Michelle Rhee biographer and hack extraordinaire Richard Whitmore claims that the DC test cheating scandal that threatens to bring down the Tiger Mom of the education reform world, Michelle Rhee, is overblown.
He writes in the Daily News that he can't tell if all those erasures on the DC tests from wrong to right answers (so many at one school that a person would have better odds of winning the Powerball grand prize than seeing those wrong to right answer switches NOT be from manipulation), but it doesn't matter because Michelle Rhee's reform legacy is based not upon test score gains on the DC exams but rather on the federal NAEP tests.
There is one major problem with Whitmore's claim - the gains DC students made on the NAEP tests under Rhee were no better than the gains students made under Rhee's two predecessors.
Pointing to the NAEP scores doesn't absolve Rhee of setting up an environment of punitive measures and fear where cheating and test manipulation were rampant.
They also don't prove her reform movement was a success since her two predecessors saw NAEP gains too.
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