First published on @TCFKSM on May 26, 2013
"According to Whitmire, Rhee and Fenty should have paid heed to the "fears" of African Americans, but not because there were any actual race issues during Rhee's tenure. Racism in DC is all done now--all that racism and "experimentation" is history and happened 1960s and 1970s. According to Whitmire, black people in DC perceived racism under Rhee, but it was all in their over-sensitive, incompetent little heads." — Rachel Levy
As Michelle Rhee's destructive trail of bigotry, deception, and duplicity comes under more and more scrutiny every day, her list of detractors expands, and her reptilian defenders back ever further into their rocky crevices.
The John Merrow work has seemingly given more mainstream writers a license to speak truth to Rhee and her handlers' power. It's nice to know that the dark past when anyone challenging Eli Broad's snarling TFA lapdog was immediately chastised as a strident defender of the status quo by poverty pimps including Jonathan Alter, Alexander Russo, Jay Mathews, and Richard Whitmire is long gone. Now it's open season on the broom wielding darling of the corporate education reform cabal, and I couldn't be more overjoyed.
A piece I missed earlier this week was Jason Stanford's Time to Stop Waiting for Superman. Despite being written by a mainstream Democrat, it's entirely honest and draws all the right conclusions. The piece opens with the Rhee's regime of cheating in DC, and he gives an excellent overview of Rhee's tawdry career as an anthophila assassinating corporate education reformer.
Stanford's analysis asks important questions like "If Rhee's success was fake, is there any evidence that high-stakes testing works?" His commentary cites the The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education study and it also attacks the long standing lie of improved NAEP scores for children of color under Rhee's tyrannical rule of DC schools.
Never one to avoid piling on, I had the following to say following Stanford's article:
Somewhere corporate propagandists Richard Whitmire and Davis Guggenheim are cringing that their elaborate campaign of mendacity propping up this vile woman is finally being exposed for what it is. Jason Stanford's brilliant essay brings together all of the latest evidence against the "warrior woman" in a concise way that should have us all calling to see Rhee frog marched to the dock at The Hague.
The thing we need to realize is that it's us dissidents that created the space for these more mainstream attacks on the corporate reform machine. We speak truth to power regardless of the season. A few years ago, no one would have ever thought that Rhee and her policies were anything but untouchable, given the momentum of corporate reform. It's a testament to our perseverance that in this age of digital memory holes, the truth is still coming out about Rhee and her ilk. Let's keep our garlic and crosses handy, it's time to drive stakes through the frigid heart of corporate education reform.
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