Is Michelle Rhee’s Revolution Over?

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/magazine/03fob-wwln-t.html?_r=1

Around the country, supporters of education reform — or at least of the test-scores-driven, tenure-busting, results-rewarding sort of reform epitomized by organizations like Teach for America and championed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan — gave a collective gasp of dismay last month when voters in a number of districts handed primary defeats to candidates closely associated with just this type of reform. In New York, three state-senate candidates who ran on pro-charter-school platforms each failed to garner more than 30 percent of the vote. In Washington, voters overwhelmingly rejected Mayor Adrian Fenty in favor of the City Council chairman, Vincent Gray, as the Democratic candidate in this year’s mayoral election. The Fenty defeat worried many people particularly because he was inextricably linked with his crusading, nationally celebrated schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee.

Rhee, who was appointed by Fenty in 2007 and given unprecedented power to shake up the ailing school system, fired hundreds of teachers and dozens of bureaucrats and principals, even removing the popular head of her daughters’ elementary school in the northwest part of the district. She demanded that the city’s tenure system be replaced with one that would reward teachers for producing measurable performance gains in their students. For her efforts, she became a heroine to some — gracing the cover of Time magazine, earning the praise of the Obama administration and an invitation to appear on “Oprah” — but she also received enormous enmity from teachers, their unions and, surprisingly enough to outside observers, many public-school parents, not a few of whom were profoundly offended when, the night after the mayoral primary, Rhee appeared at the Washington premiere of Davis Guggenheim’s much-talked-about education documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” and told an assemblage of prominent Washingtonians that the election results “were devastating, devastating. Not for me, I’ll be fine . . . but devastating for the school children of Washington, D.C.”

In the local blogs that buzzed with outrage after Rhee’s comment, a theme became clear: people — even people who seemed destined to most benefit from the work of a committed reformer like Rhee — don’t like to get the message that their communities are on the wrong track. That their schools are no good, the teachers in them subpar; that their decision to back a politician who doesn’t share the reformer’s particular style of quasi-missionary zeal would consign their kids to disaster.

<snip>

Washington residents, the majority of them African-American, many of them poor, all possessed, to varying degrees, of a sense of disenfranchisement — the city, after all, did not have the power to elect its own government until 1974 and must still submit its budget and laws for approval to Congress, where it lacks voting rights — take particularly poorly to these sorts of put-downs, says Michael Fauntroy, an associate professor of public policy at George Mason University. In fact, the black, often struggling residents of Washington — the vast majority of parents in the public-school system — have a hair-trigger intolerance for anything that smacks of paternalism or disdain by policy makers, particularly when they appear to be telling people how to run their lives and, most potentially offensive of all, how to educate their children. Fenty and Rhee, Fauntroy said, were perceived to have “an elite view of public policy: we know what’s better for your kids than you do, and because our ideas are better, yours are to be ignored, and ours are to be implemented.”

Parent power! :thumbsup: Paternalism is a great word for what has been going on in the "reform" movement. I had a feeling the adults who have their children in our public schools were not going to stand what Michelle and Co. have been dishing out.

[Reader Rabbit]

1. I'm not a religious person, but I'm praying that is the case!

This horrible woman needs to be bludgeoned with a ream of test scores from a low income public school.

[Starry Messenger]

2. I liked this paragraph too.

It was hard to slim down to a 4 paragraph excerpt:

It became clear that people don’t much like stern-faced do-gooders telling them how to think and what to do; that they prefer “a reform agenda that’s being done with people, not to people,” as Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently put it. They don’t like collective slap-downs — like the one Rhee managed when she referred to the hundreds of fired teachers indiscriminately in an interview with a business magazine as people who “had hit children, who had had sex with children.” They don’t like to see respected members of their community seemingly compared to dirt, as Rhee unthinkingly did by agreeing to pose on the cover of Time wielding a big broom. They like policy makers who at least appear to be taking their concerns to heart, as Rhee pointedly did not, bluntly telling the magazine: “I’m not going to pretend to solicit your advice so you’ll feel involved, because that’s just fake.”

I think a lot of people have had bosses who are like Michelle. They can smell the top-down BS.

[Starry Messenger]

3. k

[Hannah Bell]

4. kr. i hope rhee's toast, but i bet she reappears in another city, courtesy of her masters

in the bbc.