Lean Left

This is astonishing:

After becoming chancellor three years ago, Rhee pushed the city to take huge strides in education. She closed failing schools, introduced a new teacher evaluation system, and negotiated a groundbreaking contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union that allows the city to pay and fire educators based on their performance. Rhee became a national figure in the education reform movement, gracing the cover of Time magazine in 2008 and later emerging as the star of the controversial documentary Waiting for “Superman,” which opened nationwide just after Fenty’s loss.

I feel like I am taking crazy pills, because Michelle Rhee largely failed and yet our elite establishment still thinks she is a good model for education reform. Put aside her obvious and intense hatred for all public school systems, none of the things she did were of any use. We know the teacher evaluation system is very heavy on standardized tests, and we know that those are not effective measures of how well teachers actually teach and we know that twenty years of test heavy teaching has produced almost nothing in the way of gains. Firing teachers is of dubious value, as states and localities with little in the way teacher protection do not perform better than those with a lot of teach protection. Being a media darling, it should go without saying, does little to help students achieve anything. Even by her own standards — tests — Rhee’s “reforms” have not succeeded. In the first two years of her tenure, scores continued the climb that had started under the previous chancellor. In the third year, with most if not all of her reforms implemented, tests stagnated or declined.

There is zero evidence that Rhee has done a thing to help DC students. And yet she is the shining star of the education reform movements. Why? Seriously, why? To be blunt, Rhee has done nothing more than pimp charters and publicly display hatred of teachers and that has made her the darling of the education reform movement. One could almost think that reformers care more about trashing teachers than they do about helping kids.

I am beginning to develop a white hot hatred of so-called education reformers. I started looking into these things because I have two kids in an urban school district, one of whom is a special needs student. These reform experiments are going to affect my children directly, so I want to know what works and what does not. As far as I can tell, nothing — not one single solitary thing — that reforms push has been shown to have any positive effect on the educational system. Most of their pet ideas have been shown to be deeply flawed and ineffective.

And yet the elite commentators keep raising up demonstrated failures like Rhee and charter schools and testing and incentive pay as if they haven’t already been shown to be complete flops. These people are knowingly throwing away students on failed experiments for no reason that I can find other than they hate teachers. It is infuriating and disgusting. It says something terrible that such ill-informed and callous fools have come to dominate our education discussion.