Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

by Diane Ravitch

  Shortly after Rhee left office, critics questioned her account of her years as a TFA teacher in Baltimore. She had described herself to the media as a teacher who was awful in her first year but who then achieved astonishing results in the next two years. Her own success, she said, proved to her that a teacher with high expectations can overcome all obstacles. Her résumé said, “Taught in Harlem Park Community School, one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in Baltimore City, effecting significant measurable gains in student achievement. 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.”12

  Critics doubted that oft-told claim, but the records could not be found to verify or challenge it. Some of Rhee’s critics kept digging and found a report written in 1995 by researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The report said that the combined scores of all the classes in the grade where Rhee taught had increased significantly, but the gain was not large enough to substantiate the spectacular claim on Rhee’s résumé. The blogger G. F. Brandenburg, a retired mathematics teacher, was first to break the news. The Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews concluded that Brandenburg “has proved that Rhee’s results weren’t nearly as good as she said they were.”13 Rhee’s office promptly issued a statement saying that “the attacks” were “unfounded” and that the report covered all the students in the third grade, but not necessarily Michelle’s. It concluded, “This episode is further proof of what we’re up against.”14

  A few days later, Brandenburg published a comment by the principal investigator for the 1995 report, who told him that even though the scores were not broken out by classroom, Brandenburg’s conclusion was correct. With only four third-grade classrooms in the school, if one class had average scores in the range of 90 percent, it would have lifted the average of the entire grade.15

  Another part of Rhee’s legacy was the IMPACT system she devised to evaluate teachers. Fifty percent of the evaluation was based on the value-added test score gains of students. This is a model aligned with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, which encouraged states to judge teachers by changes in their students’ test scores (D.C. won one of the Race to the Top awards). Rhee’s system was supposed to identify the “best” and the “worst” teachers, since the best will supposedly produce big test score gains while the worst will not. In 2011, based on both test scores and observations, the district fired 206 teachers.

  But were those fired the city’s worst teachers? According to The Washington Post, one of the fired teachers received a commendation in May 2011 from her supervisor, who said, “It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined.” Two months later, this fifth-grade teacher was fired: Her students’ scores didn’t go up as much as the statistical model predicted based on their previous year’s scores. The classroom observation counted for 35 percent and other factors for 15 percent, but the value-added scores doomed her. The teacher suspected her students came from a school that had cheated and inflated their previous year’s grades. She appealed her firing but was turned down by the district. No excuses! The school principal gave her a glowing recommendation “without reservation” when she applied to teach in nearby Fairfax County, Virginia. He said she was “enthusiastic, creative, visionary, flexible, motivating and encouraging.”16 She was hired.

  The District of Columbia, like other high-poverty districts, had long had a high level of teacher turnover. This teacher churn continued during Rhee’s tenure. Hundreds were fired within a few years, while others resigned or left to teach elsewhere. One in every five teachers in the district left in a single year, 2010–11. The New Teacher Project, the advocacy group founded by Rhee, claimed that this was not so significant because the “best” teachers were retained, but somehow the “best” teachers (the report called them “the irreplaceables”) were highly concentrated in the district’s low-poverty schools. Few were teaching in high-poverty schools. At this rate, the district would lose nearly half its teachers in only two years. One longtime analyst of the D.C. system, the civil rights lawyer Mary Levy, calculated the five-year teacher turnover rate at 75 percent. The principal turnover rate was no less disturbing. In the spring of 2008, Rhee replaced one-third of the district’s principals with her choices. By 2012, 60 percent of the forty-six new principals were gone. A few had moved into senior administrative jobs or to other schools, but most had left the D.C. school system.17

  After Rhee left the D.C. chancellorship, she created StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote charters and vouchers. She quickly attracted millions of dollars from wealthy supporters of school choice and opponents of teachers’ unions. She poured large sums of money into political campaigns for candidates and issues that advanced her agenda. Although nominally a Democrat, she backed the political agenda of the nation’s most conservative Republican governors, like Rick Scott in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio, Mitch Daniels in Indiana, and Chris Christie in New Jersey. Most of her organization’s political contributions in state races went to Republican candidates. In Tennessee, she spent nearly $1 million to enable the Republicans to achieve a supermajority in the legislature.18

  What did Michelle Rhee accomplish during her three and a half years in charge of the D.C. public schools? Did she accomplish her goal of making it the highest-performing urban district in the nation? Did she make substantial progress? Under the heading “Driving Unprecedented Growth in the D.C. Public Schools,” the Web site of StudentsFirst says about her time in D.C., “Under her leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years.”19

  Boasting about her accomplishments brought her additional media attention and made her the toast of the reform movement, but it also invited additional scrutiny. Alan Ginsburg, who worked as a policy research director for many years at the U.S. Department of Education under both political parties, analyzed Rhee’s record. He reviewed the district’s NAEP scores in reading and math from 2000 to 2009 and concluded: “Rhee did not initiate the DC schools’ test-score turnaround when she took office in 2007. DC’s NAEP scores had already steadily improved under her two predecessors, Superintendents Paul Vance and Clifford Janey. Moreover, the rates of DC score gains under Rhee were no better than the rates achieved under Vance and Janey.”20 Ginsburg did not refer to the D.C. state tests that Rhee cited on her StudentsFirst Web site, because the D.C. tests “were redesigned between 2005 and 2006 and performance levels for 2006 and afterwards are not comparable with those from prior years.”

  Ginsburg found that the largest gains on NAEP occurred during the Vance administration. He cautioned that U.S. education has a long history of looking for “silver bullet” solutions that fail when tried on a large scale. He found no evidence to support Rhee’s policy of teacher removal and urged policy makers to evaluate this approach carefully before adopting it nationally. Other nations, he pointed out, have developed more positive and successful ways to improve teaching, and he urged attention to them.

  We can now add to Alan Ginsburg’s analysis because we have NAEP scores for 2011.

  From 2009 to 2011, the D.C. public schools saw no statistically discernible increases in fourth-grade mathematics scores, but there was a discernible increase in eighth-grade mathematics scores.

  In fourth-grade mathematics, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, black students, and Hispanic students were flat.

  In eighth-grade mathematics, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and Hispanic students were flat, but there was a statistically significant increase in the scores of black students.

  From 2009 to 2011, the D.C. public schools
saw no significant change in fourth-grade reading scores and no significant increase in eighth-grade reading scores.

  In fourth-grade reading, the scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and Hispanic students were flat. The scores of black students declined by a statistically real margin.

  In eighth-grade reading, there was no change in the scores. The scores of higher-income students, lower-income students, white students, and black students were flat. The scores of Hispanic students declined significantly.21

  Looking at NAEP scores, we know for certain that Rhee did not turn it into the highest-performing urban district in the United States. Its students still have low scores on the no-stakes federal assessment. It remains in the bottom group of urban districts along with Atlanta, Baltimore City, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Fresno, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia (Atlanta is in the bottom tier in mathematics but not in reading).

  Did Rhee reduce the achievement gap between black and white students? No, the achievement gap between black and white students was unchanged from 2007, when she started, to 2011, after she departed.22 Washington, D.C., continues to have the largest black-white gap of any urban district tested by NAEP, because of the extremes of affluence (mostly white) and poverty (mostly black) in the district. The Hispanic-white gap in D.C. in both reading and math is almost as large as the black-white gap, and here, too, D.C. has the biggest gaps among the nation’s urban districts.

  Rhee continued to be dogged by persistent suspicions that she had failed to investigate widespread cheating, especially after a confidential memo was leaked to PBS correspondent John Merrow. Merrow considered the memo to be confirmation that Rhee knew about a pattern of cheating but ignored it. Merrow, who filmed Rhee a dozen times when she was chancellor, summarized her tenure: little or no gains on test scores, high turnover of teachers and principals, lowest graduation rate of any big city, largest achievement gap of any big city, a truancy crisis, big increase in spending, a bloated central office staff, and declining enrollments.23

  At this point, it is impossible to discern a lasting legacy from the Rhee era in the D.C. schools, which continued under the control of her deputy Kaya Henderson. The schools have experienced high levels of instability because of the frequent turnover of teachers and principals. More public schools will close, and more charter schools will open. Nearly half the students in the district are enrolled in charter schools, more than in any other city except New Orleans. The district’s public schools have not been transformed academically. The students in D.C. are still poor and are still low performing on the federal tests. The reform program of privatization, teacher bonuses, and teacher firings was not successful. Rhee did not prove that poverty doesn’t matter. She made promises she could not keep. The problems she inherited remain unchanged.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Contradictions of Charters

  CLAIM Charter schools will revolutionize American education by their freedom to innovate and produce dramatically better results.

  REALITY Charter schools run the gamut from excellent to awful and are, on average, no more innovative or successful than public schools.

  Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, was a founding father of the charter school movement. It is ironic that one of the nation’s leading trade unionists promoted an idea that produced a sector that is privately managed, receives public money, and is overwhelmingly non-union. A 2009–10 survey found that only 12 percent of charter schools were unionized; among the newest schools, the proportion is even smaller.1

  In 1988, Shanker was trying to figure out what to do about the large number of students who were disengaged, who dropped out of school, or who sat sullenly in their classrooms, apparently indifferent to instruction. His idea was that a group of six or eight teachers in a school might collaborate on designing a new sort of school for these students, then go to their colleagues in the school and ask for their approval. Before they could proceed, they would also need to get the support of their union and the district school board. Then they would recruit those students who were hanging out on street corners and who were likely to drop out. The new school would be free from the usual regulations, and teachers would be free to come up with their own ideas to help these youths. Whatever they learned, they would share with their colleagues. They would collaborate with the public school system, not compete with it.

  Borrowing the terminology from a University of Massachusetts professor, Ray Budde, who had a similar idea, Shanker called it a “charter school.” The basic concept was that the school would have a charter for a set period of time, would work with the students who were at high risk for failure, and at some point its work would be done. He introduced the concept at a national convention of his union and carried the message to locals. He often wrote about the idea in his weekly paid column in The New York Times. He was very enthusiastic until 1993, when he saw what was happening in Baltimore. There, a private, for-profit firm called Education Alternatives Inc. was given a contract to run nine struggling schools. These were not charter schools; they were privately managed schools operating under contract to the district and subject to the rules of the district. (The Baltimore school where Michelle Rhee began her teaching career was part of this privatization experiment.) The company cleaned up the schools, brought in computers, and retrained teachers. But the company and the city quarreled over finances, and scores did not go up, so the city canceled its contract. Initially, the company and the union collaborated. But the company made a fatal error: it fired unionized paraprofessionals, who earned $10 an hour (in 1991 dollars) with benefits, and replaced them with college graduates who were paid $7 an hour without benefits. This was unacceptable to Shanker.2

  Shanker concluded that management by private corporations was privatization incompatible with public education. The management’s decisions would be based on reducing costs, he realized, not improving education. In 1993, he turned decisively against the charter idea when he realized that it would become a vehicle for privatization. In 1994, he learned that the first charter school in Michigan was Noah Webster Academy, which enrolled seven hundred students, mostly Christian homeschoolers, and that instruction was given mainly through computers. The students continued to stay at home but with a state-funded computer and a curriculum that taught creationism. Shanker was aghast. He was even more disturbed to realize that the academy’s founder had discovered a tiny, impoverished school district with only twenty-three students that agreed to sponsor the academy and give it a ninety-nine-year contract, in return for “a kickback of about $40,000.” Meanwhile, the Noah Webster Academy would receive $4 million in state funding for its at-home pupils. Shanker warned that the real aim of some advocates of charters was “to smash the public schools.” He began referring to charter schools, vouchers, and privatization as “gimmicks,” “magic bullets,” and “fads” that would do nothing to change the essentials of teaching and learning.3 Shanker was a strong supporter of national standards, and he recoiled at the idea of a “do-your-own-thing” curriculum.

  Despite this history, some charter advocates continued to cite Shanker’s endorsement of charters long after he renounced his own idea. It is doubly surprising that they claim Shanker’s approval for the creation of non-union schools.4

  Charter schools became the hot new idea in American education, beloved by advocates of school choice on the right. Conservatives at the Hoover Institution, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Center for Education Reform, ALEC, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute realized that charters were the next best thing to vouchers. NCLB recommended charter schools as an option to replace low-performing public schools, despite the lack of any evidence for their efficacy when the law was passed in 2001. Major foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and dozens of o
thers lavished funding on the expansion of charter schools and charter chains. The U.S. Department of Education required states to lift their limits on charter schools if they wanted to be eligible to compete for the billions of dollars in President Obama’s Race to the Top competition. Their advocates portrayed them as the salvation for poor minority children trapped in subpar urban and suburban schools. Candidates for state and local office could count on contributions from wealthy individuals and organizations across the nation if they promised to support charter schools.

  By 2012, forty-two states had passed legislation authorizing charter schools.5 Only twenty years after the charter idea was first proposed, more than six thousand charter schools enrolled about two million students, about 4 percent of the nation’s K–12 students. In big-city districts, charter school enrollments were far larger. About 80 percent or more of the students in New Orleans were enrolled in charter schools, as were nearly half the students in the District of Columbia. In six districts, at least 30 percent of students attended charter schools, and another eighteen districts had at least 20 percent of their students in charters. Nearly one hundred districts counted at least 10 percent of their students in charters.6

  Because the charter sector is by nature composed of thousands of different entities, it is impossible to make a generalization that applies equally to all charters. Some are run like military boot camps, with rigidly applied rules of behavior. Some are progressive in pedagogy and tone. A few are dedicated to the needs of autistic children and others with disabilities. Many exclude children with severe disabilities and accept very few English-language learners. Many have high attrition rates. Charters vary from state to state, and charters vary even within the same district.