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Friday, December 30, 2011

Top Ten Rheeform Moments of 2011 | Twin Cities Daily Planet

Top Ten Rheeform Moments of 2011 | Twin Cities Daily Planet:

Top Ten Rheeform Moments of 2011

December 29, 2011

What is Rheeform? It is a catchall for the market based, destructive reforms that have become vogue since No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Michelle Rhee became the darling of the movement, gave it a personality, and a "liberal" that the plutocrats could hide behind.

The defining characteristic of market based Rheeform is what it does not do. Rheeform does not try and change how we teach. They want to change where we teach. How long we teach. What we teach. How we are hired, fired, and compensated. Who is allowed to teach. All of these are part of Rheeform, except, of course, how we teach.

This approach is not an oversight. The way we have taught for the last two hundred years has benefited and worked for almost all in power. The idea of a solitary teacher making a difference worked for them. The model of a teacher as some sort of independent contractor operating in an isolated classroom kingdom was effective for