Michelle Rhee– the Sarah Palin of the education reform movement
Written by Marc Osgoode Smith, for the Morton Report. Read the original here.
“The pendulum appears to be swinging in “Ed Reform 2.0.” The education policy community is starting to question the all-or-nothing “data-driven assessment” mantra of former Washington DC School Chancellor — and national poster child of the reform movement — Michelle Rhee. …
–her beloved “data” revealed shortcomings in her execution. It also revealed an over-reliance on teacher-union bashing as political red meat and polarizing rhetoric to intimidate.
The primary criticism of Rhee’s platform is its insistence upon constant “data-driven assessments” of students that measured student abilities with two-page data synopses made up of color graphs and pie charts. “We didn’t have time to instruct them on the material on the assessments, because we were always taking assessments,”
