Those who like to take it easy late in the week and don’t pay as much attention to news in the edusphere might have missed a journalistic bomb thrown by LearningMatters’ John Merrow as he reassessed Michelle Rhee’s tenure as the head of the Washington D.C. school system.

What spurred Merrow to give Rhee a second look were recent indictments handed down in Atlanta to Superintendent Beverly A. Hall and 34 other district employees for planning, aiding and abetting the largest cheating scandal in recent memory.

Rhee’s term as Schools Chancellor in Washington D.C. has long been marred by rumors that she was aware – and failed to investigate – instances of system-wide cheating on standardized exams in 2009. To allay concerns about the cheating, Rhee commissioned an outside company to compile a report. The results of the investigation were long kept hidden, but earlier this year an unnamed whistle-blower mailed two copies to Merrow after he wrote a column wondering how he could get his hands on it.

What that memo contained was explosive.

Prior to the memo becoming public knowledge, Merrow asked Rhee about the cheating for his PBS Frontline series on her:

Rhee has publicly maintained that, if bureaucratic red tape hadn’t gotten in the way, she would have investigated the erasures. For example, in an interview conducted for PBS’ “Frontline” before I learned about the confidential memo, Rhee told me, “We kept saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this; we just need to have more information.’ And by the time the information was trickling in back and forth, we were about to take the next year’s test. And there was a new superintendent of education that came in at the time. And she said, ‘Okay, well, we’re about to take the next test anyway so let’s just make sure that the proper protocols are in place for next time.’”

The conclusions of the so-called Stanford memo which both the author and Rhee wanted to keep confidential was unambiguous: judging by the number of wrong-to-right erasures on the test answer sheets, it suggested that cheating on standardized tests in District schools was prevalent and widespread,.

As a single example, a school that was rewarded by more than $270,000 for their 29% improvement in math and 43% in reading showed the ratio of wrong-to-right erasures of 5.7 on average and 6.8 in mathematics. Districtwide, the number was 1.7 and 2.3 respectively.

Sanford, a Marine officer who carved out a post-retirement career in data analysis in California, spelled out the consequences of a cheating scandal. Schools whose rising scores showed they were making “adequate yearly progress” as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act could “wind up being compromised,” he warned. And what would happen to the hefty bonuses Rhee had already awarded to the principals and teachers at high-achieving schools with equally high erasure rates, Sanford asked? And, Stanford pondered, “What legal options would we have with teachers found guilty of infractions? Could they be fired? Would the teachers’ contract allow it?”

It isn’t hard to deduce why Rhee would close her eyes to the cheating scandal that was staring right at her. Not only was she generously remunerated for her accomplishments as Chancellor, after leaving her post she now heads a hugely influential lobbying group StudentsFirst that seeks to apply the same methods to other districts she pioneered in Washington. For a lot of people who count, Michelle Rhee is the face of school reform successfully implemented.

Rhee wasn’t the causus belli of cheating in Washington, but her policies likely set the stage. When she first took over as Chancellor, Rhee applied pressure – in person — to her principals by asking them to commit to specific improvement numbers. Thus the motivation was created, but the means and opportunity existed well before Rhee came on the scene.

According to teachers who were employed before, during and after Rhee’s tenure, the test administration process in the district was abysmal. The test booklets arrived well in advance of test time and weren’t sealed. It was also an open secret that favored teachers were given opportunities by the principals to get a look at the questions prior to the exam.

After-the-fact cheating–by erasing and changing answers–was even easier. “The tests would stay in the building for almost two weeks after they were given” so students who had missed a test could make it up. “They were in the building for a good month between arriving about a week ahead of time and finally getting shipped out. It would have been fairly easy for people to sit down and look through the booklets and change answers.”

The most important question Merrow asks is located at the end of the article: now what? Should the district expand resources to investigate cheating scandals that took place in 2008, 2009, and 2010? Undoing the damage done to students is going to be nearly impossible, and clawing back bonuses awarded on a lie will be more impossible still.

While erasure analysis would reveal the extent of cheating, what deserves careful scrutiny is the behavior of the leadership when it learned that a significant number of adults were probably cheating, because five years later, Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.

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When it comes to the array of exciting stuff developing in online higher education, it seems the United States is where it’s at. First, California legislators announced a plan to invite MOOC providers to offer courses for public university credit and now, George Washington University in Washington D.C. is launching a limited pilot of a new online MBA program — and its first 17 students come from as far away as Afghanistan and Singapore.

The online program isn’t exactly like the online courses people have gotten used to. It’s not entirely asynchronous, for one. All 17 students meet together online at the same time once a week for a “lecture,” but the majority of the work is done on their own schedules.

The videos used for instruction do retain some of that college-lecture flair though – they feature a professor lecturing a group of stand-ins.

The image mimics the more intimate feel that comes with sharing a classroom with a small cohort of students, said Doug Guthrie, the business school’s dean. Otherwise online education can feel isolating, particularly in massive courses with limited person-to-person interaction.

“I think of us as the anti-MOOCs movement,” Guthrie said. “We really believe that in some cases if you completely strip down a course and totally change the pedagogical approach …you can both build a better community and interaction between the teacher and the students.”

Online courses could be a particular boon for D.C. schools, since their ability to expand is severely restricted by the enrollment caps imposed by the D.C. Council. Georgetown, another area school is launching its own online experiment for the very same reason.

Next January, the school will kick off the inaugural class of its new online master’s degree in finance. Fifty students will get a chance to enroll in the new program. If it proves a success, the university anticipates launching two additional online master’s programs – in international business and policy – shortly thereafter.

George Mason University began an online version of its executive MBA program in January of last year to capture mid-to-top-level managers from around the region. With the exception of a two-week program in either Washington or overseas, instruction and student interaction take place entirely over the Internet. The online program, created with Colloquy — an online education company owned by The Washington Post Co., parent of Capital Business — provides flexibility for students who couldn’t attend classes that otherwise meet on weekends and provides George Mason with a new stream of tuition revenue, said Jean-Pierre Auffret, director of executive degree programs.

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The number of “dropout factories” – schools where fewer than 60% of students make it all the way from grade 9 to grade 12 – is on the rise in Washington DC, The Washington Examiner reports. The data from the 2013 edition of the “Building a Grad Nation” report released earlier this week shows that the District is one of the few localities where the number of such schools grew in the last ten years.

Nationwide, there has been a drop in the number of schools that fail to graduate their students on such massive scale, yet Washington D.C. is bucking this trend. In total, 13 District high schools graduated fewer than 61% of their students year-to-year compared to only 2 in 2002.

While the list of individual dropout factory schools for 2011 was not released, independent advocacy group Alliance for Excellent Education keeps data for schools as recent as 2010. That year, D.C. also had 13 dropout factories, five of which were charter schools and eight of which were traditional public schools.

Nearby Maryland was another area covered in the the report where the numbers weren’t encouraging. There were 17 dropout factories in the state in 2002. In 2011, the last year covered by the report, there were 22. Maryland and D.C. had the only school systems in the country where there were more dropout factories at the end than there were at the beginning of the time period covered by Grad Nation. Thirty eight states reported a drop in the number of such schools while in four states, the number remained level throughout.

The increase in low-performing schools may be partly due to an increase in schools in general, with more charters starting up in the District and some large Baltimore schools being split up into as many as four smaller ones, report co-author Joanna Fox said.

“There are a lot more high schools than there were,” Fox said. “There’s been a quite intense period of reform, which causes a little turbulence in the numbers.”

Fox added that another underlying culprit could be poor record-keeping by past DC Public Schools officials.

Although the statistics are discouraging, district officials have already put into place a plan that aims to reverse this trend and generally raise the rate of high school graduation across Washington. In accordance with the five-year plan, schools and the district will provide intervention programs to identify and assist those students who are most in danger of dropping out before getting a diploma.

In addition, those who need to make up credits to graduate on time will have access to summer programs and additional academic help throughout the regular school year.

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The Fairfax School District and Junior Achievement have teamed up for the last two years to find a solution for one of the nation’s greatest problems: young people who come into adulthood with no real idea how to manage money. The Washington Post’s Ovetta Wiggins reports that the program not only seems successful in teaching basic money management, but that it’s also very popular with local 8th graders in spite of the course’s academic rigor.

While most of the students come from middle schools in Fairfax County, 8th graders from nearby communities like Arlington in Virginia and Prince George’s in Maryland can also participate in the Alexandria-based program. It begins with a five-week curriculum taught in math and social studies classes in their home schools. Here they learn the basics of personal finance: saving and investing, interest and credit, and the difference between gross and net income.

Students are assigned fictitious profiles that tell whether they are married or single, provide a family size, and assign income. Classroom exercises are based on this information for each student.

But the really fun phase comes when they arrive at Junior Achievement’s Finance Park, where a building on the campus shared by Frost Middle School and Woodson High School has been turned into a miniature mall. Each store front is managed by a business partnering with Junior Achievement. Students spend one day as shoppers and consumers. They have to plan major purchases like cars, home mortgages, and insurance packages.

It’s clearly a program that interests real-world commercial interests. Capital One Bank funded the Finance Park building in Fairfax County, and it has committed $2.5 million to build a second educational mall in Landover, MD. The businesses that operate store fronts in the malls are local and national companies that gain name recognition with future consumers.

For the 8th graders, it’s like a giant board game. From the adults’ perspective, that’s not all bad.

“Yes, the game of life,” commented Edward J. Grenier III, president and chief executive officer of Junior Achievement of Greater Washington. If the students can retain what they’ve learned here, it could be revolutionary.

“We have a unique opportunity to change a culture,” said Lateefah Durant, an academic officer in Prince George’s County, during a recent presentation to the Board of Education. “As a county, as a state and as a nation we know the result of making poor financial decisions.”

Prince George’s, which has the highest number of foreclosed homes in the state of Maryland, looks forward to increasing their pupil participation with a new campus. School board member Perry Higgins expressed a hope that the effect would go beyond the 8th grade.

“What this does is not only help students, but our county,” Higgins said. “It shows the importance of . . . learning how to handle money.”

The new Junior Achievement campus is scheduled to open in 2014.

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Results of the investigation by the U.S. Department of Education of the cheating scandal in Washington. D.C. schools are in, and according to the Inspector General, there is no evidence to confirm that cheating was widespread in the school system. The findings, which were released earlier this week, serve as a vindication for former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose tenure was shadowed by accusations that most of the gains made in the district were due to misconduct during the administration of standardized exams.

The investigation was launched in response to allegations by Adell Cothorne, who used to head up the school at the epicenter of the scandal – Noyes Education Campus – that the district applied for and won several federal grants only because district officials submitted results from exams where cheating was suspected. The findings confirm that cheating went on at one of the schools whose results were submitted in grant applications, but that the problem went no further.

As chancellor from 2007 to 2010, Rhee placed an emphasis on student test scores, tying exam results to the pay and employment status of teachers and principals. The approach produced higher scores, but also became the focus of public controversy in 2011 after a USA Today investigation documented an unusually high number of wrong-to-right pencil erasures on standardized test papers going back to 2008. The testing company, CTB-McGraw/Hill, however, pointed out the erasures to then state superintendent Deborah Gist in 2008.

Critics are already speaking up about the report for its lack of breadth. Although a high number of erasures were reported in nearly half of the district’s schools – with the highest number showing up during Rhee’s first year in the job – only results from a single school were looked at. The Inspector General’s office also didn’t look at the data from Rhee’s first year in office at all.

Cothorne, who headed up Noyes during the 2010-2011 academic year, alerted her superiors to the possibility that cheating might be going on after finding a number of teachers in a room surrounded by exam booklets and answer sheets.

In her lawsuit, Cothorne outlines several other incidents of alleged cheating she said she observed while principal at Noyes. Each involved the DC BAS test, a practice test leading up to the year-end DC CAS test.

In one instance, Cothorne reported walking in on a teacher teaching materials that were going to be on the DC BAS exam while test booklets were in front of the students. In a separate incident, a Noyes teacher allegedly told her, “You know they cheat on their tests,” according to the complaint. When test security was later tightened at Noyes, according to Cothorne, scores fell by 25 percent.

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Although the Washington D.C. school district is holding on to its best-performing teachers at nearly twice the rate of its low-performers, as a recent report indicates, the turnover rates in the district continues to be high enough to cause alarm. The Washington Post reports that too many of the district’s best instructors are leaving every year — something that district officials need to fix if they are to continue improving the quality of education for D.C’s kids.

The report, titled Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools and authored by The New Teacher Project, surveyed nearly 25% of the district’s teachers and draws some conclusions about the reasons behind the high teacher attrition rates. Many of those interviewed said that they’ve considered leaving both the school and the city because of poor working conditions, underqualified school and district leadership and lack of a good working relationship between instructional staff and the administrators.

More alarming was the finding that many of the best teachers were open to remaining in their jobs — if an effort had been made to retain them. Yet no move in that direction was ever made by anyone in a position to do it. The lack of motivation to meet a teacher half way is expressed by the fact that as many as 2/3 of the D.C. principals don’t rank talent retention as a particularly important goal.

Former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee founded TNTP 15 years ago, and Chancellor Kaya Henderson served as vice president. The organization has a contract to provide teacher-recruitment services to D.C. public schools, but no money was spent on this research project. TNTP studied four other urban school systems this year and found little difference in the retention of high-performing and low-performing teachers, as judged by students’ progress on standardized tests.

Still, despite the high turnover, the Washington D.C. school district is unique in the fact that its approach to highly effective teachers is much different than the approach used to those who don’t perform quite as well. It’s 88% retention rate for instructors classified as “highly effective” is exemplary, as is the fact that year-to-year, the district retains only 45% of those rated ineffective or minimally effective.

Overall, more than one in five teachers left at the end of the 2010-11 school year, higher than four other urban school districts TNTP studied, and more than three times the turnover rate in suburban Montgomery County.

“We’re very proud of the fact that we’re differentially retaining our teachers,” said Jason Kamras, the school system’s chief of human capital. “That is not a small thing, and that has real benefits for kids. But we certainly acknowledge that we have room to grow.”

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Washington D.C. public schools saw a 5% increase in enrollment this fall, The Washington Post reports. The number of students currently attending either traditional or charter schools – 81,000 kids in all – is the highest it’s been in over a decade.

The enrollment figures released by the district late last week are considered preliminary as they are reported by the school to the central office and will be verified by an independent auditor before they are finalized. Although the numbers are expected to change slightly once the audit is complete, they are still a strong indicator that the enrollment declines experienced by the city over the last ten years are turning around.

Although all schools appeared to have gained students, charters account for most of the enrollment growth. According to Scott Pearson, the executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, these gains could either be an indication of parents transferring kids from private schools due to increase in school quality, or could be accounted for by parents who are making a choice to stay in the district rather than leaving for better schools elsewhere.

This is the fourth consecutive year of enrollment growth citywide. By far, most of the increase occurred in charter schools. Their enrollment jumped by 11 percent, to just over 35,000 students. D.C. charters, which are funded with taxpayer dollars but operated independently of the traditional school system, have expanded quickly in the past decade and now appear to comprise 43 percent of the total public school enrollment — two percentage points higher than last school year.

Although the self-reported numbers showed a slight uptick in enrollment for traditional public schools, there are some who believe that once the final estimates are in, they will be shown to have lost students compared to last year. On the whole, enrollment in traditional district schools has held steady over the past four years, but a look at more granular data paints a different picture.

While schools in higher-income neighborhoods are overcrowded, those teaching students in low-income and minority areas are operating partially empty. In light of that, district administrators are expected to announce a plan to close a number of schools considered to be chronically under-enrolled.

“We are actively working to improve our schools for all of our students,” spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said in a statement. “We are hopeful with the strategic work we are doing, more families will continue to choose DCPS.”

If nothing else, the figures clearly show that district parents have a good eye for quality when it comes to choosing a school for their children. New and well-performing charter schools accounted for most of the student gains, while those ranked badly by the Charter Board actually lost students.

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Although the ability to fire teachers for poor performance has been one of the most contentious issues defining the relationship between teachers unions and their local districts, in Washington, D.C. the mechanism to remove instructors who are preforming poorly has been in place since 2009.

Usage of student achievement metrics in comprehensive teacher evaluation systems and therefore allow them to have an impact on hiring and firing decisions was one of the points of disagreement that led to the Chicago teacher strike which concluded last Tuesday.

According to the Washington Post, since the system went into effect more than three years ago, it has led to the termination of nearly 400 teachers. Just last month, 98 Washington teachers were notified that they were being relieved of their jobs because their evaluation results were below the threshold required to maintain employment in the district. And far from the layoffs arousing a bad reaction from the union representing Washington teachers, the union leadership has actually expressed support for its use and also thanked district officials for softening the criteria used for employment decisions.

“It was a goal of mine to get to a point where this is business as usual,” schools chancellor Kaya Henderson said. “Any well-functioning organization fires people for performance, and that’s going to be a regular occurrence. Every high-performing organization also recognizes and rewards the highest achievers, and that’s now a regular occurrence.”

Although supporters of the new system have said that holding teachers accountable for student performance generally serves to improve the quality of instruction, there are those who feel that the only thing new evaluation systems have done is increase staff turnover and consequently make good teachers more wary about taking jobs in district schools. To support their argument, critics point to the fact that over the years the system has been in place, students have shown only a very modest improvement in academic achievement, based on standardized test results.

“We have gone from a system where almost no one was terminated, no matter how bad, to the other extreme, where good teachers as well as bad are terminated,” said Mary Levy, an attorney and a longtime analyst of city education policy. “The latter is probably more damaging due to the stress and demoralization it causes.”

Washington was one of the first districts in the nation to be given permission to use student test scores to assess teacher effectiveness, although administrators didn’t exercise this option until the severely underperforming school system was taken over by then-Mayor Adrian Fenty and his handpicked schools leader Michelle Rhee.

During the three years of Rhee’s leadership, over 1,000 teachers lost their jobs for poor performance and misconduct, including questionable sexual behavior towards the students. However, Fenty’s defeat in the Democratic primary three years later, in an election that was widely viewed as being mostly about Rhee’s performance as chancellor, led to her resignation.

The new mayor, Vincent Gray, with Kaya Henderson as his lieutenant, sought to temper the fiery rhetoric used by Rhee — but that didn’t mean that they were looking to walk back the reforms she brought about in the district, including the new assessment system.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said the discussions about teacher quality have been more respectful under Gray and Henderson. That’s one reason he’s working to change the system from within, rather than pushing to scrap it entirely. Starting this school year, test scores only account for 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, down from 50 percent under the previous model.

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Many felt that the No Child Left Behind requirement to have 100% student proficiency in mathematics and literacy was unrealistic, but some are now wondering if the new academic goals set out by the Washington, D.C. school district — which are based on race and ethnicity — are taking realism too far. Others, however, are saying that by setting out targets that vary by race, ethnicity, location and even by school, the District is simply following the lead set by other states all over the country.

Those charged with designing the standards say that the focus is on closing achievement gaps as soon as possible, but meanwhile the benchmarks are set up in such a way as to demand the fastest progress from those farthest behind. Unfortunately, the optics of this policy make some parents think they’re prejudicial.

The Washington Post uses Anacostia High to illustrate how the new standards are applied. Anacostia, where the students are mainly African-American and drawn from some of the poorest areas of the city, will need to increase the number of students who are at grade level in reading four times by 2017 in order to meet its individual benchmarks. However, even if the benchmarks are met, that would still mean that fewer than 60% of Anacostia’s students would be proficient in literacy. In contrast, Schools Without Walls, located in Northwest Washington and a magnet school that draws the best district students, will be required to have more than 99% of its students at the same proficiency level.

Setting different aspirations for different groups of children represents a sea change in national education policy, which for years has prescribed blanket goals for all students. Some education experts see the new approach as a way to speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students, but some parents can’t help but feel that less is being expected of their children.

Alicia Rucker, a mother of 6 children — all of whom have either graduated or are currently enrolled in D.C. public schools — says that she doesn’t understand the rationale used by the officials that by expecting less from some students they will be able to help them achieve more. District leaders, however, claim that this is not what they’re doing at all. Instead, by setting realistic, achievable goals, they will finally be able to bring about real improvements in academic outcomes for those who have traditionally been left behind.

Ultimately, whether the District’s goals — or the country’s goals — are ambitious enough to close achievement gaps is a matter of judgment, said Andrew J. Rotherham, a past member of the Virginia Board of Education who writes and consults on education issues. It’s a matter of what the public is willing to accept.

“Look, our schools are political creations,” Rotherham said. “You’ve got to start from there. Decisions about them are politically derived.”

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It’s not unreasonable to ask how seriously Washington D.C. Public Schools take the problem of truancy when the district lays off a number of attendance counselors and fails to keep track of the number of children arrested by the police for missing school. According to a report by the office of Inspector General Charles Willoughby, the lack of consistent policies across the district meant that there was no uniformity to how schools responded to unexcused absences by students.

The report, which looked mainly at the data from the 2009-10 school year, said that reducing the number of truancy counselors from at least three district high schools with the worst attendance problems undercut the district’s supposed commitment to addressing the issue.

“In fact, the attendance counselor at Cardozo [Senior High School] had to rely on employees working for the Department of Parks and Recreation … to conduct home visits because she did not have enough time to conduct them during the day,” Willoughby wrote.

“Instead of arbitrarily assigning one or two employees to handle day-to-day truancy matters at each school,” DCPS should consider student enrollment and the school’s truancy statistics when assigning staff, Willoughby urged.

Nearly 40% of the district’s high school students are considered chronically truant, meaning they have at least 15 unexcused absences during the school year. At the three high schools covered in the report, McKinley Technology, H.D. Woodson and Anacostia, 60% of the student body was classified as chronically truant.

Melissa Salmanowitz, the spokeswoman for the district, said that additional social workers were hired to to work at the schools with the worst absenteeism rates. In a formal response to the IG’s report, DCPS admitted that staffing issues were hindering its efforts to enforce student attendance at school, but said that there were several schools that lacked the means to enforce rigorous truancy policies due to the large percentage of students requiring intervention.

School staff also disagreed with Willoughby’s recommendation to track the number of truant students picked up by the police and brought to school midday. Officials said this summer that the data system does not allow for them to note this and that sometimes students who are truant are marked as at school.

The IG investigation is just the latest shot across of bow of DCPS. Earlier this month a report released by the Inspector General’s office found several instances of testing-integrity irregularities at one of the district’s middle schools. Although the report concluded that the information uncovered didn’t warrant intervention from law enforcement officers, it did note that the environment at the Noyes Education Campus was often cited by teachers who were involved in the cheating as the reason why they did it.

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