Michelle Rhee and the DC Schools

I am a big proponent of Waldorf education, which de-emphasizes reading and emphasizes creativity, so I think I would be one of the parents against her if my children were in the DC school system. My daughters didn't learn to read until the 5th, 4th, and (probably, tbd) 2nd grades. Waldorf graduates end up in ivy league schools in way higher percentages than public students do.

The real way forward for this is to implement school vouchers. Parents are the best judges of teacher quality, not standardized tests (or tests at all, really, which just measure the ability to memorize). Written reports are much better evaluators of student progress.

If parents have the ability to vote with their feet, the quality issue will sort itself out. Now, you would have to have a voucher system that really worked for everybody, so that a welfare mother could send her kids to a private school with no out of pocket money spent, though.

I'm no authority in these matters, but I question the idea that "parents are the best judge of teacher quality."

I'm going to have to assume that America is full to the brim with parents that could no more discern quality teaching than they could fly. I also pretty sure that there are a goodly number of parents that are actually hostile to quality teaching, in that it results in their children being exposed to ideas and methodologies that conflict with whatever benighted world view is prevalent in the household.

Now, if you by "judge of quality" you mean "should be able to dictate the the particulars and pedagogical strategies of their children's education", that's another argument entirely.

By best I mean better than a remote bureaucrat looking at a set of test scores, and firing people based on statistics. Most people are intelligent enough (and care about their kids enough) to do a better job than that - it wouldn't take much to do better than that.

Well - in the current private school population, it is true (at least in the Waldorf schools it is, which is where most of my private school parent experience lies). But I suppose that is just because they are rich and well educated. Are you saying that the poor need to be protected from themselves?

I don't think "American parents with school age children" are well characterized by "wealthy patrons of private schools and poor people."

Quite a few middle class people patronize private schools. I'll admit that my world view is probably not very universal - everyone I know either sends their kids to Waldorf school or wishes that they could, hence the two groups.

As much as we love the touchy-feely stuff it is numbers that eventually help us move to where we need to go. It can be budgeting with money, it can be dieting with personal fitness. Almost everyone needs more than their gut and perceptions to make a result happen.

The real issue isn't can we achieve excellence because we know we can. The deeper issues are are we willing to engage in a little cultural imperialism to make it happen and when we start engaging in that, from what moral high ground do we claim the right to undertake that conquest.

Malcolm Gladwell has a nice extract from his latest book in the Guardian and in it he talks about the 10,000 hour rule of mastery.


This is the most interesting section to me....


Our students are currently in school for enough hours to master whatever curriculum it is that we desire for them learn. However the issues are deeper. These folks that achieve mastery, they don't just put in the time, they put the time in very specific ways. When they have studied folks in sports or music as examples, they are ridiculously meticulous by the standards of a layperson.

So the variables are effective methods, effective people and will the student put in the time. I suspect one of the reasons her reform won't work is because even when she puts in effective people and effective methods, the students themselves cannot be forced to put in the time and the real problem as Gladwell suggests is that there is no shortcut, you have to put in the time.

As a teacher one of the most frustrating things for me is that I cannot change a student's effort level. Some will choose to change them but most of the time, it really doesn't matter how many assignments I grade because the effort level and grades they earn are terrifyingly consistent. I could grade 60 or 120 assignments and that 75% - C student only ever seems to stay at 75%. Within the variables I can control I have confronted this two-fold, one I make them put in more time via recess and lunch and two, I simply cover more material since 75% of more material is still a better result. In the areas I can't control, I would love to require mastery of something or teaching how to do something with focus and precision and the student must demonstrate the ability to do that.

So take someone like Rhee, she can change the culture of a school, but cannot change the culture of a neighborhood. Say the teacher does as I do, and assigns homework where the student is to read a self selected, high interest book at a appropriate reading level for 30+ minutes a night. Some kids just won't do it. Their parents will lie about it for them. They'll sign whatever log or lie in whatever fashion is necessary. This is especially true of sports or fun activities are on the line.

So what do we do? Send people into their homes to force a book into their hands while standing over them? How do we know they are really engaged in the book as opposed to merely holding it up and looking over it, etc.?

We can take this in all the other areas again, finance, fitness, you name it.

However as Newt used to say, great countries do not give out, they give in. We're a debtor country that is either obese or becoming more so and we require more and more resources to get something done due to unproductive attitudes and habits and this is especially true in education.

If your kids were in the DC school system a Waldorf style education would be the least of your worries.

I have seen several projects like it. I hope for the best with regard to it.

Waldorf is strongly biased toward liberal arts and humanities. As noted in an earlier thread, a waldorf kid is significantly more likely to be accepted to a liberal arts school like oberlin or hampshire than MIT (1995-2004 - oberlin: 82, Hampshire: 55, MIT: 2). It is only really suitable for a subset of students.

Here's more on Rhee

D.C. Schools Chief Scores Gains, Ruffles Feathers

Rhee-Forming D.C. Schools


Change Our Public Schools Need

I should point out that there are several fallacy's here (and this is not to suggest that I am a proponent of the Waldorf schools -- I don't believe that creativity can best technical training (it would require someone of immense intellect to recreate all of human knowledge to get to calculus, let alone the three centuries of math after Newton and Leibniz):

Those are self-selecting raw numbers, statistics on this size of a sample are meaningless even if they were percentages accepted.

Liberal arts schools may not engender the hard nosed respect like MIT, but schools that attract the same quality of students broach technical subjects at the same level of knowledge. To use MIT versus Liberal Arts as a reporter in this context is to implicitly state that one is more technically difficult than the other. That is false. So stop doing it.


--

Waldorf makes the mistake, as does Montesori and traditional education systems, that it is the system that matters. It isn't. Regardless of the student, the parents, the teachers, the school, the quality of the building, the availability of resources, if you can get that student's attention and excite them to learn they will learn. Considering the barriers to getting at the student fails your approach from the get go. The student is a living breathing entity, you can no more force the student to learn than you can to breathe. So engage them about their education early -- kindergarteners shouldn't be rote memorizing the periodic table (in fact, no one should, but that is another discussion) -- they should be being taught that it is ok to ask questions and pursue resources they want to learn about the world...

[/end hippy liberal hardeeharhar rant]

Sorry, but I fail to see the "several fallacy's" you claim are contained in my three sentence post. What I do see in your post, however, is a series of arguments against strawmen.

I don't disagree with you, but I find it laughable that you would use raw counts of people going to various colleges from the Waldorf as a defense of any argument whatsoever about its efficacy. It is simply funny.

What's lost in the Waldorf vs everything else debate is that if only every parent were vested enough in their child's education to even know what a Waldorf style education is then we'd have a lot better education for kids than we do now.

It's interesting that no one has mentioned that Obama opted out (using his vast wealth) of the DC school system. He's against vouchers for DC schools because he's concerned about the kids "left behind" but not concerned enough to put his family where his mouth is. School choice for me but not for thee.

Ack Waldorf...anthroposophy peudo-science. Your kids didn't learn to read until the 4/5th grades? What did they do? Spend all their time looking for gnomes?

Waldorf kids ends up in ivy league schools in higher precentages than public school kids? I would guess that most private schools, even Waldorf ones, have higher percentages college bound grads given that they are self-selecting from families that can afford private education and value education enough to pay for it. But I dunno that the Waldorf oddities are the reason for success.

never mind....

Very interesting.

My take is this: Good for her. We'll have to see if it works. Certainly the D.C. school system needs radical change. I suppose the issues I have are these...

1. Is it really possible to judge teacher performance by his/her class test scores? Perhaps if we look at year-to-year over say, a 10 year period...yes. But a few years is simply not enough. The biggest variable is the makeup of the students in the class. I see this even in my suburban (and wealthy) district. Some classes are just "low." There is no way around that fact.

2. How far does this "anti-creativity" vein go? Does this extend to the fine arts? If so, I obviously see a serious problem.

3. Why is it necessary for her to be impersonable? You can make tough decisions (canning teachers and principals) without being like she is described in the article.

4. I don't like this comment:


--What about making the classroom inviting to learners? Decoration can also be educational.
--Morning meetings or what not can build rapport. A lot of activities in my room are done for that reason.
--Why assume the above are done in place of "real work?"

I'm not opposed to merit pay...but it depends on how the teacher is evaluated. I don't think it should just be test scores or even primarily test scores. It should be a total evaluation like in many other fields. Scores can be taken into consideration, but so should other factors.

This is about the lamest and weakest argument I think I've ever seen put forward in my entire life.

Anyone with enough wealth has options for many different types of educational opportunities. Most would inherently choose a private school of some type. D'oh!

Also, we're talking about children of the POTUS are we not? Where has Obama sent his children to school in the past? The inner city public schools of Chicago?

Why don't you list all the children of past POTUS that have gone to the DC public schools.

I'm waiting, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, ...

Carter's kid.

Also the pubic high school where Obama's kids went aint all that bad. I know people that sent their kids there.

Focus on Obama's argument for not supporting vouchers. It's because he's worried that the kids left behind will be worse off. Well why not make them better off by having his kids there too?

While his kids get the golden parachute the other kids in the DC schools get the shaft. What a great man he is standing by his convictions.

My ex taught in a baltimore school. OMG. The freaking elementary schools have metal detectors and guards.

"The data back up Rhee's obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level--and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up."

If Obama put his kids in a DC public school he'd be a fucking idiot because it would be a publicity stunt that hurt his children.

Carter was a fucking idiot. 'nuff said.

"Rhee says she does not expect all kids to move up the charts at the same rate; the important thing is to demand that most do move up."


If the engine doesn't turn over, does it really matter if seats still recline? How does one have a fine arts program if the kids can't read or do basic math?


/shrug

She would probably be more effective to be more personable. On the other hand, no one else is doing what she's doing. Which is breaking the teacher's union.

Teacher unions are the most useless things in america as far as I'm concerned because they don't protect good teachers (the Anne Arundel teachers union gave up the right to strike for a piddling raise and continued to work without a freaking contract for YEARS) and protect bad ones from being fired.

Leeches and incompetent.


Tests scores are an objective measure of performance. For $130,000 a year you fucking better turn out kids that can pass the basic assessments tests with flying colors. And if your school is underperforming like many DC schools you don't deserve the $65K a year for being a glorified baby sitter.

What other factors matter more than test scores anyway? Granted the desire to learn is more important than test scores but there's no objective way to measure that. So you can only measure the average improvement of a student from where they entered your class and when they left.

The DC union is being the complete useless leech all teacher unions are. Standing in the way of change and the opportunity for it's best members to excel and finally earn the money they deserve.

OK, you've named all of one child of a POTUS, please continue with additional POTUS children.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, ...

WTF?

Obama's children were born in 1998 and 2001 so I don't see them attending any high schools yet.

I named the one. Stop being silly.

Obama is a hypocrite that extends a privilege to his children that he denies to other children caught in DC schools because they can't afford to get out.

What's the real reason democrats oppose vouchers? U-N-I-O-N-S

They learned quite a bit without being able to read, and yes - they spent a lot of time looking for gnomes. I really like the way that they teach math, for example, in the early grades of a Waldorf school - it is all about rhythm and patterns.

I don't see any advantage to learning to read early, I don't think it helps you in the long run. I think that early reading (and memorisation of written material) kills any love of learning that the student may have.

The high schools students I have seen at the various Waldorf schools have a charisma and love of learning that you don't see in public high school students. Science education in Waldorf schools is done in a much better way than in public schools - the students do the experiments first and come up with their own theories before being taught the "official" theory, which is a big difference from learning the theory first (because you then fit the experimental data to what you were supposed to get).

etc, etc

I'd rather have a "hypocrite" with two brain cells to bang together than another Carter thanks.

But hey, I'm sure you'd call him on grandstanding AND being a hypocrite if he did send his kids to a DC public school in the ritzy white neighborhood like Carter did.

The one exception to the rule doesn't cut it. Period.

Obama isn't a hypocrite, it takes a really very warped mind to take the status quo and turn it on it's head.

Vouchers would never work on a wide scale covering all students for the simple reason that there will never be enough supply to meet the demand if everyone was given a voucher.

D'oh!

Do I really need to chase down recent total public school attendance versus total private school attendance numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau to prove my point?

You want to subsidize the private sector with public money?

Wow, how socialist of you.

Boy you are totally in the tank. Obama is doing the right thing because it would take a "warped mind" to do something different from Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush

Wait I need a few more

For those kids that get vouchers and get out of the catastrophe known as DC schools it works out great. Rather than extend that to more kids ... Obama opposes it because of "special interests". Of course unions aren't "special interests" (with a big fat wallet) they are "grass roots" organizations.


I need a few more


Change!

Reagan and Bush 41 didn't have any school aged children.

Why don't you tell us, since you're the one who used that term, not I or anyone else in this thread for that matter.

BTW, Bush 43 also didn't have children attending local schools of any form, as they were already in college at the time of his inauguration.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, ...

Kids have no problems with imagination so looking for gnomes is an overrated activity. About the only thing that Waldorf offers that I would like in my kid's school is the introduction foreign languages and music at an early age. Something we supplement with music classes and some attempts to teach another language.

Of course, many schools now teach spanish and have music programs. My school has added Spanish but it's only one day a week. No knitting though. I guess my kids will just have to suffer that loss.


Reading opens up a world of imagination and not "memorization of written material". Are you nuts? Reading is FUN and not a chore or rote memorization.


Beating public schools are not what I would consider a high standard to shoot for.

A few points here even though I generally agree with your sentiment. First a fine arts program has nothing to do with how well you read or write but actually could encourage much better reading, writing, etc. When teaaching these wonderful kids how to read, write and calculate, it helps if they have something with which they desire to read, write and calculate. There can also be huge benefits, specifically with music education. My boys had no problems learning to read for example but part of that is they had already been associating little scribbles of ink with sounds for years. It was called reading music. Tracking left to right, one to one, etc. all of that was something they already had mastered in one domain and thus it easily transferred to another.


Most don't have school age children and those that do have been Democrats. Carter, Clinton and Obama have kids while Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41 and 43 did not. We can go further back but in general all those old white men who were president were indeed old and most didn't have school age children at the time of being in office. Having kids is the exception and then he found the exception within that exception. What more do you want from the guy?


Now give Obama credit. He hasn't taken office yet and still has plenty of time to be worse than Carter.


See above


See above