All About the Recent Cheating Scandals

Good report I saw on YouTube:

Michelle Rhee on the Ropes

Chris Hayes of MSNBC looks at the latest dirt on the filthy Michelle Rhee by interviewing John Merrow:

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She can go to prison for all I care, and she should take her buddies Obama and Duncan with her.

Can Michelle Rhee Stay Out of Prison?

Via Diane Ravitch is this piece by one-time Rhee groupie John Merrow, who has seemed to have changed his tune as of late.

So will she be able to avoid the fate of Atlanta's Beverly Hall?

Michelle A. Rhee, America’s most famous school reformer, was fully aware of the extent of the problem when she glossed over what appeared to be widespread cheating during her first year as Schools Chancellor in Washington, DC. A long-buried confidential memo from her outside data consultant suggests that the problem was far more serious than kids copying off other kids’ answer sheets. (“191 teachers representing 70 schools”). Twice in just four pages the consultant suggests that Rhee’s own principals, some of whom she had hired, may have been responsible (“Could the erasures in some cases have been done by someone other than the students and the teachers?”).

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.

To say the least.

Read the whole long piece. It's pretty revealing.

Whistleblowing in Education is Dangerous

for the whistleblower involved. Naturally non-teacher John Merrow, in his "report" about crooked administrator Michelle Rhee, didn't go into much detail about the principal who tried to blow the whistle on the D.C. cheating scandal.

Whistleblowing is deadly in the ed field. Typically an educator who is ethical is too much for the higher-ups to stomach because, after all, any violations are reflections on THEM, and that can't be allowed. Better the teacher or principal be railroaded out of a job than face criticism by the public.

Merrow, of course, didn't give this principal much airtime. He was too busy shilling for Rhee.

Why the code of silence? One person explained that she wouldn’t be able to find work in education if she spoke out—and then hung up. Others told much the same story.

So let me tell you more about Adell Cothorne, in her own words.

“I grew up in poverty. I’m a minority, of course, (laughs). (And the daughter of a) teenage mother. So I absolutely understand the value of a strong public school education. It will take you places you’ve never been before.”

Education enabled Adell Cothorne to rise from those unpromising circumstances, and she ended up as an Assistant Principal in Montgomery County, Maryland. For those unfamiliar with the Washington, DC, area, Montgomery County is a wealthy suburb of the Capital with excellent ‘Blue Ribbon’ public schools. It’s one of the top-ranked school districts in the nation.

Since John Merrow is so fixated on those mythical "bad teachers," he sounds totally shocked that teachers and principals are terrified to speak out because it is career-ruining. He doesn't understand the extreme power imbalance in education between teachers and administrators, or even with the few ethical principals and the higher-ups.

Districts have a million ways to blackball educators, and this blackballing can cross state lines. Disclosure questions are supposed to weed out the truly dangerous or incompetent educators, but any teacher or principal can be weeded out regardless of ability if they have been forced to resign, were dismissed regardless of how bogus the allegations are, or are non-renewed for whatever reason. I once copied-and pasted WCSD's application questions which ask the same question about six different ways in order to screen that teacher applicant from ever being eligible for a job.

Merrow is too much in bed with the privatizer interests to ever take a hard look at the power games in education, which "reform" efforts would make much worse.

The documentary should have centered on Adell Cothorne rather than Merrow's hero Michelle Rhee.