Making Sense of What's What


Welcome to Making Sense of What's What!!!


This blog is devoted to addressing those issues which impact our daily lives. Political, educational, relational and transitional issues are all grist for the mill. Life is personal and my need is to personally share with you those things and issues that impact me and others of us as we move through our daily experiences.

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Saturday, April 30, 2011

Another View of Michelle Rhee's Impact on Public Education

Michelle Rhee appears to have become the poster child for public education's new "top down," business oriented "restructuring" fad.  What does Rhee represent? To begin with she taught school for 3 years. She left the classroom and spent 10 years as a recruiter for teachers.  How does someone with her background qualify to be the leader of a 46,000 student school district in Washington D.C.?  In this regard, Rhee represents the prevailing corporate view that training and experience in education isn't necessary or important for someone to go into school administration or the classroom.

Rhee seems to operate from a mind set that she holds onto regardless of what scientific or educational experts might say. "Teachers are the reason why children are not learning in classrooms" and "the unions are responsible for keeping poor teachers on the payroll."  This is her opinion, her belief and her mantra.  It is also the kind of scapegoating that creates an atmosphere of negativity and polarization between herself and those with whom she works.

What is equally disturbing is that she doesn't seem to know what she doesn't know.  She has made several public statements that reveal her ignorance about children in particular and education in general.  To paraphrase her, she has said on national television that work related stress "is good for people to experience."  She went on to say that the idea that a child's background effects their school experience is "crap." And, finally, she has responded that "if the test evaluates the curriculum, what is wrong with teaching children how to take the tests?"

Her assertion that work related stress is good for people, begs the staggering amounts of scientific evidence that suggest just the opposite.  People who work under stress are less effective, less productive and less able to adapt to the situation in which they find themselves.  Not only that, negative job stress litterly destroys the body of those who live with it as a daily companion.

The notion that a child's background has no impact on their ability to learn in school is beyond comprehension.  This does not mean that because of a child's background, we make excuses for their lack of achievement and essentially write them off.  What is does mean is that we need to appreciate what a child brings with them to school from their world of family and neighborhood so that we can begin to understand  and meet  their needs.

Many of our inner city children who are surviving in poverty are the products of fractured and dysfunctional families. They are often living in a world filled with empty bellies, drugs, violence, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Many of these (our) children have poor health care, are never read to, hear a language other than what they hear in the classroom and are two years behind their more affluent counterparts by the they are ready to begin kindergarten.

Often these children sit on the floor at night so that the bullets that go through wall won't hit them.  Many of these youngsters attend school suffering from post traumatic stress like symptoms.  These same children come to school where, many times,  teachers with no training are suppose to teach them how to understand "classroom English," how to learn to read and how to go from "getting in your face" surviving on the streets to learning a whole new way of talking through conflicts and arriving at a verbal resolution to differences within the classroom.

Rhee's assertion that such a background has little or no impact on a child's learning at school indicates that she has become part of an educational movement that is genuinely ignorant  about what is necessary for real learning and real educational reform to take place.

And then, she asserts that "if the test evaluates the curriculum, what is wrong with teaching children how to take the tests?"  The problem with this rationalization is that tests define what can be evaluated and, thus, what can be taught. Today's "high stakes testing" fad is focused on training kids to take multiple choice tests on "skill sets" in reading and math.

In order for the child to be prepared to take a specific test, other areas of study are deemphasized.  What this means is that, rather than the focus being on a child receiving a well rounded and comprehensive education, they are being telescoped into a narrow area of curriculum and evaluated on their ability to learn how to pass a tested on those specific skill sets.

Rhee's approach to children's learning fails to appreciate that not all children are developmentally ready for learning basic skills at the same time, learn in the same way, or show what they have learned by using only one means for measuring learning success.

In addition, what is alarming about this process is the lack of transferability of what students are suppose to have learned, when given a test other than the one they have prepared to take.  This means that many children are only learning how to take a specific test and not learning the material that the test is suppose to be measuring.

Michelle Rhee also believes that it is not necessary to develop a community focused approach to working with teachers, support personnel and parents.  Her attitude has been that she only has to focus on gaining results and the results would validate her methods of achieving them.  The fire storm of push back against her methods were considered to be a source of annoyance and little more.

Top down, authoritarian management, of which she is a proponent, has never been successful in education. If we were to look at any successful K-12 educational program, the key to success is having people feel that they are an important and valued part of the creation of a problem solving process.  In successful school programs, we will find a community building focus in their approach to solving the problems and meeting the needs of those children whose lives have been intrusted into their care.

What Rhee failed to realize is that her agenda driven way of relating to those on whom she was ultimately dependant to achieve success was counter productive and a pathway to failure. When the Mayor of D.C. was voted out of office in 2010, her support system evaporated.  Her approach to restructuring schools alienated her from those with whom she worked and the parent community within the D.C. School system. And at what cost?  How many lives were treated as merely collateral damage in her quest to achieve her goals?

In the wake of her 31/2 year reign, what was gained?  Did her children benefit from her agenda?  Was the degree of improvement worth all of the turmoil that was characteristic of her style of top down leadership?  What might of happened if, instead of scapegoating teachers, she had worked with and supported professional and support staff in meeting the needs  of D.C. students?  She did not appear to have the awareness, experience or interpersonal skills to do other than what she did. And who suffered from these limitations?  In time, the children who endured the experience will let us know.

Thanks for stopping by.

Namaste,

Jim Farwell