Is Michelle Rhee a Liar? She says she raised her students' scores when she was teaching but....

[Hannah Bell]

Is Michelle Rhee a liar, or is she honest? You decide.

You remember that Michelle Rhee said that when she taught for three years in Baltimore, after a bit of a rough spot during her first year, she brought her students from the very bottom to the very top, right? If that’s true, then it should be really easy to spot those scores, especially since there were exactly TWO third-grade classes at her Baltimore school during her final year, and she says that she team-taught with the other second-grade, later third-grade, teacher during those last two years...

Her official resume says “Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90% of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.“

Here are the graphs showing the CTBS reading scores in nine different schools (or clusters of schools) during the years Michelle Rhee claims to have worked her miracle. I included all of the seven Tesseract/EAI schools, including Harlem Park where Rhee taught, and I also included some of the regular public schools that were officially designated as comparison schools in the study that was supposed to figure out whether Edison was doing a good job or not.

I will NOT tell you which graph is Harlem Park. It’s your job to figure out which one it was...

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/i-have-a-puzzle-for-you-can-you-spot-the-baltimore-rhee-miracle-of-1993-1995/

[BanzaiBonnie]

1. Michelle Rhee was lauded

for her amazing accomplishments today on "The Talk."

I got a bad feeling. She was all smiles and grimaces. She was sharing about how children were getting crappy educations because of poor teachers.

[Hannah Bell]

2. and the answer is:

(2) If you believe Michelle Rhee’s boasts about how she achieved educational test gains, then, if you look at all of those graphs, there is NOT A SINGLE ONE of those schools that shows CTBS reading scores going from the 13th percentile in the 2nd grade in 1994 to over the 90th percentile in the third grade in 1995. And there is no school in the list that shows students going from the very bottom in 2nd grade from 1993 to the very top in 1994, either.

NOT ONE.

Which is not surprising to me. I would bet a large sum of money that nobody can document that sort of thing ever happening before. (Even though I would love to LOSE the bet!)

(3) Apparently, the only conclusion is that this part of Michelle Rhee’s official resume is purely fictional. At least concerning the CTBS reading scores.

Rhee’s school was school C, where reading scores went steadily down for Rhee’s first two years, and then went up a bit during the third year, but not even to the 50th percentile in reading.

http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/

[montanto]

3. She's not a liar!!!!

She lost some, true. She gained some, true. She brought her kids "almost to the top" (cough-cough-of-the-second-quartile-cough-cough), true.

See! Its all true.