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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Education “reform’s” new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown - Salon.com

Education “reform’s” new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown - Salon.com:



Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown

Exclusive: As Rhee's efforts flounder, new links emerge between a group she founded and a new face, Campbell Brown



Education "reform's" new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown (Credit: Jacquelyn Martin)
For years, Michelle Rhee, the former District of Columbia schools chancellor, has been upheld in the media as someone with the formula and fight required to “fix” public schools.
Others – okay, yours truly – have likened her more to an “education Ann Coulter,” providing lots of attention-getting optics for a movement made up of rich and powerful people who press their belief that what ails public education most is “bad teachers.”
Supported by shadowy money and shaky science, these wealthy folks have created a “blame teachers first” campaign that seeks to address education problems rooted in inequality and low investment by attacking teachers’ job protections and professional status. Their efforts are, of course, “for the children.”
The campaign’s latest victory was the court case Vergara v California, which threw out key job protections for teachers in that state. Now, Vergara-type lawsuits are expected to roll out across the country.
But recent developments in the career trajectory of Rhee may have prompted the Blame Teachers First crowd to pick a new front person to lead their campaign: former CNN anchor Campbell Brown.
Rhee’s Sullied Reputation
However you feel about Rhee and her campaign to label “ineffective” teachers as the cause of just about everything wrong with public education, her luster certainly seems to be waning.
Her book “Radical: Fighting to Put Students First,” recounting her personal accomplishments as an education policy leader, has been a complete bomb. Her “grassroots movement” seems to consist of, as education historian Diane Ravitch has put it, “’members’” who “seem to be people (like me) who innocently signed an online petition supporting teachers.”


As the folks at Parents Across America have pointed out, Rhee’s StudentsFirst campaigns have done little to animate parents. In Connecticut, an investment of about $700,000 produced a rally at the State Capitol, with Rhee as the featured speaker, which drew only about 75 people. In Alabama, where StudentsFirst claimed 17,000 members, only about 20 showed up at a meeting she called at that state’s capitol.
Revelations about Rhee’s accomplishments while she was chancellor for Washington, D.C., public schools have also sullied her self-avowed reputation for “raising achievement.” PBS’s education reporter John Merrow likely knows more aboutEducation “reform’s” new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown - Salon.com: