Michelle Rhee embraces disgraced charter school advocate
Education reformers rush to defend Florida schools chief, Tony Bennett, after he resigned in a pay-to-play scandal
Tony Bennett, Florida’s education chief, abruptly resigned yesterday after an AP investigationrevealed that in his old job running Indiana’s schools, he frantically overhauled the state’s evaluation system to avoid giving a poor grade to a charter school run by a prominent Republican donor. In addition to his charter school advocacy, Bennett was also known for his staunch support of standardized testing.
Emails obtained by AP showed that Bennett and his staff scrambled to make sure the donor’s school received an “A” grade, despite initially earning a “C” thanks to poor test scores. “They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in September to his chief of staff, who is now Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.
Despite the controversy (Bennett calls the charges “malicious and unfounded,” saying he decided to resign within days of the AP’s report only so he could avoid becoming a “distraction”), Bennett has plenty of defenders in the school reform movement. Here’s Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor who has become a patron saint of school reform and one of its