The Cutthroat Curriculum
Business, Education, MediaMay 5, 2011
“When you are basing the effectiveness of teachers on lots of softer things, whether the kids feel good, whether the classroom is happy, whether we’re creative (don’t get me wrong, those things are important), but if the kids can’t read…that’s not acceptable,” former Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee asserted indignantly in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, defending hertesting based reform movement, one she has touted very successfully in a year long celebrity tour of the applauding corporate media. Rhee is fighting a battle against these “softer things,” as The American Thinker recently observed, an image she cultivates carefully in her iconic stern pose on the cover of Time Magazine – humorless, severe, standing imposingly above the viewer as she holds a broom, ready to sweep away “bad teachers” like errant spitballs and broken pencils littering the classroom floor, and with them, “softer things” like creativity, and perhaps, empathy.
And certainly, Rhee has little empathy for “bad teachers,” and in fact, has