Michelle Rhee Hearings Liveblog
Sorry to get started late here. You missed a lot of Harry Thomas Jr. grandstanding. Pity. Follow along on Channel 13.
10:50: Marion Barry wants more black people in the schools. Is outraged that none of the four top DCPS officials are black. "That doesn't mean that no African Americans can't teach black kids. But all four? Come on!"
10:53: Jim Graham: "Hope you have a comfortable seat, because this is going to be a very long day."
10:55: JG: Hey, Michelle---why do all these teachers your group brings in quit so fast?
10:58: Can't tell if Kwame Brown wants the most qualified people or the most qualified black people. Not sure he knows, either.
11:01: Bring on the witnesses! "Lengthy witness list" says Vince. Three minutes per witness. Oooh--and they get Marie Drissel right off the bat.
11:05: Spanish-speaker hearts MR. Further: "All educators must know that education is teaching." Yikes.
11:12: Nutty, rambling guy at mike. Three minutes I'll never get back. Just segued from Kepler and Galileo to how his son is serving in Iraq.
11:16: Ward 5 ANC Robert Brannum really hates the Post editorial board.
11:18: Drissel: "When I say D.C. schools are disgraceful, it is on a worldwide scale." Pro-Rhee. And clearly a pro when it comes to Council testimony: She's speaking at a near-Micro Machines pace.
11:24: Aw, thanks, Renee Muriel Bowser. You had to interrogate the woman who doesn't speak English...
11:26: Drissel: "I honestly don't think she'll put up with people who don't perform."
11:27: HTJr.: "I would like to thank the diversity of this panel..."
11:41: MR already getting things done at Wilson, says parent. Of course, everyone else thinks, it's Wilson.
11:47: OK, somebody needs to explain to Muriel that she doesn't need to ask every panelist a question.
11:55: Carol Schwartz notices that everyone who has met MR supports MR. David Catania points out that panelists hate the Fenty plan, love MR anyway. And then he goes into a weird Ross Perot-esque digression on profit-based HR management.
12:08: HTJr.: "It's not often that my colleague Mr. Catania understates situations..."
12:13: Marion Barry thinks Fenty/Rhee needs to apologize to Clifford Janey for being so mean!
12:18: Joel Klein in tha house!!! Says MR "has all the right stuff."
12:31: It's the celebrity educational administrator panel: Former Cleveland schools chief also steps up for Rhee.
12:38: Whoa---Kevin Johnson! KJ! Remember when Jordan schooled you in the '93 Finals? Oh wait, you do---"The hardest thing I ever had to do was guard Michael Jordan...and that wasn't Michael Jordan of the Washington Wizards, that was Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls." Anyway, he's an education advocate now, and he likes MR, too.
12:47: Klein says Rhee's "gotta deal with the Be-team---they're gonna be there when you come and they'll be there when you leave." Vince prefers the term "we-bes" to "be-team."
1:10: Catania again refuses to understate the situation: "This represents the last best effort to salvage what we have left of traditional public education."
1:17: Tommy Wells asks former basketball star: "How do we get young men to care about academics?" KJ sez: More role models, and not Charles Barkley.
1:23: Chainsaw Joel! Says you gotta love firing people.
1:27: Harry Thomas Jr. becomes first councilmember to address KJ as "KJ."
1:36: Joel Klein mentions he hasn't studied the DCPS bureaucracy. "I can tell you: It's bloated," says Marion Barry, a man who knows from bloated government.
1:42: Klein says Rhee "has the magic sauce." Jim Graham is skeptical, dammit!
1:52: Was that Graham trying to extort an autographed basketball from KJ?
1:59: After meeting with Rhee, WTU chief "left with a sense of optimism." Just wait till collective bargaining season.
2:02: Ah, so WTU prez was good cop; VP is bad cop. "Pink elephant in the room": The process wasn't followed, no one asked the teachers union---waaaah! But he likes Rhee, too.
2:09: DCPS teacher bitch session! She didn't get reimbursed after she tore her clothes on a sharp desk! Principal parks in handicapped spot! Disgruntled bureaucrat refuses to process back pay!
2:14: Ahhh! So WTU members were consulted on the Rhee decision, just not the WTU members the WTU wanted. Whoops!
2:29: The teacher's union has gotten over Fenty steamrolling over "the process." Not Mendo though---commence indignant questioning!
2:36: Wait---Carol's pissed, too.
2:41: Catania cuts through the WTU's ass-kissing: Compliment her all you want---I know you're going to get into it with Rhee eventually...
2:44: Tommy Wells asks WTU prez how far he'd be willing to go in contract concessions: "We're willing to do what is right for teachers and children." In that order.
3:03: Damn! Vince is beaucoup pissed that the WTU is playing kissy-face with Fenty. Dammit, guys, Vince Gray needs allies, too!
3:14: Vocational education...blah, blah, blah.
3:18: More box talk! "Not only are we thinking out of the box, we're taking it further and stepping out of the box," says DCPS teacher.
3:21: Former Baltimore students of Rhee testify: She took us to Cleveland to meet our pen pals! one says.
3:41: Young, well-dressed, attractive white people---it's the New Teacher Project!!!
3:53: New Teacher Project woman can't stop grinning. Spooky.
4:07: Seriously, Yvette and Muriel---what's with the inquisition? I mean, can't you read a brochure about this New Teacher thing and move on?
4:25: Singing testimony! Singing testimony!
5:07: Sorry, folks. Actually had to do some real work there for an hour. Don't think I missed much. Lots of stuff about outcomes, accountability, shit like that.
5:18: Vince takes off the skeletor glasses, rubs his eyes. We know how you feel, big guy.
5:34: Hey, look, Michelle Rhee's finally in front of the dais.
5:36: "In short, there will no longer be faceless failure and unresponsiveness....Everyone will feel pressure to succeed."
5:39: OK, here we go. She's promising to rebuild special ed. "It won't be cheap."
5:41: "High-quality interim assessment program." In other words, she's going to keep stats. But we knew that already.
5:46: Vince wants to talk PROCESS, Michelle. Get ready to talk PROCESS.
5:47: I played hard to get! I told them no at first! Really!
5:51: Ah-ha! Fenty had her speak to two Post reporters on June 10---two days before the announcement.
5:54: "I am a change agent...you don't want me," she told Fenty. Fenty didn't care---ONIONS!!!
5:57: OK, Muriel broaches the Baltimore grades issue. MR says, "We actually did not have documentation at that time....The lessons here is that...we need to provide documentation to our teachers..." Oh, snap, that's some nice spinning.
6:10: Mendo: "I know the District can be a difficult place." Now allow me try to make it more difficult for you.
6:11: Mendo says turning off Janey's e-mail, locking him out was "tacky." Rhee says she tried calling him, once. Now she has a "better phone number" and hopes to get in touch.
6:16: A Mendo gotcha: She doesn't know how many principal vacancies there are, off the top of her head.
6:22: She's been here three weeks and still can't find out how many people work for DCPS.
6:32: "I have no plans to ask for additional funds---right now."
6:33: "Right now, I have no intentions of looking at" privatization. That's a lot of right-nows.
6:43: Chainsaw Michelle, not so much. " I'm not gonna say right now how many people need to stay or go..."
6:51: Rhee: "A vast majority of discipline problems" come from teachers who don't "engage" students.
7:01: Marion Barry reminds MR than black people hate Koreans. So what are you going to do about that? "I'm not trying to stereotype you at all."
7:02: Let the race-counting begin! Of Rhee's 10 hires: 3 black men, 3 black women, 1 Latino man, 2 white men, 2 white women. "Sounds great!" says Barry.
7:04: Vocab lessons from Jim Graham: "Apparently you reached such a nadir---that means bottom!..."
7:05: Pronunciation lesson for Jim Graham: It's NAY-dur (sometimes NAY-deer), not nuh-DEER.
7:21: Vince Gray demands to know what MR's 10 hires will be doing on their first day. Gonna take a stab here: Paperwork?
7:26: Uh oh, DCPS bureaucrat---if you fucked up summer school, MR's gonna be on your ass.
7:33: Muriel wants MR to look into changing some underenrolled schools to a K-8 format. MR agrees! Hurrah!
7:39: Yvette Alexander: "Ms. Rhee, how do you feel about plagiarism?" Guess what the next question is.
7:45: Rhee expects contract to be finalized over the next few days. Not fast enough for Mendo!
7:47: Mendo: "Did you find it strange to be meeting with the Washington Post editorial board two days before the announcement and not meeting with councilmembers?"
7:49: "How do we measure our progress?" asks Mendelson. Dude, you have so not been listening: That's the "high-quality interim assessment program"!
8:10: "Is there some 'wow' initiative that you'd like to roll out right away...so that you could control the headlines tomorrow?" Nice try, Tommy Wells. We appreciate it.
8:18: Holy shit. Mary Cheh got her cell phone number! 202-744-7727!!!1! Hold her accountable!
8:25: Gender equity: Not just for Kwame anymore. Harry Thomas Jr. asks about Title IX.
8:29: Barry: "Our athletic program is in the basement somewhere."
8:34: MR spent last night driving through Ward 8. Marion Barry is mad she didn't call.
8:37: The dais begins to empty. Barry has to go to "a Ward 8 meeting." At Player's?
8:46: Vince Gray says DCPS has 622 bus routes.
8:57: "I could be here for another few hours," says MR. Come on, Michelle---no one likes a suckup.
9:03: Breathe easy, 841 North Capitol---no one's getting fired just yet. You're probably safe for another couple weeks, deadweight bureaucrat.
9:06: Carol Schwartz' attention span is apparently less than three hours. I mean, gawd, Carol: She already told us how she feels about charter schools at like 6 p.m. Sheesh.
9:17: They're talking buses. This liveblog thing is getting a little old.
9:20: Gray goes on about how the Turkey Bowl used to draw 50,000 and was played in RFK. Take it from Tony Soprano, Vince: "Remember when" is the lowest form of interrogation.
9:24: LAST QUESTION! Something about having a strategic plan. We're already asleep, Vince, come on.
9:27: Carol points out that the only two members left besides Gray are her and Mendelson--both of whom voted against the takeover. I wouldn't take that as proof of your wisdom, guys.
9:29: Oh god. Lawrence Guyot, Cardell Shelton, and Robert Artisst still want to talk. (Wait, Artisst left...) I'm outta here.
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Linked From: July 3rd, 2007Washington City Paper: News & Features: Blogs
8:29 am[...] Savage Love « Michelle Rhee Hearings Liveblog [...]
11:58 am
uh, it's muriel bowser -- not renee
12:29 pm
Doh! Fixed, thanks.
12:48 pm
I don't know what the big deal is! After all, Michelle has a very small shoes to fill in Janey's. Anybody can do this. What is Barry talking about is totally beyond me. Why is this gu NOT in jail?
At any rate, D.C. needs Michelle more than Michelle needs them.
I hopr sshe and Allen, with mayor's help, set new standards for D.C.
After all, this is our nation's capital. I just hope that D.C. people do what is best for their kids and their future. Additionally, people like Barry or other blacks who want status quo must resign. I think I know why Fenty did NOT bother to consult them.
1:45 pm
Rhee will prove in time to be no better in improving student performance, test scores and a few years down the road, we will look for another false prophet.
7:03 pm
Yes Debonis, CLEVE-land (Graham pronunciation), reached a Nad-IR, not nadir or Ralph Nader, when the Cuyahoga River went on fire.
Great blogging....keep it up.
9:30 pm
Hey Former LL. Fuck the correct pronounciation; Let's get on point here.
That is:
Whether it is the DC Public Schools or other school districts, two things they all have in common are: 1. Each school district has been given more than enough money to fulfill its needs for keeping buildings up to par, teacher and other salaries and more; and 2. Schools have been crumbling and teachers leaving.
So if our school districts have had the past twenty (20) years all they needed to run effectively and in state of the arts facilities, then what is going wrong?
The answer is quiet simple; namely, gross misappropriations with most of it being in the form of exorbitant salaries to school chancellors, school administrators, awarding contracts for building and supplies to gougers, an over-hiring of support staffing, buying things not needed and failing to downsize when schools are only have the size they use to be.
So far, Mayor Fenty is following in the same foots steps of those who have destroyed our schools if you look at what he is agreeing to pay, who he is paying it to, what is on his table to do and it is all a new formula for failure.
Sadly, we have to question the intelligence of the members of the DC City Council who seems to rubber stamp all that Fenty does, and this is clearly the result that each of them is extremely ignorant of what is needed to be done and thus they are allowing themselves to cover up for their sheer ignorance by trusting in a man (Fenty) who was a very poor student himself and barely passed the bar examine to tell them what is best along with a ho hum former school board member (Victor Reinoso) who was a part of the problem, and an absentee former leader of D.DOT (Dan Tangherlini) who deceived taxpayers by being away most of the time in Pennsylvania attending college to get his MBA and used the modern invention called the cell phone to make most think he was at work but busy on the Hill.
Paraphrasing Gary Imhoff of DC Watch, we’ve been here before and I think when 2010 rolls around we will be no better off.
9:33 pm
I want to be the next LOOSE LIPS!!!
I shove bottles of Jalapenos up the asses of our leaders until they spill their guts with the truth.
9:37 pm
Being both a DC Teaching Fellow (having worked 8 years in investment banking) and a 3 year veteran ESL teacher, I have a unique insight into the challenges and issue facing DC Public Schools. And, I wanted to comment on the Washington Post’s, City Paper, and related media’s coverage of the educational reform issue.
Most of the analysis I've read is incredibly shallow, especially when reporters cite statistical measures used to compare apples with oranges; akin to cherry picking style cross-sectional analysis. No reporter actually does longitudinal analysis, with multi-year moving averages, where a student cohort's progress was tracked to determine the quality of an educational program.
Second, the conditions I work in every day would make most people get up a cry and leave the profession, which many DC Teaching Fellows do every day. We don't need a new educational chancellor, we need a top flight construction company to rebuild the physical and technological infrastructure that we work in, which has widows, no air conditioning, no healthy food, and for a while no water supply building; not to mention I have roaches and rodent in my classroom. In what conditions do you work in fellow Washingtonian?
Third, the child to teacher ratio that you posted on the Washington Post web site is all wrong. The size of a teacher classroom is determined by how many students are in that given grade, for that given year. So, I've seen 35 students in a kindergarten and 32 students in first grade, while only 15 students may be in 3rd grade for example. It is this kind of nonsense that DCPS permits, as per the weighted student formula, which is creating a recipe for failure. So, the published ratios on the fancy Washington Post new enhanced java page data resource are virtually useless.
Fourth, the de facto segregation of this city is a major obstacle. All my students being ESL, grow up hearing non-standard English i.e., Ebonics which creates whole host of language problems that result in poor language performance on standardized test. You write how you speak! I cannot solve this problem short of taking the child out of the home environment in which they are being raised, unless Michelle Rhee and Fenty get their way.
Fifth, the solution to this problem is tantamount to parental outsourcing whereby the student spends more time in school than he or she does at home. This is fast becoming a reality, because our aftercare programs are going to serve dinner in the near future. Congratulations. the solution to poor student achievement is me becoming the full time parent and educator of 40 plus kids (not kidding about the number), making a fraction of the amount of money I made in the private sector. I am not a masochist, but I get treated like one every contract renegotiation and performance review.
By the way, Ms. Rhee's organization of which I came from as a DC Teaching Fellow coupled with NCLB have crippled the union and driven out a lot of teachers that can't pass Praxis 1 and 2. Do you have to take a test to prove you ability to write in a newspaper? I'm sure the answer is no. But, I did have to take a test to prove my competency, and I get paid half the amount a veteran teacher gets due to the seniority system.
These are the facts. Not opinion. I can go on and on. But no one will ever ask me how to fix problem because I am just a lowly ESL teacher not hardwired to the DCPS’s bureaucracy or Fenty’s blackberry universe of political animals that make it a calling to slam everyone else ideas, but their inner circle of sycophants and political animals trying to make a living AKA “feed on the carcass of DCPS”, after years of neglect just to get 4 year contract at $250,000; while plagiarizing everyone else’s idea and selling them to the electorate as their own.
I love the kids, but the majority of parents, the principals, the DCPS bureaucracy, and the media (Washington Post, The City Paper) can all learn to stop talking out of their ass and come inside an actual classroom, not at a brand new school, and see how they would survive on the frontline of a war to get kids to college.
1:08 am
Our new services: http://tinyurl.com/29ym53
4:00 pm
DC Teaching Fellow said it best. Bravo. Hope you'll be back for another season of fun.
9:59 am
Hi all,
As Michelle Rhee recently commented, education has the potential to be the true equalizer within our divided society.
On August 14th from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, Greater DC Cares will host a forum to discuss how various issues affect college access, early childhood education, adult and vocational education, and special education within the context of the District’s educational system.
Panelists include College Summit’s National Capital Region Director, Martha Ross of the Brookings Institution, and Pre-K for All DC's Advocacy Director, Jesse Bailey amongst others. To join us, contact Maya Graham at mgraham[at]greaterdccares[.]org or (202) 777-4445. Location: 1727 I St. NW.
9:51 pm
Please tell me how many of Rhee's friends have been hired. I just found out that Deonne Medley was hired for the transition team. She was a witness for the "resume" portion of Rhee's confirmation. Was that payment for her testimony or what???
4:57 am
Response From: Jane Doe
08/05/2007 2:59AM
I'm concerned with the amount of politicking going in regards to the appointment of Ms. Rhee. Her association with Mr. Kevin Johnson (CEO of St. Hope Public Schools_ and his aspirations of political social climbing has appalled the Sacramento Education Community to no end. With his little Soldiers running St. Hope Public Schools to excommunicating employees without notice, who challenge the "system", Ms. Rhee's ties to Kevin Johnson may harm her in months to come. From shredding "bad" test scores to luring unsuspecting high level Directors to Sacramento, Miss Rhee has much to overcome. In 2006-2007, Miss Rhee was the interim Operations Director of St. Hope Public Schools. She lured many successful Administrators from all over the U.S. to come to St. Hope in hopes to turn it around from the cesspool Mr. Kevin Johnson had created witin his own organization. But, alas, the St. Hope Song and Dance was just it, a song and dance. These hopeful Administrators were under the impression they had a say in the curriculum and the day to day operations of running a high school and an elementary school. They were sorely mistaken. St. Hope had an agenda and meant all along to exploit the services of these highly motivated Administrators who had much to offer. These Administrators saw on a daily basis bad data passing through the SIS, they saw how under developed the curriculum was, they saw money wasted on outside agencies coming in and giving their resources only to fight with accounting about getting paid for their year long services. These outsided agencies had to deal with un-credentialed new teachers who had nary a clue how to teach students, much less manage the classroom. Additionally, Ms. Rhee's hiring/firing practices lack ethics and morales and I pity the DC School system and all the teachers who will eventually face Ms. Rhee's chopping block and creative test scores. I digress. I actually pity the children who attend St. Hope Schools in Sacramento High School in year 0708. With a Miss Rhee appointee from New York at the helm in Sacramento, has surely put Miss Rhee and KJ in a tenuous spot. Students with no Math Classes scheduled to a staff that has been cut in half, I feel that the new lady running St. Hope has more than her hands full. Professionally, anyone in high level postions at St. Hope better hope they get the Charter renewed because where else are they going to go? Additionally, I'm waiting for the Sac Bee/SCUSD memorandum stating the allegations of one minor who was victimized by Mr. Kevin Johnson. I hope Sac Bee/SCUSD have enough balls to break the story at the Charter renewal because the public in Sacramento and the world deserve to know the truth.
Response From: Jane Doe
08/05/2007 3:06AM
Quick Note:
St. Hope Public Schools
Teachers/Staff
80% turnover rate from 0506-0607
95% turnover 0607-0708