Tony Bennett's Day of Reckoning Has Come: Is Corporate Reform Far Behind?
For months the question has hung in the air: When will the weight of deception bring the corporate reform project crashing down? For some, the day of reckoning has come already.
The emails of one of the nation's leading "Chiefs for Change," Tony Bennett, were simply too much this week. The former state superintendent from Indiana was found to have done backflips to prevent the favored charter school endowed by one of his big donors from receiving a C on the state's accountability system. One email stated: "If you can't tell, I am more than a little miffed about this. I hope we can come to the meeting today with solutions and not excuses and/or explanations for me to wiggle myself out of the repeated lies I have told over the past 6 months."
But wiggle as he would, Mr. Bennett could not escape his lies and manipulations on behalf of the schools he favored. And this has revealed, at least in his case, that the "accountability" project he has championed was driven to produce results that would stigmatize public schools and promote charter schools. And when the numbers did not come out the way they wanted,