John Warner
There are perhaps no better exemplars of the products of our current meritocratic system than three of the most important recent figures in the education reform movement: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “Common Core architect” David Coleman, and one-time chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee.
They are also all near-perfect examples of what William Deresiewicz labels as “excellent sheep,” in his new book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite.
According to Deresiewicz, one of the chief problems with this miseducation is in these so-called “elite” individuals mistaking “being in charge” with “being a leader.”
In my review/response to Deresiewicz’s book I argued that these people are especially important because the rest of us are subject to their rule, as they find themselves so often at the intersections of money, politics, and power.
These “excellent sheep” are also the products of persistent myths which they appear to have swallowed whole, but which the rest of us would do well to reject.
In a series of posts, I mean to explore the origin stories and mindsets of these “excellent sheep” and seek to demonstrate how and why these people in charge seem to perform so poorly in positions of leadership.
I’ll start with Michelle Rhee.
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While Rhee, Duncan, and Coleman are a generation ahead of the students Deresiewicz discusses in his book, they share the same discernible pattern of educational advancement as the present day “excellent sheep”: professional parents, attendance at elite secondary schools, exposure to less privileged communities via community service, and then the Ivy League, before embarking on a postgraduate opportunity that also involves “meritocratic” selection/validation.
Rhee grew up in Toledo, her father a doctor, her mother the owner of a clothing store. She attended Maumee Valley Country Day School for high school, and volunteered at an American Indian Reservation.
Graduating from Cornell (’92 Government), Rhee chose Teach for America, then in only its second year, and was placed in the Baltimore school district. Immediately post college, we appear to have a young, driven, well-educated, apparently idealistic person ready to change the world through a life of service to others.
But that doesn’t appear to be enough.
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At the start of her tenure as chancellor of the D.C. schools, Rhee is portrayed in a2007 Washingtonian magazine profile by Harry Jaffe as the tough-as-nails reformer, siding with students and parents against an entrenched bureaucracy and substandard teachers. She has apparently been shaped by her struggles in her first Teach for America year, after which she knuckled down, driving herself and her students to work harder, assigning “two hours of homework a night,” which was “time better spent than hanging out, playing video games, or watching television.”Excellent Sheep Run the World: Part II - Michelle Rhee | Just Visiting @insidehighered: