Rhee's Two Takes on her Taping Incident
Michelle Rhee popped up in The Washington Post this month glorifying the same standardized tests from which so many parents seek to shelter their children. It is so strange to me, in this day and age, that one who started her career with a glaring example of child abuse could come so far and exercise so much influence upon our public-school system. I would like to briefly revisit that incident, including her more recent attempts to rewrite her own history.
In an online Financial Times article entitled, "Lunch with the FT: Controversial Schools Reformer Michelle Rhee," October 4, 2013, Edward Luce quotes Rhee, "I think when I took the job in DC, I was not particularly savvy about the media. People asked me for interviews, I answered the questions and because I was so honest about my thoughts, it gave them the material. I can’t blame anyone other than myself for that. I was stupid.”
Luce asked her, among other things, about her incident taping students' lips at Harlem Park in Baltimore. Rhee explained that she had asked her rowdy class to put their fingers to their lips as they passed other classrooms on the way to lunch: "One of the boys asked for a strip of Scotch tape instead and suddenly everyone wanted the same thing,” she says. “And when I removed the strips, one of the boy’s dry lips bled a little. That’s all that happened. Now it’s turned into, ‘Michelle Rhee duct tapes children!’ But the only reason anyone knows the story in the first NYC Educator: Rhee's Two Takes on her Taping Incident: