Michelle Rhee: Arbitrary and Capricious

Michelle Rhee

Remember Michelle Rhee, the woman who ruled over DC schools and threatened to step down if Fenty was not re-elected and illegally campaigned for Fenty during his try for re-election?

The same Rhee who taped her students’ mouths shut because she just didn’t know what else to do with them when she did her three year stint as a Teach for America recruit?

The same Rhee who accomplished the wholesale firing of teachers in DC and implicated that many of them were under suspicion of sexual misconduct which later turned out to be false but painted a horrific picture of teachers in general? That Michelle Rhee?

Well, an arbitrator in DC determined her firings as “arbitrary and capricious”.

Per the article at wtop.com:

An arbitrator has ruled that former Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee improperly fired 75 new teachers in 2008 and is ordering them reinstated with two years of back pay. That would amount to a maximum of $7.5 million.

Arbitrator Charles Feigenbaum found that the school system never told the teachers why they were being fired and gave them no chance to explain or refute what their principals reported to school system officials.

A complete waste of time and money for students, parents and teachers in the DC area. She destabilized an entire community that didn’t need any more disruption and angst. The voters showed her and Fenty the door but not without paying a price for Rhee’s rule in DC.

Dora

Post Script:

This is also the same Rhee who lied on her resume and has repeated the lie all too often. See:

Michelle Rhee’s Miracle Teaching Turns Out to BE Another Enron Education Story

Parents Across America Unite: The Sleeping Giant of Education Awakens

Judy Rabin with Schools Matter did a nice post on the Parents Across America forum that Sue and I participated in last weekend. You can read it below.

It was a great weekend for me, meeting parents across the United States who are working hard to create a better educational environment for their children and standing up against the corporate takeover of our schools. Their stories were like many others who I have heard from over the last two years. Three parents decided to take back their schools by running and winning school board seats. Another parent is battling the takeover of public schools in New Orleans. She came back after Hurricane Katrina to find her son’s school had been turned into a charter school with an entirely different curriculum and a corporatist structure.

You can follow what we are doing on Facebook and on the Parents Across America website. I personally will be focusing on legislative action in Olympia and D.C. with other PAA members and invite other parents to join us in that effort.

All are invited to join. If you have additional questions regarding Parents Across America, you can e-mail me directly at seattle.education@gmail.com.

Dora

Ravitch Says The Sleeping Giant is Awakening

As Parents Across America Unite

by Judy Rabin, Schools Matter

Hailed as a “hero” by supporters who came to hear her give the keynote address, Diane Ravitch took the stage for almost an hour as she spoke to parents, teachers, and activists from across the country Monday night at PS/IS 89 in New York City. They came from Seattle, Florida, Rochester, New York City, New Jersey, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, for the kickoff of the nationwide organization Parents Across America (PAA) and a call to action to take back public education.

PAA is a grassroots effort and political campaign spearheaded by parent activists and local organizations joining forces nationally against corporate interests who have hijacked public education and against the politicians who have turned their backs on the voices of parents and professional educators. “Since the top-down forces that are imposing their will on our schools have become national in scope, we need to be as well,” according to the PAA website. 

Ravitch told the audience at this auspicious gathering, there is a perfect storm brewing in which those who have delegitimized public education are taking advantage of a bad economy and deep budget cuts to implement their own ideological agenda. She criticized President Obama’s Race to the Top by saying “education is not a race – education is not a competition. Good schools depend on collaboration, not on teachers competing for dollars. ” She said the punishments and remedies instituted under No Child Left Behind have escalated under the current administration and closing of schools destroys the social capital which consists of the relationships in the community essential for good, strong schools and a quality education.

The passion, excitement, determination and anger in the room were palpable as speaker after speaker got up to discuss how the current education reform is damaging their own communities, their schools and any chance of real learning opportunities for their children. They spoke of communities being torn apart in New York City and other urban areas where parents and teachers are pitted against each other. Members of the national board of PAA urged the audience to contact their local legislators and work to educate parents in their local communities by providing them with the tools and research-based evidence that illustrates why merit pay, charter schools and testing are failed policies that have not improved education or closed the achievement gap. In fact, with 20 percent of children living in poverty, Ravitch says poverty is the elephant in the room and it is an issue.

Up until now, parents have had very little say as the corporate reformers “move children around like checkers on a checkerboard” in their mindless pursuit of test scores, explained Ravitch. That’s why PAA hopes to galvanize parents and empower them to channel their frustration by working together with teachers and lobbying state legislatures and Congress to enact real, genuine education reform that will improve public schools, not close them. Some of the alternatives and ideas advocated by PAA include common sense solutions such as: high quality early childhood programs; parent education programs; reasonable limits on class size: medical clinics in schools: more professionalism in teaching: and more support and better working conditions for teachers; and acknowledging what every teacher and educator already knows — test scores have been and still are closely correlated with the socioeconomic status of a school’s population.

Ravitch ended on a note of optimism. “There is hope even though all the power and all the money is on one side, and on the other side there is no one standing up for teachers. Parents are the sleeping giants of this debate. If the sleeping giant awakens you can take back American education and the time to start is today.”