Michelle Rhee is the firmer chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, appointed by Mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s highly lauded by education reformers because of her performance there – there were dramatic turnarounds in proficiency in some of the worst-performing schools during her tenure. She has opened her own education reform foundation and the solutions she are pushing are breaking teacher contracts and charter schools. Will new revelations about the supposed miracle affect her reputation?
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
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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.
The USA Today investigation found that the scores were swinging wildly. The fourth grade went from 22% proficient to 84% and then back down to 52%.
I dint know how you feel about education reform but from my view education reform focuses too narrowly on tests scores and teacher-blaming. Until reformers stop looking for miracle one-size-fits-all solutions we will see things like this happen. I feel really sorry for the kids in this case because they gain absolutely nothing by being labeled falsely proficient.