There are two sides to every story, but sometimes one of those sides gets splashed on the front page of The Washington Post‘s Metro section.
What’s on tap? An angry former DCPS teacher has revealed that Michelle Rhee’s results as a Baltimore teacher weren’t as hot as she claimed.
Rhee wrote on her resume that “Over a two-year period, [she] moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”
From the Post:
The study found that third-graders overall at the school made gains that year in reading and math. But they finished nowhere near the 90th percentile.
The reports originally jumped from the teacher’s blog to the Post earlier this week, in a blog post of their own.
A spokeswoman for Rhee’s nonprofit advocacy group, StudentsFirst, fired back on the organization’s blog this week: “Our public schools are in crisis. Instead of talking about how to fix them, we’re getting unfounded attacks on Michelle. To get back to the debate about public schools, we want to address this misinformation head-on.”
Mafara Hobson calls the teacher’s report “error-laden” and scolds the “mainstream media” for picking it up. She refutes:
There is no way to know if any of Michelle’s students were even included in this study. The study included only certain students at the school, and excluded large numbers from their sample.
The Post notes this in its story, although it’s pretty buried. Of course, not as buried as this quote, the very last paragraph of the article:
