Michelle Rhee’s four years as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public school system were spent exemplifying Campbell’s Law, which states that the more quantitative incentives are used for social decision-making, the more likely corruption and cheating are to occur.

The Cornell- and Harvard-educated Teach For America alumna was hired by then-D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2007 to head his failing school system, despite no prior experience in educational administration. Rhee promised true reform and promised that by focusing on test scores and expanding charter schools — two methods that were well on their way to being discredited — reform would come quickly.

On paper, it did: In a “Frontline” documentary on the D.C. education system, Washington Post reporter Bill Turque noted the sudden “outsize” gains of 20 to 30 points in test scores in the year after Rhee took over. Hundreds of D.C. schools saw marginal to substantial gains in their No Child Left Behind performance markers nearly instantly, and Rhee was celebrated as a hero.

But there was something sketchy about those numbers, wasn’t there?

Pressured by their boss’s rapidly increasing test standards and threats of school closures and determined to earn the federal funding allotted according to students’ scores, teachers across the district cheated — proving Campbell correct, once again — by erasing and correcting their pupils’ incorrect test bubbles.

The rest of Rhee’s reforms failed miserably — her high schools’ ranked dead last in the United States in graduation rates for the 2010-11 school year, and her ostensibly money-saving moves to close dozens of schools instead cost the district millions of dollars. The vast majority of D.C. students weren’t learning any better under her stewardship, and, as a result, she and Mayor Fenty were ousted after just four years.

Yet for the past few months, the political media establishment, policy-makers, and even the dependably sensible Jon Stewart have feted Michelle Rhee for her supposed educational genius. She has become a darling of the delusional Beltway center, epitomizing the type of compassionately corporate, pro-school-voucher, pro-quantitative-analysis reformer that so-called moderates adore for her willingness to close schools and dismiss teachers (so gutsy!) at the drop of a hat (or test scores).

My question is this: How on Earth can these people trust her when absolutely none of her ideas have ever panned out?

Expanding the number of charter schools — semi-public institutions, funded in part by private sources, that aren’t subject to the same sort of union and federal regulations as public schools — hasn’t worked nationally, just as it didn’t work in D.C. NYU education history professor Diane Ravitch, whose influential blog explores the hypocrisies behind the modern reform movement, recently wrote in the Washington Post that “numerous national and state studies have shown that charters … don’t get better results than regular public schools.” Scores of studies have come to the same conclusion, yet Rhee, along with Bill Gates and other misguided reformers, still extol the virtues of publicly funded schools able to fire and hire teachers at will (and, in the case of Louisiana’s charters, teach that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.)

Most shockingly, Rhee, a self-described Democrat, recently endorsed school vouchers — a system that involves taking tax money that would otherwise support public schools and giving it back to families to spend on private schools. The theory goes that this would increase “competition” and force public schools to perform better in comparison with their public school counterparts or face the wrath of the free market. In actuality, it just drains them of desperately needed resources and deprives them of their ability to do what they’re supposed to do — teach children effectively.

If we want to truly fix a broken education system, we need to stop listening to people like Michelle Rhee. We can’t keep banging our heads against the wall, insisting that vouchers and competition will save our children, if we hope to produce different results.

We do need, though, to listen to teachers, principals, students, families and data — real, hard data, not erasure marks and skewed enrollment statistics. Real, hard data has shown that sufficient funding, fair compensation for educators, flexible curricula and a reduced emphasis on “teaching to the test” all lead to better outcomes for students.

Perhaps most importantly, the federal government needs to change its educational philosophy. That can start by seriously considering ending its No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top program, both of which tie federal grant money to increases in test scores and incentivize educators to cheat. And, if I were President Obama, I’d stop trying to appeal to conservatives by advocating for charters and school privatization. Simply put, those ideas don’t work.

For once, let’s do right by our society’s kids and give them a free public education system they’ll flourish in.

I’m a proud graduate of a public high school. I’d love for my children to be too.

Adam is a freshman in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @hercules5.