Fordham Institute's Flypaper Makes Excuses For Rhee

You knew they would, right?

Michelle Rhee probably blew it on cheating—but got much else right

Michelle Gininger / April 12, 2013

  John Merrow’s expose on cheating in Washington, D.C., doesn’t look good for former D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee and current chancellor Kaya Henderson. Indeed, it’s hard to dismiss “two highly placed and reputable sources,” not to mention the missing memo. *

Let’s be clear, however: This is hardly evidence of Atlanta-style wrongdoing. We have no reason to believe that Rhee (or Henderson) encouraged cheating or covered up illegal behavior. It’s more likely that they simply exercised poor judgment in not treating the evidence of cheating more seriously.

Critics are bound to say that all reforms that Rhee stands for—teacher evaluations, tenure reform, and school choice—should be dismissed. But let’s not abandon education reform and accountability at the expense of our students, which getting rid of testing surely would.

Instead, to borrow from Michael Petrilli on the Atlanta cheating scandal, let’s “mend it, not end it.”

Did Michelle Rhee know about the cheating? The evidence is strong.

Should we investigate the D.C. cheating in 2008–10? Maybe.

And should we look at improve standardized testing to curb cheating and to improve student learning? Absolutely.

Oh, so much to hammer away at here.

Let's start at the top.

The post runs with the frame "Sure it looks like Rhee knew about cheating, but so what?  We like her on so many other issues - school privatization, tenure, evaluations based upon test scores - that we simply cannot dismiss her as an education reform 'warrior woman' no matter what she did or didn't do around the cheating!"

Which is to say, they don't really care whether she's a crook or not, they don't really care whether she refuses to be held accountable for her tenure as DCPS chancellor - all they care about is the education reform/privatization policies she promotes and the utility she has to the movement.

In other words, the ends justify the means.

Next, the writer says this "missing memo" is hardly evidence of "Atlanta-style wrongdoing."

Ah, but the USA Today story that originally broke the cheating allegations back in 2011, reported the following:

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.

Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.

A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.

Let's repeat that last part:

The erasures at Noyes and other schools were so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.

Were they examined thoroughly?

Rhee indicates in her official statement to the "missing memo" that these allegations were indeed investigated and she and DCPS were exonerated:

In a statement, Rhee said she didn't recall getting Sanford's memo: "As chancellor I received countless reports, memoranda and presentations. I don't recall receiving a report by Sandy Sanford regarding erasure data from the (DC Comprehensive Assessment System), but I'm pleased, as has been previously reported, that both inspectors general (DOE and DCPS) reviewed the memo and confirmed my belief that there was no widespread cheating."

But as Jay Matthews at the Washington Post points out here, both the USDOE and the DCPS investigation were flawed, limited in scope and very little investigating was actually done:

In the 42 years I have worked for this newspaper, I have adopted many of this town’s mental habits. One is a deep respect for inspectors general, those stewards of truth whose work we often herald in The Post. That is why I am disappointed by the failure of not one, but two, inspectors general to expose test tampering in the D.C. schools.

From 2008 through 2010, according to testing company CTB/McGraw Hill, some D.C. schools had 70 percent or more of their classrooms flagged for wrong-to-right erasure rates far beyond the mean erasure rates for all D.C. students. When officials at those schools were denied after-hours access to the answer sheets because of tighter security, their test scores plummeted.

University of North Carolina professor Gregory Cizek investigated similar erasures in Atlanta. He found they were the results of cheating. Many culprits confessed and lost their jobs. Cizek and other psychometricians say there is no reasonable explanation for statistically improbable wrong-to-right erasures other than adults changing the wrong answers to right.

Such expertise apparently didn’t interest D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby and U.S. Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen S. Tighe. Their investigators found insufficient proof of massive cheating on the district’s standardized tests. It is easy to tell why, now that Tighe’s office has released a report on its findings and Willoughby has been forced by D.C. Council member Kenyan McDuffie to defend his work: Neither IG took the erasure data seriously.

They never studied the answer sheets. When test scores plummeted at Noyes Education Campus and other high-flying D.C. schools, it never occurred to the IGs to ask whether erasures also declined. Noyes educators blamed the declining scores on an influx of new students from low-performing schools. A computer check of enrollment rolls would have told the IGs whether that was true.

In his response to McDuffie, Willoughby also dismissed evidence from Adell Cothorne, a principal at Noyes Education Campus who reported suspicious behavior at her school. Cothorne said she found three staffers loyal to a former principal holed up in a room, after-hours, with answer sheets and erasers in their hands. She said she believed they were erasing wrong answers and penciling in the right ones on a D.C. preliminary exam.

Cothorne says Willoughby’s people never tried to interview her. Willoughby told McDuffie that Cothorne’s attorney said the principal didn’t want to talk. You decide who is telling the truth. The fact that Willoughby stopped his investigation after looking at just one school, Noyes, suggests little interest on his part in getting at the truth.

I congratulate Tighe’s staff for interviewing Cothorne in July 2011. The principal said they talked to her for several hours. Willoughby knew this but never mentioned it in his original August 2012 report. He said he couldn’t use her account because she had filed a whistleblower’s lawsuit against the District and the complaint had been sealed by the court – which happens in all whistleblower suits.

The Education Department also revealed Feb. 7 that several educators reported other forms and signs of cheating at Noyes and other D.C. schools: tests distributed days in advance to teachers who shared the questions with students; teachers coaching kids during the tests; kids excelling on the tests though they had performed poorly in class.

Yet both IGs apparently reject Cothorne’s assertions, though they don’t explain why. Because the three staffers she fingered denied any wrongdoing? Had they confessed, they almost certainly would have been fired. So why did the IGs believe them instead of her?

Cothorne now finds herself condemned as a liar after Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said she made “fictitious” claims.

Amid apparent lying, cheating and turning of blind eyes, I’d say that if there’s one honorable person in this five-year-long melodrama, it’s Cothorne. She’s the one who didn’t look the other way, instead putting her students’ interests first.

These two flawed, IG-led investigations uncovered nothing because they didn't really want to uncover anything.  

Rhee can try and hang her hat on these two IG-led investigations as proof of exoneration but they actually raise more questions than they resolve and they certainly do not give us definitive proof that "Atlanta-style wrongdoing" didn't take place in DC since only the last investigation in Atlanta - the one pushed by Governor Perdue - actually found the evidence of widespread cheating.  

Remember, the first couple in Atlanta, as ineffectual and limited as the two IG-led investigations done on Rhee, found no evidence of cheating either and exonerated Beverly Hall and her teachers:

In August 2010, after yet another blue-ribbon commission of Atlanta officials found no serious cheating, Mr. Perdue appointed the two special prosecutors and gave them subpoena powers and a budget substantial enough to hire more than 50 state investigators who were overseen by Mr. Hyde.

Mr. Bowers, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hyde had spent most of their careers putting criminals in prison, and almost as important, they could write. They produced an investigative report with a narrative that read more like a crime thriller than a sleepy legal document and placed Dr. Hall center stage in a drama of mind-boggling dysfunction.

Until we get a full investigation of all those erasures at the 103 DCPS schools USA Today red-flagged, until we get a full investigation of Rhee's and Henderson's official responses to the Sanford memo, we cannot say whether "Atlanta-style wrongdoing" did or did not take place in D.C. because the truth is, we don't know if it did or didn't.

Let's have that investigation, run just the way Governor Sonny Perdue ran the last one in Atlanta, with special prosecutors and subpoena powers and a substantial budget that allows for a real investigation, and then we will know whether Atlanta-style wrongdoing took place or not.

Next, the Flypaper writer says that there is no evidence that Rhee or her deputy chancellor Kaya Henderson encouraged cheating or covered up illegal behavior.

But that's not necessarily so.

John Merrow in his post last night about the cheating memo wrote the following:

Rhee has publicly maintained that, if bureaucratic red tape hadn’t gotten in the way, she would have investigated the erasures. For example, in an interview^[1] conducted for PBS’ “Frontline” before I learned about the confidential memo, Rhee told me, “We kept saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this; we just need to have more information.’ And by the time the information was trickling in back and forth, we were about to take the next year’s test. And there was a new superintendent of education that came in at the time. And she said, ‘Okay, well, we’re about to take the next test anyway so let’s just make sure that the proper protocols are in place for next time.’”

At best, that story is misleading.

...

 Michelle Rhee had to decide whether to investigate aggressively or not. She had publicly promised to make all decisions “in the best interests of children,” and a full-scale investigation would seem to keep that pledge. If cheating were proved, she could fire the offenders and see that students with false scores received the remedial attention they needed. Failing to investigate might be interpreted as a betrayal of children’s interests–if it ever became public knowledge.

For unknown reasons, Rhee decided there would be no full investigation.  And then, every time questions came up around the allegations, Rhee used the two limited IG investigations as proof of full exoneration (when they actually weren't) or refused to answer questions at all (as happened with USA Today.)

Now Rhee is claiming she doesn't remember the memo that shows she was filled in on the potential cheating problem.

Merrow says he has a highly reliable source in DCPS who knows Rhee saw the memo and discussed it at DCPS staff meetings.

While none of this is direct evidence that she or Henderson encouraged cheating, nor is it direct evidence of a cover-up, it certainly leaves a stink around how they handled the allegations and why they decided a full investigation was not warranted. 

In fact, the Flypaper writer herself later writes that "The evidence is strong" that Rhee knew about cheating.

If "The evidence is strong" that Rhee knew about cheating but did nothing about it and now continues to do everything she can to stonewall further investigation of the cheating allegations and her handling of them, it certainly leaves the impression that there was some kind of cover-up.  

Otherwise why not go with the full investigation? 

Otherwise why not talk to USA Today about the allegations?

Otherwise why not go on Chris Hayes' program on MSNBC and respond to John Merrow's report on the cheating memo?

The Flypaper writer then sets up a straw man argument over the potential fall-out of this scandal - critics of Rhee will say the allegations against Rhee are a reason to end all of her reforms.

Then we get a reiteration of Flypaper's Mike Petrilli's "Mend it, Don't End It" meme that he trotted out earlier after the Atlanta indictments.

I don't know what other critics of Rhee are saying, but here is what this critic is saying:

The allegations against Rhee are evidence of why a full investigation of Rhee needs to be done and if her "miracle schools" in DC turn out to be as bogus as the miracles in Atlanta and Texas, then it means we need to reassess what test-based accountability reforms are doing to school systems all across the nation since so many of the "miracles" turn out to be shams.

It is quite clear that there is a lot of fear in the halls of the education reform think tanks and "non-profits" now that the Rhee cheating memo has surfaced just two weeks after the Beverly Hall/Atlanta indictments.

Hall was bad, but the reform movement could survive Hall's fall from grace.  

Rhee, however, is another matter. 

As I wrote back on March 30, 

Hall's fall from education reform grace is happening far from center stage and while it hurts the movement that someone with Hall's education reform credentials has been taken down by evidence of cheating and fraud, it is not fatal to the movement.

If the same were to happen to Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein, the other education reformer and former schools chancellor with the same prominence and notoriety as Rhee, it would be, if not fatal to the movement, a very grave wound from which the movement might not recover.

Rhee, along with Klein, are the very public faces of the education reform movement.

Whatever happens to them, happens to the test-based, teacher accountability/education reform movement as well.

For now, they're circling the wagons around her and making excuses for her and for Kaya Henderson too.

It is amazing how the "No Excuses!" crowd, the "Teacher Accountability" people, are so uninterested in accountability for Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson and DCPS and are making excuses for them.

There needs to be a full, Atlanta-style investigation of Michelle Rhee, her tenure at DCPS, what she knew about the cheating allegations and what she did or didn't do in response to them.

And it would be great if the "No Excuses!" crowd, the "Teacher Accountability" people who so love to hold teachers and schools accountable for real and perceived sins of omission and commission, would do the same for their emblem of ed deform, Michelle Rhee.

That's not asking too much, is it?