Michelle Rhee and TFA-style Education Reform

A good way to understand Teach For America and the standards based education reform movement is by reading this Time article on DC Superintendent and TFA Alum, Michelle Rhee.  Her approach to reform is summed up in a few key ideas:

• the quality of teachers is the most important factor for student success
  
• the quality of current teachers is low because unions make bad teachers unfireable and good teachers unrewardable
  
• students must be rigorously tested to make sure they are learning
  
• teachers must be rewarded and punished for their students' performance
  
• ed schools don't create good teachers; intelligent, competent people do
  

The article explains how Rhee has enacted her accountability based agenda:

In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood.

It also showcases some good research backing Rhee's approach:

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.

But the article also reveals Rhee making some very polarizing comments.  Teachers unions often complain that standards reform people disparage the profession.  Rhetoric like this characterizes the debate:

"The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job." [emphasis added]

This tone is problematic for standards based reform people and TFA.  I don't know in what other professional setting you can publicly and derisively mimic others in the workplace.  Many New York City teachers, including alternatively certified ones, already resent an implicit message they see in the program: that teaching is a 2 year volunteer stint before you start your real job, and that learning is poor because teachers are bad.  For a political platform premised on the deficient quality of existing teachers, its people don't exercise a lot of tact.

If you want to get a skewed but decent overview of the major education policy debate, this is a good read.