little more than her PR apparatus.

Fenty failed in not properly vetting Rhee. He failed in many ways and ultimately paid for it by being defeated last September. The DC Council failed because members were not interested in taking the heat that a proper examination of Rhee's qualifications would entail. And, the citizens of DC failed by allowing their desire for improved public education to be exploited by someone more interested in self-promotion than putting students first.

Her heroic improvement of students' test scores is the foundation of the myth of Rhee as Superman. When asked about the role of standardized tests in the IMPACT evaluation system, Rhee has said that she was able to overcome poverty and other external factors to achieve test score improvement. However, the evidence suggests that's something she failed to achieve.

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Note: I stopped publishing "State of Columbia" and removed it from the Internet. However, the original 2007 article is available here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071012123206/stateofcolumbia.com/weblog/archive/2007/06/28/rhee-scores

I also republished the article on DCUM here:

http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/101581.page

Nick Anderson has also written about Rhee's test score claims in the Washington Post.