So Much For Michelle Rhee's "Miracle" In D.C.

From Bill Turque at the Washington Post:

Michael Casserly is not a reporter, so he can’t be accused of “burying the lead,” newspaper parlance for failing to place what’s new and most significant at the beginning of a story. Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a non-profit that provides research and other support to urban school systems, wrote an opinion piece for Sunday’s Post (“A Chancellor Up to the Challenge” ) supporting the nomination of Acting Chancellor Kaya Henderson for the permanent post. Henderson is scheduled to appear before D.C. Council on Thursday.

Casserly, also a strong supporter of Henderson’s predecessor, Michelle A. Rhee, walks through the signs of progress in the District, including increased enrollment and graduation rates, and impressive growth in fourth and eighth grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

But wedged into the seventh paragraph is this caveat:

“An analysis by my organization also indicates that the D.C. public schools score well below what one would expect statistically, compared with other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics. Students show unusual difficulty reading and interpreting texts, evaluating and critiquing information, identifying appropriate measurement instruments, and solving problems involving geometric shapes. There is much more work to be done.”

Casserly says the full report will be available soon. It’s likely to generate a news story or two.

Casserly can try and hide the truth all he wants - if the NAEP scores for D.C. do not compare well to other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics, but D.C.'s own test scores show great improvement even as allegations of widespread cheating abound under Rhee, something funky happened in D.C. under Rhee.

It is amazing to me that the two most prominent "education miracle workers" - Klein and Rhee - still have cache in D.C. and other power broker circles.

Klein left NYC with the test scores as low as when he came in and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Hispanic students was larger than before he took over the school system.

Rhee is under scrutiny for widespread cheating on D.C. tests and now an NAEP analysis will show that D.C. does not score as well as other cities with similar poverty, language, race, disability and family characteristics. This indicates that those vaunted D.C. test score gains Rhee bragged about may have indeed come from cheating.

And yet, even after all this Rhee, Klein still gets to write jive opinion pieces in the Washington Post and Rhee gets to do the same in the NY Daily News.

Both stand to make millions from their "education reform" work.

What a country.