For those of you who believe that Michelle Rhee’s resignation today will hurt the achievement gains experienced by the DC school system; take a look at these charts (click to enlarge), with DC NAEP scores from 2003-2009.
It appears that DC schools were improving in terms of test scores at about the same rate pre-Rhee (before 2007) than after she got there, in every subject except 8th grade reading, where the improvement was greater before. (The source for these charts is the Rutgers report released today on mayoral control ).
Of course how much of this is due to her or her predecessors' educational reforms and how much to other factors (eg gentrification) is hard to discern. And many of Rhee's policies, such as IMPACT, the new teacher evaluation system, really won’t have show an effect until the next few years, if they are ever fully implemented.
Rhee-diculous. Yet she is a hero and every hard working teacher in America is the goat in every newspaper, every day. Wake up people.
ReplyDeleteNot that NAEP is an appropriate indicator of a the quality of a school chief. For more indicators, see Guy Brandenburg's blog: http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/
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