A Response to Michelle Rhee’s Op-ed, entitled, “MAP boycott is about keeping test scores out of teacher evaluations.”
Michelle Rhee is wrong. In a special op-ed to the Seattle Times on March 6th, she argues against the Seattle teacher boycott of the MAP test. Rather than summarize her arguments, I will present them below and address each sequentially. In this way, I will identify each of her arguments’ flaws and demonstrate that she has failed to establish a foundation for her very position. That said, I will begin first with her second paragraph, returning to her opening statement at the end of this analysis.
Logical Trickery: Ad Hominem and Equivocation
In her second paragraph, Rhee characterizes the boycott in the following terms: “Some local teachers union members have decided to reject Washington state’s student assessment program, and that’s unfortunate because every great teacher knows that student assessments can be a great tool.” Within this statement, Rhee utilizes several logical “dirty tricks” that you, as a reader, should reject.
First, when describing these teachers, Rhee makes a point to refer to them as union members. Now, while it is true that these teachers are union members, their status as union members is irrelevant to their decision to boycott the exam. The use of the term union members to describe the teachers is meant as a pejorative, what logicians label an ad hominem attack, a logical fallacy that discredits an argument based on a characteristic of the speaker, not the merits of the argument. By including these teachers’ union membership in this discussion, she avoids addressing the merits of their boycott and instead seeks to discredit their boycott by invoking the unpopularity of unions today.
Second, Rhee falsely characterizes the teachers’ boycott as a rejection of the