Rhee Is Wrong. Again. It's About Poverty, Not Teachers
...
With so many dollar to raise (a billion of them) before the 2012 elections, who can blame [Rhee] for pulling lines out of her broomstick to spice up the slick ads for potential donors. Here is a recent fabulous fabrication that Michelle offers during a staged discussion led by Rupert Murdoch's chief advisor on education, Joel Klein:
"When I travel around the country talking about these issues, I inevitably come up against, you know, wealthy folks in the suburbs who say, 'Well, but my kids are fine,'" Michelle Rhee, a former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, said during a recent gathering at The Daily.
"I say, 'Did you know that the top 5 percent of kids in America, the top five — the ones that are going to Choate and Andover and all these great places, they are 25th out of 30 nations, compared to their global counterparts?''
Could Rhee have gotten her numbers from Klein's researchers over at Fox News, where they simply make it up when the facts don't support their agenda? Michelle certainly did not get them from the most recent international test comparison (PISA) published by OECD, which has been all over the media since early December.
...
Of all the nations participating in the PISA assessment, the U.S. has, by far, the largest number of students living in poverty--21.7%. The next closest nations in terms of poverty levels are the United Kingdom and New Zealand have poverty rates that are 75% of ours.
U.S. students in schools with 10% or less poverty are number one country in the world.
U.S. students in schools with 10-24.9% poverty are third behind Korea, and Finland.
U.S. students in schools with 25-50% poverty are tenth in the world.
U.S. students in schools with greater than 50% poverty are near the bottom.