The Education Celebrity Tour: Legend of the Fall, Pt. II
The U.S. is floundering at the bottom of international comparisons of education, and what makes this worse is that in the grand ol’ 1950s, the U.S. was at the top—at least that is one story offered by Michelle Rhee on a recent episode of the Colbert Report.
Like the discussion of Waiting for Superman by John Legend on Bill Maher’s Real Time, the celebrity tour of Rhee, who recently lost her job as chancellor of schools in DC, raises some real problems about not only what our self-appointed educational leaders are saying about education, but also how our so-called left-wing media helps (directly and indirectly) to perpetuate misinformation about our education system—misinformation that is being promoted to mask the real issues about poverty in our culture that the political and corporate elite do not want to face.
Rhee, in her interview with Colbert, makes several sweeping claims about schools, and as is the nature of contemporary media (recognizing, of course, that Colbert is satire), she is allowed to make those claims without