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With all the talk about Michelle Rhee here, I'd like to add my two cents: by and large, Rhee was a charlatan. Her claims of boosting student achievement as a teacher herself were, at best, highly inflated, and could have been outright lies. It is quite possible that a substantial part of whatever rise in scores did happen happened because poorly performing students were counseled out. Her central argument was that bad schools are bad because they have bad teachers; as I mentioned above, this is not true. The "value-added" metric that Rhee put in place, which purports to measure the role a particular teacher had on their students' test score changes, is worthless numerology (and there are statistical analysis that demonstrate this). There are likely to be long-time teachers at poorly performing schools who have developed ways to cope with the depressing churn of at-risk kids, a churn that causes many an idealistic young teacher to burn out sooner rather than later. But there is no evidence that replacing existing teachers with "good" teachers can lead to sustainable, generalizable improvement in a population of at-risk students.

What Rhee did that was good was to convince parents in wealthy neighborhoods to send their kids to their local DCPS schools. The effectiveness of her other reforms was irrelevant; breaking the chicken-and-egg cycle that keeps neighborhoods with lots of middle (and up) class families from creating a critical mass of students at a school is what counts.

by thm on Jul 17, 2012 4:57 pm • link • report