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Stories tagged with “Michelle Rhee”

LGBT

‘StudentsFirst’ Campaigns Against Bullying While Giving $70,000 To Anti-Gay MI GOP Legislator

By Zaid Jilani on Oct 30, 2011 at 11:12 am

The self-described “education reform” group StudentsFirst, headed up by former Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, has recently forayed into pro-LGBT and anti-bullying activism. It filmed its own “It Gets Better” video and also opened up its blog for anti-bullying activism. The four most recent blog entries on its site are all about these issues:

StudentsFirst’s pro-LGBT activism is both welcome and needed. The bullying of LGBT youth is a national shame and it will take as diverse a movement as possible to battle it. However, as Daily Kos’s Laura Clawson and AMERICABlog’s John Aravosis point out, Rhee’s group is spending $70,000 to defend GOP Michigan Rep. Paul Scott against a potential recall election, and Scott is rabidly anti-gay. Scott even campaigned on making it a “priority” to stop transgender individuals from changing their sex on their driver’s license:

While running for State Representative, Scott criticized his opponent for accepting donations from gay rights groups. He called those groups “far left and radical homosexual groups.” While running for Secretary of State, the Republican was criticized for gay baiting by the Log Cabin Republicans. He emailed supporters listing his top four priorities which included: “I will make it a priority to ensure transgender individuals will not be allowed to change the sex on their driver’s license in any circumstance.”

Yes, that should help get the economy back on its feet. During the same Secretary of State race, according to Log Cabin, “Scott touted the support of Former Bush 2004 Michigan Social Conservative Outreach Chair, Bill Voorheis, who hunts people down at conventions and other GOP functions to confront them about their supposed homosexuality.”

It is outrageous that StudentsFirst would, on the one hand, engage in positive LGBT rights activism, and on the other hand, sink tens of thousands of dollars into a legislator who openly derides LGBT people and uses anti-LGBT rhetoric as a political weapon.

Update

One of the authors of one of the StudentsFirst blog posts, Scott Conwell, distances himself from the group’s agenda in our comments thread: “A quick comment from one of the blogs authors. If you look at my article and see the comments you will see that I am not a Rhee or studentsfirst.org supporter. I was simply taking the opportunity to get a Progressive message inside a jilted organization. Please do not see my post as an endorsement of Rhee. The fact that this has been picked up by Think Progress is viewed as a victory by me! Now maybe we can see just how Rhee and her organization speak out of both sides of their mouth! In addition, as a Michigan resident I IN NO WAY endorse Rep. Paul Scott.”

Education

‘StudentsFirst’ Spending $70,000 To Support MI GOP Rep. Who Backed Huge Education Cuts

By Zaid Jilani on Oct 28, 2011 at 9:00 pm

Is StudentsFirst really living up to its name by supporting a right-wing Republican?

Earlier this week, Michigan’s Flint Journal reported that Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst has been supporting Michigan GOP Rep. Paul Scott against a potential recall election. Altogether, StudentsFirst has spent and owed $70,000 of political spending on behalf of Scott.

This came as a shock to many, who viewed Rhee’s StudentsFirst as primarily a nonpartisan group dedicated to education reform. By spending tens of thousands of dollars defending Scott, StudentsFirst is drawing a decidedly political line. What’s more, Scott has been a vocal defender of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) economic and education policies, which have led to significant reductions in the state’s K-12 school aid.

Included among the budget that Snyder signed earlier this year was a whopping $300 million aid reduction to schools statewide. Additionally, there was a $100 million cut to aid to cities, which also serves to negatively impact schools.

It seems odd that an organization that says its goal is to “build a national movement to defend the interests of children in public education and pursue transformative reform, so that America has the best education system in the world” would spend so much money to defend a right-wing Republican who loyally helped his right-wing Republican governor take an axe to the statewide school budet.

Yglesias

Controversial DC Education Reform Has Raised Teacher Salaries Substantially

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 19, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Via Dana Goldstein, a Democrats For Education Reform analysis (PDF) of the controversial IMPACT evaluation system in DC raises a couple of interesting issues about the real Michelle Rhee legacy.

For starters, as you can see the way the evaluation system (which combines in-person evaluations with test scores) works the number of people who get a negative evaluation is the same as the number of people getting a positive evaluation. There’s a lot of fairly sensationalized talk about firing “bad” teachers, but the actual system we’ve implement here in DC is equally about identifying which are the most effective teachers. And concurrently with that, the net upshot of the change has been to increase teacher salaries:

— Last year, over 660 (out of a total of just over 4,000) Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) members were eligible for bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $25,000.
— 290 WTU members (7%) were eligible to have a base salary increase of up to $27,000 for being rated Highly Effective two years in a row.
— The maximum teacher salary under IMPACT is $131,540, compared with $87,584 under the previous contract.
— 65 WTU members (2%) were rated Ineffective and were terminated.
— 141 WTU members (4%) were rated Minimally Effective for two years in a row, and were terminated.

In other words, an approximately even number of people are getting IMPACT raises as are getting impact terminations. Another larger set of people are getting one-off IMPACT bonuses. And the compensation ceiling is going up.

The national political legacy of this is quite clear. The American Federation of Teachers decided that it had nothing better to do in the 2010 election cycle than spend $1 million on a primary challenge to Adrian Fenty who lost. New mayor Vince Gray got rid of Chancellor Rhee, and replaced her with Rhee’s deputy while keeping the evaluation system AFT objected to in place. At the same time, a bumper crop of new Republican governors and state legislators were elected who’ve gone about enacting various kinds of education cuts. Rhee has frequently been collaborating with these new governors on their education agenda, and both Rhee and Fenty seem pretty bitter about getting fired and are making various kinds of anti-union statements. In turn, union folks are constantly pointing to Rhee’s post-DC career as evidence that education reform has “really” been all about union busting and budget cuts from day one.

This is all unfortunate in my view, but it has relatively little to do with what actually happened in DC. Here, DCPS teachers are still represented by the Washington Teachers Union and have all their collective bargain rights intact. What’s more, they’re earning more money than ever. The city implemented a fairly basic compensation swap, in which teachers gave up some job security in exchange for higher pay. This got dragged into a larger national ruckus for various reasons, but in concrete city-level terms this plan to give teachers more money doesn’t bear a close resemblance to the vicious, teacher-hating reforms I frequently read about.

Alyssa

‘Bad Teacher’ Takes A Balanced Look At Education Reform — And Reaffirms Old Movie Myths

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 27, 2011 at 6:34 pm

Cameron Diaz applies unorthodox methods in 'Bad Teacher.'

As with Midnight in Paris (this was not a good moviegoing weekend for me), I really wanted to like Bad Teacher, if only because I agree with my friend and editor Eleanor Barkhorn that the movie’s a refreshing diversion from the idea that a saintly single educator changes everything. The movie’s jokes about substitute teacher Scott (Justin Timberlake) dry-humping Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) on a school field trip, or Elizabeth giving a seventh-grader her bra to help him win back some cool points, aren’t as shocking as writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg might have imagined they were. And the movie has a big, gooey candy center: despite smoking a lot of pot, dreaming of breast implants, giving another teacher hideous facial poison ivy, and stealing state test results, Elizabeth ends up dating the obvious nice guy in her orbit and finding her niche in giving kids advice on how to acclimate (if not more of her bras).

That said, the middle section of the movie provides a surprisingly balanced look at the question of what role performance pay and testing should play in education — along with the movie’s most successful sustained dramatic and comedic tension. When Elizabeth, who has previously gotten by showing her class Stand and Deliver and sleeping through lessons, learns that if her students get the highest scores on an Illinois State performance test, she gets a $5,700 bonus that would allow her to afford her dreamed-of breast implants, she engages as a teacher for the first time (one thing the movie does nicely is keep salaries realistic, and makes clear that $5,700 would be a game-changer for Elizabeth). Her teaching methods, including abusing her class with dodgeballs and writing the world’s meanest test comments, are unorthodox, but her students do appear to learn something. The problem is, performance pay is too much of an incentive. Worried they aren’t learning fast enough, Elizabeth dons a Little Orphan Annie wig from the school play, tells a state Education Department official she’s a reporter writing about racial biases in testing for the Chicago Tribune (“Orientals test better,” he tells her.), drugs him, and snaffles the test. Her kids ace the test, and after many hijinks, Elizabeth’s rival for the bonus check and Scott’s affections is effectively deported to a hard-case school, where her cheerful approach to teaching will presumably get her absolutely annihilated.

That realism about the uses and dangers of incentives is refreshing — performance pay is neither a panacea nor a means of destroying teachers’ pay and benefits. At one point, the school principal frets over what the teachers’ union would do to him if he demanded that Elizabeth be drug-tested with what he thinks is insufficient evidence — of course, she would be totally busted — but the union isn’t there as a malign force, either, forcing a good principal to do bad things. He’s just cowed by it, to the point of avoiding conflict that might have been worth the risk. And while the movie is clear that Elizabeth shouldn’t be teaching anyone — and by the end of the movie, she’s not — Bad Teacher does suggest that she’s good at something test scores don’t measure: helping kids acclimate to their surroundings. In this sense, the movie is kin to School of Rock, a generally warmer if less pointed movie, in arguing that obsessions with achievement, whether they come from education bureaucracies or parents, are missing the point. It’s kids’ social lives and individual growth that matter. Which means that even if one teacher isn’t the key to that growth, Bad Teacher still shares a general educational philosophy with Dangerous Minds and all the good teacher movies that have gone before it.

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