The Education of Michelle Rhee (via Frontline)

Grab a soothing drink (or set that VCR or DVR) because this is going to be good - Frontline is showing a special on Michelle Rhee.  It will be on KCTS 9 at 10 pm Tuesday night. 

Rhee, the poster girl for all that is wrong in public education reform today, has had this discussion long coming.  Given Frontline's hard-hitting reporting, I'm sure they will be thorough and frank. 

Coincidentally, Rhee just released a report card of sorts, through her "group" StudentsFirst on how states are doing.  Diane Ravitch calls her out on it here.

This comes on the heels of a number of staffers at StudentsFirst, all Democrats, who abruptly left the organization recently. 

From the Huffington Post:

"There were known to be some significant differences on political strategy and policy matters, especially in StudentsFirst's approach toward unions and partisanship," said a source close to the education reform community who declined to be named in order to preserve working relationships.

The shake-up is significant because if SF is less concerned about its positioning among progressives, that could decrease its credibility among Democrats, imperiling the bipartisan appeal of the group.  

As Diane Ravitch said in her piece about this:

Think about how frequently Rhee has allied herself with rightwing governors like Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, Rick Scott, and Chris Christie. She has advocated for for-profit charter schools and for-profit universities. She supports vouchers. She was honored along with Governor Scott Walker by the far-right American Federation for Children, which is passionate for vouchers and privatization of public schools.

What part of her agenda is bipartisan?

Update:  From Esquire:

One problem with the education "reform" industry is not merely that it generally looks at "education" as though it were a commodity, like soybeans, and that the problems with how we educate a great many children of our fellow citizens can be solved if we just refine the delivery systems for the product. In other words, most education "reform" proponents treat "education" as though it exists in a vacuum unaffected by the factors — like, say, joblessness and poverty — in the real world outside the classroom.

Thus do we come to the second problem with the education "reform" movement — it is shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers.

About Rhee:

She also instituted a system of standardized testing by which Michelle Rhee would be able to judge the awesome awesomeness of Michelle Rhee.

 Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education. 

A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress is generally a reliable "tell" that "reform" has ended and that the grift has begun. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress — and, it should be said, as a Procrustean scoreboard to judge whether a teacher, an administrator, or a school system are doing their jobs properly — almost guarantees that some finagling with the numbers will take place. It is a sub rosa way to install a corporate model on public education and, since the corporate model for everything in this country right now is a moral and ethical quagmire, it encourages cheating on a massive scale. Hence, the very real possibility that the empire built by Michelle Rhee, tough-talking "reformer," may be built upon a  wilderness of crib sheets.

Bravo, Esquire.  The emperor has no clothes.