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Monday, April 25, 2011

Michelle Rhee uses Care2 to astroturf edu-privatizers

Michelle Rhee uses Care2 to astroturf edu-privatizers

Michelle Rhee uses Care2 to astroturf edu-privatizers

What Michelle Rhee’s billionaire dollars buy…

The following post originally appeared on the DailyKos.com, on April 17, 2011.

Michelle Rhee, tool of corporate edu-privatizers, is using Care2 to astroturf her anti-teacher, anti-union, Students First Foundation with a petition entitled “Save Great Teachers”. (The foundation title itself is propaganda. For someone who is all about accountability, she should change the name to Profitsfirst.org, it would be more accurate.) Studentsfirst.org is well financed by the Billionaires Boys Club, Diane Ravitch’s apt descriptor of the wealthy edu-privatizers who are crawling all over DoE, congress and state legislatures to lobby for laws to break teachers unions and teachers employment safeguards.
According to Ken Libby at http://www.schoolsmatter.info/… Rhee intends to raise $1billion through her Students First Foundation. Her sugar daddies are putting serious money behind initiatives to sell public schools to Wall

In the wake of Michelle Rhee's damage

Originally posted on Conducting the Inner Light, April 17, 2011.

Michelle Rhee has a new piece on Huffington Post, Why I’m Proud of Student Achievement in D.C. (and Why We Need National Reforms, in which she trots out all her euphemistic (to put a nice word to lies) language about her “achievements” in Washington. It never ceases to amaze me the way in which Rhee and her advocates, especially Richard Whitmire, dredge up the same horse manure, over and over again, and try to pass it off as oats. Here is a video I stumbled across on The Teachers Leader Network in a piece written by Dan Brown (not Davinci Code Brown but a local teacher) that demonstrates loud and clear how damaging Michelle Rhee’s management was for our schools.

Isn’t it astonishing to hear what went on? Especially since we saw none of this in the news! How do you think opening day would have looked as a scene in Waiting for Superman? But it is exactly this kind of management that Michelle Rhee should get press for – autocratic, despotic, and damaging. Instead, she is managing to influence major decisions in education around the country.

Let’s take for example, Georgia. Rhee was able to get 7,000 members of her Students First organization to send out 12,000 emails and calls to legislatures around the state advocating the hiring of teachers on the basis of