WP spins for Michelle Rhee. Defends her DC schools time with study by her own group.

[madfloridian]

The Washington Post editorial links to the site that did the study, but fails to mention that Michelle Rhee was its founder and leader for ten years. She founded The New Teacher Project in 1997.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is an organization with a mission of ensuring that poor and minority students get equal access to effective teachers. It attempts to help urban school districts and states recruit and train new teachers, staff challenged schools, design evaluation systems, and retain teachers who have demonstrated the ability to raise student achievement. TNTP is a non-profit organization and was founded by Michelle Rhee in 1997.

Makes it hard for me to accept what they say as convincing.

Here is the editorial from the Washington Post.

REMEMBER THE predictions that former D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s overhaul of teacher evaluation and compensation would lead to damaging upheaval? That there would be an exodus of good teachers? Those claims — like much of the criticism of D.C. school reform — have been proven baseless: Three years of dramatic change in personnel policy has made the District a model for smart teacher retention.

A study released this week by the nonprofit New Teacher Project lauds the District for its record of retaining good teachers while shedding low performers. Most school districts, as the group has established in previous reports, retain their best and worst teachers at similar rates. It’s the result of a cookie-cutter approach to personnel that enshrines mediocrity, tolerates ineffectiveness and has terrible consequences for students.

If a paper runs an editorial praising a study vindicating Rhee, then they should reveal that the group was founded and run by her for 10 years.

My own opinion, for what it's worth. I think that aside from anything else she is doing, all the anti-teacher, anti-union activities in many states...including my own...she should NEVER be forgiven for this horrible ad which ran during the Olympics and ridiculed our country's public education.

It was created by her present group Students First, and they still proudly defend it.

View it at You Tube

Then take another moment to view their video defense of that insulting ad.

Rhee's Students First defends Olympic ad

Worse than the ad itself.

[formercia]

1. Union Busting and elimination of Tenure and Benefits

To Rhee, Teachers are a commodity, like pencils and paper. When Teachers cease to be useful, they are replaced with a fresh one.

[Enthusiast]

2. Rhee's Students First bears more than a passing resemblance

to other groups with similar destructive agendas like Freedom Works and the Heritage Foundation. This can't simply be a coincidence.

[No Elephants]

3. Reminds me of my mom, an incredible cook, when she would take her first

bite of a meal she had just made and served, then exclaim, "Mmmmm. Our food is tasty!"

I never knew whether she met the kind of cuisine in general or was referring to her very own cooking, using the royal plural.

In any event, it always made me chuckle inside.

Poignant personal memories aside, praising yourself is fine only if the source of the praise is totally obvious, as it was when my mom praised herself to no one in particular at the family dinner table. Otherwise, it is highly unethical.

But, when has Rhee shown a concern for ethics?

Then again, Rhee is Rhee and I can do nothing about her directly.

My concern is with federal, state and local governments, all of which are acting as though charter schools are the best things for kids since the Salk vaccine.