Rhee’s erasure guy quits.
Claiming he was looking “forward to the opportunity to pursue new options and old interests,” former DC schools boss Michelle Rhee’s Instructional Superintendent quit his job.
Wayne Ryan gained national fame for being the fall-guy for Rhee. Sudden increases in test scores, that Rhee claimed were the result of her amazing leadership, turned out to be the result of Ryans amazing ability to change the answers on the test scantron sheets.
Bill Turque in the Washington Post:
Ryan became a literal poster boy for D.C. school reform under former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee after DC CAS scores spiked dramatically at Noyes from 2007 to 2009. The District ran principal recruitment ads with his picture asking “Are you the next Wayne Ryan?” Rhee promoted Ryan in 2010 to instructional superintendent, where he supervised a group of principals.
But a USA Today investigation published in March found an extraordinarily high rate of erasures on answer sheets in which wrong answers were changed to correct answers. The newspaper reported that on the 2009 DC CAS reading test, seventh-graders in one classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets. The citywide average that year was less than one.
Good things happen to good people. And vice versa.
When routinely lower performing schools suddenly spike like that, we usually know that something is in play. What we also want to measure is student progress, whiich BTW, “reformers” take note, has nothing to do with teacher tenure or seniority.
you mean DEFORMERS! despite the use of quotation marks, it continues to irk me that they’ve hi-jacked the word ‘reform’ when their policies are anything but!
“When routinely lower performing schools suddenly spike like that, we usually know that something is in play.”
Yes, indeed. “We” figure cheating is involved, whereas “they” presume a miracle.
Even we acknowledge that only a miracle could produce such scores, but we don’t believe in miracles.
Neither do they, really, but they believe in the likelihood of other people believing in miracles, so try to hoodwink them.
Not nice and completely unhelpful to children, who always come first.