Reply to Frontline doc about Rhee and cheating

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Reply to "Frontline doc about Rhee and cheating "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Truth is, teachers and staff members who weren't doing their jobs could have been fired without Michelle Rhee.  Even teachers with tenure could have been fired for time and attendance violations.  The situation we have now with IMPACT is that everyone feels threatened, including great teachers who work under very difficult conditions.  Also, we have teachers who don't do that much who are earning bonuses.  Does this sound like an improvement?[/quote]

People who aren't teachers are constantly evaluated in their jobs. Why should teachers be excluded from review? It sounds like teachers are moving more towards working in THE REAL WORLD, not DCPS where every action was ignored and a paycheck rolled in regardless. Most people, especially in a bad economy, feel threatened about losing their jobs. Welcome to real life.[/quote]

+100[/quote]

This statement and it's "+100" is so unfortunate. No one has criticized Michelle Rhee for wanting to evaluate teachers. Rhee has been criticized for the way she went about reforming education and evaluations. Even today, her organization calls for 50% or more of a teacher's evaluation to be based on test scores, even though she 1. offers no evidence that this is really good for students and 2. hasn't started any dialogue about how to even improve standardized tests so that they are accurate predictors of student growth.

Rhee either believed or wanted it to be true that if people just had higher expectations, students would miraculously do better. This is not true, and it is a mindset that ultimately hurts students because they are deprived of the real resources they need in order to improve. Teachers do not just need to come to school filled with hope and high expectations - they also need sound curricula and support in building environments that are conducive to learning. Rhee may have found boxes of glue and pencils in the warehouse and been great at responding to emails, but she didn't put any effort into revamping curricula. So, it's not that teachers didn't WANT to meet Rhee's high expectations or be held responsible for improving student learning; it's that they were given very little time to figure out real, effective strategies to improve learning. Most teachers did not cheat, but MANY teachers narrowed the curricula and stopped trying to incorporate best practices for teaching kids and replaced them with best practices for getting scores up. This is not because teachers were greedy, lazy or trying to shirk responsibility; it's because they were being told to get something done was very nearly impossible to do without cutting corners (i.e. either cheating or narrowing the curricula).[/quote]

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