Reply #20: you can put all of the lipstick on you want

[another saigon]

but this pig is too ugly. Rhee is merely doing the dirty work for this administration.....

<snip>

In the past few weeks, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee made headlines for firing 241 teachers, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a major speech on education reform and Race to the Top finalists were announced for Round Two, many of which agreed to overhaul their state’s teacher evaluation and tenure system.

Even President Barack Obama took up the theme of education, weighing in on his administration’s reform agenda for three-quarters of an hour at the National Urban League Centennial Conference – although the president who relied on teacher-union support in his election treaded carefully.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet /


Were some D.C. teachers fired based on flawed calculations?

<snip>

But this simply cannot be. The difference between 498 and 499 is a tiny difference among very high achievers in the fourth grade. But the difference between 499 and 500 is the difference between the highest performing fourth-grader and the lowest performing fifth-grader; and there are many fourth-graders who outperform low-scoring fifth-graders.

And heaven help the poor teacher who is teaching a class filled with students who’ve been retained in grade.

A fifth-grade student who got every question wrong on the reading test at the end of fourth grade and every question wrong at the end of fifth grade would show an actual gain of 500–400=100 points.

A fifth-grader repeating fifth grade who had a scaled score of 510 the first time through, and a scaled score of 530 during his or her second year in fifth grade, would show an actual gain of just 20 points. DC’s value-added methods may, of course, simply exclude students who are retained in grade from the calculations, but that sends an unpleasant message about whose scores count when teachers are evaluated.

Did DCPS completely botch the calculation of value-added scores for teachers, and then use these erroneous scores to justify firing 26 teachers and lay the groundwork for firing hundreds more next year?

According to the only published account of how these scores were calculated, the answer, shockingly, is yes.


And this. Obama's RTTT. Another corporate scam like LNCB....

RHEE HAS made a career doing battle on the frontlines of the free market crusade against teachers and public education. Her latest move puts D.C. even more at the forefront of the national movement toward expanding charter schools and a "flexible" workforce of non-union teachers.

That movement is currently being led by the Obama administration and its education secretary, Arne Duncan. Rhee's most recent onslaught is a bid to meet the criteria of the administration's Race to the Top (RTTT) program, which offered state governments the chance to compete for $4.3 billion in federal funding if they remove caps on charter schools and use student test scores to evaluate teacher performance.

By forcing states to compete for desperately needed education funding, RTTT is the Obama administration's main strategy for pushing school "reform" and making education a game of winners and losers. Rhee has fought to win RTTT money by attacking teachers and charterizing the school system in D.C.

So it was no surprise that a few days after the firings were announced, the U.S. Department of Education announced that D.C. and 18 states remain in the running to win a piece of the remaining $3.4 billion RTTT prize.


http://socialistworker.org/2010/08 /03/rhee-ratchets-up-the-attack