Moral Duty, Aviv's Atlanta Scandal Article, Portelo's Case, Connecting the Dots on Why Tenure is Essential

Rachel Aviv has a terrific article in this week's New Yorker on the case of the test-cheating scandal in Atlanta under Beverly Hall, who was Atlanta Public Schools superintendent from 1999 to 2010. Her "Wrong Answer, In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice" is a great work of investigative journalism. She documented how, on the ground, the game of high-stakes tests can drive administrators to create conditions for wide-spread test-tampering and other forms of cheating. This was the thorough kind of high-profile expose and criminal prosecution that former Washington, D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee managed to avoid for her parallel Erasuregate under the pressures of No Child Left Behind.

Of course, this then, leads to the question, who can speak up, for their conscience, without fear for losing their job? The need to have the freedom to speak up about wrong-doing is why tenure is so important. Without tenure protection for teachers to speak up about wrong-doing, the climate for misuse of power and wrongful directives can worsen.

This leads us once again to the case of New York City teacher Francesco Portelos. As noted last September in "What the Francesco Portelos Case Means for All Teachers," it is essential for teachers to be able to speak up about wrong-doing or to merely ask questions, to bring clarity into the governance of schools, without fear for reprisals. (However, while it is welcome that he has retained his job, it is wrongful that he was fined and was sent into rotation. We would expect that this present administration would respect legal precedent and would set a new, gentler tone towards teachers in city policy.) We often hear that tenure extends due process to teachers. When one witnesses the multi-million dollar over-reach in the prosection of the Portelos case, and the over-reach in the city's resolution in his case, we cannot help but note that the quality of the due process for the teacher's behalf is weak.

How unfortunate that the media are so inclined to villainize teachers that they cannot slow down to understand that he was stating that they often speak on behalf of students. The corollary is that administrators by their actions create climates whereby teachers are afraid to speak up. As Arthur Goldstein reminds readers in his fine op-ed piece,"Teacher Tenure: For Good Apples, Too," in Wednesday's Daily News, an untenured teacher advocating for administrators to abide by a student's special education Individualized Education Plan (IEP) can get fired for doing so. Goldstein noted that he, himself --once tenureed-- threatened to file a grievance on the fact that he did not have an adequate number of books for his students, at that a week after that, he was given a brand-new set of books for his students. He went on to note,

Tenure doesn’t only protect the so-called bad apples, or teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. It protects all teachers. This is a tough job, and despite what you read in the papers, it also entails advocating for our students, your kids, whether or not the administration is comfortable with it.
I meet passionate and effective teachers everywhere I go. How many will stand up for your kids when schools don’t provide the services they need? How many will demand deserving kids pass classes even if they fail a standardized test? How many will tell state Education Commissioner John King that failing 70% of New York City’s students is not only counterintuitive, but also counterproductive?
It’s hard to say. Abolish tenure and that number will drop very close to zero.

Remove the protection that tenure provides and you lessen the possibility whereby teachers will speak up to protect students' safety, to advocate for working water fountains, clean restrooms, books for students, staffed libraries, adequately comprehensive curricula. Need we go on?

Hall's scandals in Atlanta, Rhee's Erasuregate in D.C., these were the legacy of No Child Left Behind. What scandals are the legacy of Obama and Duncan's Race to the Top and Common Core? Remove tenure and the likelihood of some future expose will be even more remote.

Michelle Rhee Wins U.S. Senate Seat in New Jersey

*Boon to hedge-fund investors *Back-pedaling from Common Core?
Well, not exactly Rhee herself on the way to Washington.
But in Cory Booker senator-elect from New Jersey (55 to 44 percent) we have a personality whose education policy has as a cornerstone the shuttering of public schools and the opening of privately run charter schools in their place; he is poised to exactly continue his echoing Michelle Rhee's line of what American schools need.

All of Booker's Wall Street hedge fund friends, recounted in this piece, must be high-fiving each other today.

For all the links on the issue of Booker's policies as mayor of Newark, New Jersey and his financial institution backers, read this post from July:
Cory Booker, Senate stand-in for Rhee / Update: Newark '12 contract came with strings attached to accountability to Facebook gift
an excerpt:

Booker has given a weak effort into supporting state senator Barbara Buono, Christie's Democratic challenger to the governor's office. Indeed, as [Jason] Farago notes, it is public knowledge that there is good will between Booker and economic conservatives of Democratic and Republican stripes: George Will spoke favorably of him in a column. Michelle Rhee, disgraced former chancellor of D.C. schools is one that Booker calls "a friend of mine." Akin to Rhee's test score scandals, news broke last fall that three Newark charter school officials breached test security.
 . . . .
Back in 2000 Cory Booker gave a speech at the economic libertarian Manhattan Institute, which the foundation published as "School Choice and Government Reform: Pillars of an Urban Renaissance." In the speech he declared his support for charter schools and public funds for religious and private schools (vouchers). As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, "In 1999 he helped found E3, a prominent education-reform group in New Jersey that pushes for charter schools and vouchers for inner-city communities." WSJ's glowing portrait of Booker was reprinted by E3, which stands for "Excellent Education for Everyone."

And so this kind of thinking has continued on his career as Newark mayor. He has clearly aligned himself with the dominant neo-liberal pro-corporate faction of the Democrats, now firmly in control of the Democratic Party. He privatized the sanitation department and attempted to do the same with the water department.
Mayor Booker also secured support for a teachers' 3-year contract that would include merit-based bonuses.
The local education reform handlers saluted the school system for this change.
Booker, with this merit based contract, curiously has the backing of Newark Teachers Union president Joseph Del Grasso, who just survived a challenge by a nine vote margin from a new democratic-minded dissident caucus, the Newark Education Workers (NEW) Caucus; yet the new caucus won a majority of 18 of 29 seats (Samantha Winslow at Labor Notes). Even Booker supporters are drawing parallels between Booker and mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.
 . . . .

No wonder Congressman Pallone cited this as evidence that Booker is “too close to Wall Street.” Further evidence comes from Republic Report, which chronicles how cash in politics corrupts democracy, which detailed numerous rich relationships between Booker and his hedge-fund billionaire and other Wall Street friends ["Celebrity cash fueling Cory Booker's Senate dreams"], "Cory Booker's Political Career Guided by Top Wall St Donors to Romney's Super PAC," May 21, 2012.
Hedge-funder Lee Ainslie, who gave $100,000 to Mitt Romney's presidential bid, maxed out his donation to Booker. ("Booker’s Wall Street Fundraising Past – and Obama’s")

[Tiger Management LLC’s Julian] Robertson, the prominent Booker campaign supporter who helped finance a Newark Charter program on behalf of Booker, is a close ally to Mitt Romney.

Notable donors donating the maximum $10,400 to the Booker campaign: Michael Bloomberg, Ivanka Trump, Mark Zuckerberg.

Other donors giving the maximum $10,400 include Maria Cuomo Cole, the daughter of New York’s former governor and sister of the current governor; Wal-Mart billionaire Christy Walton and writer/producer Jeffrey Abrams.
Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, gave $10,400 each.

 And on the infamous associations go for Booker.

At least he has been back-pedaling --in the last month-- at least, from the Common Core.

Booker's lack-luster victory is remarkable. Truly his Republican opponent Steve Lonegan should have been an easier candidate to beat. Consider how seriously nutty the latter guy is. He takes his Common Core opposition to the length of invoking Hitler and Stalin for parallels.

Against him, Booker's margin of victory should have been greater. But that weak showing suggests that progressive voters sat home. This reflects the pattern across the nation: a Democrat moves right. Left leaning voters sit home, right-leaning voters recognition the real (right-leaning) thing in the Republican, hence Tea Party Lonegan's comparatively strong 44% showing.

Yes, Rhee Did See Cheating Memo as D.C. Chancellor

(UPDATE: JOHN MERROW APPEARED ON CHRIS HAYES' MSNBC SHOW, DISCUSSING CHEATING SCANDAL - MEMO LINK BELOW) Valerie Strauss reported today that John Merrow reported that Michelle Rhee did see the January 30, 2009 memo about cheating in Washington, District of Columbia (D.C.) schools. Of course, she was well into her tenure as schools chancellor there, as her term of service began in June 2007 and ended October, 2010. So she could not pass this off as a development that began prior to her watch.

Just to be clear, because some have wondered, Rhee did see the memo, according to Merrow. He wrote in a post ["Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error"] on his blog, Taking Note:

I have a copy of the memo and have confirmed its authenticity with two highly placed and reputable sources. The anonymous source is in DCPS; the other is DC Inspector General Charles Willoughby. A reliable source has confirmed that Rhee and Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson discussed the memo in staff gatherings. Sanford came to Washington to present his findings in late January, 2009, after which he wrote his memo.

Rhee, however, did not push for a thorough investigation and instead, repeatedly, publicly minimized the extent of the cheating.

No, the memo doesn’t prove that cheating took place, but it does suggest there was more going on than investigators have so far uncovered. There have been several probes, but two — one by a private testing firm and the other by the D.C. Inspector General — were limited. Another, by the U.S. Education Department’s Inspector General, resulted in no action taken, though the extent of the investigation is unclear.

If the memo isn’t enough to spark a new investigation, this should be: My colleague Emma Brown reported in this new story that teachers in 18 D.C. classrooms cheated last year on high-stakes standardized tests during the chancellorship of Henderson, Rhee’s successor in the post, according to the results of an investigation released Friday by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

This confirmed cheating took place after security was tightened as a result of the earlier suspicions. All in all, a new probe — by investigators with real subpoena powers, which is how the Atlanta cheating scandal was uncovered — is clearly warranted.

Here is the bombshell 2009 memo, as reported at Merrow's Learning Matters website. At that time, the brewing scandal already had a name, euphemistic we might add: Erasure Study.

All of this reverses the long standing official story on the erasuregate scandal, that it was limited to 2011, that it was limited to one school. Yet, as this recent April 11, 2013 story by Greg Toppo at USA Today attests, the memo shows that the cheating was more widespread than previously understood.

District of Columbia Public Schools officials have long maintained that a 2011 test-cheating scandal that generated two government probes was limited to one elementary school. But a newly uncovered confidential memo warns as far back as January 2009 that educator cheating on 2008 standardized tests could have been widespread, with 191 teachers in 70 schools "implicated in possible testing infractions."

The 2009 memo was written by an outside analyst, Fay "Sandy" Sanford, who had been invited by then-chancellor Michelle Rhee to examine students' irregular math and reading score gains. It was sent to Rhee's top deputy for accountability.

The memo notes that nearly all of the teachers at one Washington elementary school had students whose test papers showed high numbers of wrong-to-right erasures and asks, "Could a separate person have been responsible?"

It recommends that DCPS contact its legal department "as soon as you think it advisable" and ask them to determine "what possible actions can be taken against identified offenders."

DCPS officials have said they take all cheating allegations seriously, but it's not immediately clear how they responded to Sanford's warnings. Only one educator lost his job because of cheating, according to DCPS. Meanwhile, Rhee fired more than 600 teachers for low test scores — 241 of them in one day in 2010.

The cheating issue first came to light in 2011, after USA TODAY reported that, between 2008 and 2010, 103 schools had test-erasure rates that surpassed districtwide erasure-rate averages at least once.

So, with those mass firings Rhee did, we wonder, was the wrong person (Michelle Rhee) not fired?
* * *
Another matter that arises is in Merrow's account how Rhee catapulted to the top of education supervision with flimsy credentials. She was aided by elite school pedigrees, a B.A. at Cornell University and a Masters in public policy from the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She then went on to teach her three year minimum in the elite Teach for America program in Baltimore. She never served as a principal or as another other sort of education administrator. She had no training or certification in educational supervision. Instead, she coasted along her stint supervising 120 teachers in the New Teacher Project (TNTP). She got the D.C. Chancellor position upon no standard credentials, instead by the recommendation of New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. She billed herself as a student performance wonder in her bid as chancellor, yet her actual personnel file that would document her claims of supposed spectacular student performance were unavailable. (See the June 30, 2007 Washington Post article, "Council to Challenge Rhee's Résumé.") When someone did uncover her files, they indicated that her students' scores increase during the 2nd and 3rd years, but the gains were less than half what Rhee had claimed. (See February 8, 2011 Washington Post article, "Michelle Rhee's early test scores challenged.")

Furthermore, she practiced some cronyism. She hired her best friend, and that was just the start. Merrow wrote:

She surrounded herself with people with no experience running a large urban school system. Her deputy would be her best friend, Kaya Henderson, another former Teach for America corps member who was then Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at TNTP. She would be managing the District’s 11,500 employees.

Her Chief of Data and Accountability would be Erin McGoldrick, whom Rhee had met at Sacramento High School some years earlier and who was an avowed fan of Rhee. A classics major at Notre Dame, McGoldrick also studied public policy at UCLA. Although she was in charge of data analysis at the California Charter Schools Association when Rhee offered her the job, McGoldrick had no experience in Rhee’s ‘data-driven decision making,’ according to several reliable sources.

Rhee selected Jason Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year and a veteran of seven years in the classroom, to lead what she called her ‘Human Capital Design Team.’ Kamras’ assignments were to design a teacher evaluation system and create a model union contract.

That no one in her inner circle had any experience managing an urban school system did not seem to concern Rhee.