By Thomas Ultican 6/17/2025
It was “déjà vu all over again” when Eric Hanushek and his wife Macke Raymond shared their views in the Washington Post. They cited Michelle Rhee and Mike Miles as exemplary education leaders, merit pay as good education policy and turned to A Nation at Risk for support. Governor Abbott took over Houston’s schools and installed Miles as superintendent but here Hanushek and Raymond were referencing his long ago stint in Dallas.
I am no longer a reader of the Washington Post. When Bezos decided his paper would not endorse a candidate for president, I cancelled my subscription. However, a friend felt I needed to see this article and sent me a copy.
Billionaires like Bezos are destroying America and all of its venerable institutions. Hanushek and Raymond are Stanford based billionaire tools.
While working on her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester, Macky fell in love with her much older professor, Eric Hanushek, and eventually married him.
Today, Raymond is the director of CREEDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says in part, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.”
Are the billionaires guarding the hen house?
Rhee and Miles
The Hanushek and Raymond opinion piece states:
“In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.”
This is a totally bunkum statement and is followed by another world of bunkum claim:
“Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.”
The linked evidence in the Dallas claim is to an Education Next article written by Hanushek and friends. In it, he claimed, “In the four years after Dallas adopted new performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation systems, student performance on standardized tests improved by 16 percent of a standard deviation in math and 6 percent in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat.”
Sixteen percent of a standard deviation of growth in math after 4 years sounds weak and 6% of a standard deviation growth in reading does not seem much more the noise in the data.
Hanushek gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. The history of crazy pants unsupported statements like this have long caused me to seek verification for whatever he says.
Hanushek and Raymond claim that both Dallas and Washington DC saw comparatively superior testing outcomes than other urban areas in the US. The evidence they provide is a link to the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (tuda). I graphed 4th and 8th grade math tuda data between 2009 and 2024 for the Large City composite, Dallas, DC, Baltimore and San Diego. Nothing substantive popped out in my graphs.
I decided to subtract the 4th grade scores from the 8th grade scores to get a sense of how the students were progressing. The results graphed below stunned me with their clarity. Baltimore, which traditionally has low scores, San Diego, which traditionally scores well and the Large City composite had fairly consistent increases of about 40 points. Dallas and DC both fell below a 30 points increase.
Billionaires Take Over
Michelle Rhee came out of Teach for America (TFA) where she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school. She returned to New York, TFA and Wendy Kopp to help found the New Teachers Project which is now known as TNTP. New York Chancellor of Public Schools, Joe Klein, who worked for multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recommended the 37-year-old Rhee to be Washington DC’s new superintendent.
During Rhee’s three year reign of terror, she replaced half of DC’s teachers and a third of its principals. She was consumed with raising test scores and scorned those who did not share her devotion to standardized testing. Her relentless pressure to raise test scores brought some early gains and produced a major cheating scandal.
DC principal, Adell Cothorne, lost her job for insisting upon increased test security when she learned that teachers were violating testing protocols. I had lunch with Adell at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. She struck me as a proud Black woman with poise, immense courage and profound character.
After Rhee left DC schools, she started StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote school choice. Billionaires and their friends provided her organization with millions of dollars. (Reign of Error Pages 145-155)
Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011.
Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change, “But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections.”
The billionaires contributing included Ross Perot, Ray Hunt and Justice Thomas’s buddy Harlan Crow.
Once the new 2012 board was seated, it fired Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replaced him with Mike Miles, a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy.
The article “Dallas Chamber of Commerce Disrupts Dallas Schools” summarized Miles three year tenure:
“Miles’s reforms included a new principal evaluation process which led to large turnover. He also instituted a merit pay system for teachers and hired Charles Glover a 29-year-old administrator of the Dallas TFA branch to be Chief Talent Officer in DISD. After just under three years, he had managed to alienate the black and Hispanic communities as well as many experienced teachers and principals.”
Like Michelle Rhee, he also believed in standardized test based accountability and merit pay.
Concluding Information
Reporting for NPR on the 35th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Ana Kamenetz discovered, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”
A decade before Ana’s report, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”
In 1990, Sandia engineers set out to add weight to A Nation at Risk. They disaggregated the data by race and sex and were surprise to find that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period. The growing numbers of SAT test takers was driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.
A Nation at Risk was a fraudulent paper and America’s students were actually healthy and doing well, which means public schools were healthy and doing well.
Merit pay is a Taylorist scheme that appeals to many American business leaders, but has a long history of employee dissatisfaction and output quality issues. Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied merit pay for teachers and found no significant gains in testing data and in New York researchers documented negative results.
Unfortunately, billionaires own the media and publish opinion pieces by hired frauds like Hanushek and Raymond.
tultican 
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