Jersey Jazzman deconstructs Michelle Rhee’s appearance on Jon Stewart’s show and wonders why interviewers allow her to avoid any real analysis of her policy recommendations. Instead of asking what is the evidence for her views, she is allowed to get away with glittering generalities about how much she loves teachers.
Jon Stewart is one of our very best interviewers, yet she spun her blather past him.
Jersey Jazzman writes:
“Our nation’s dialogue about education has been commandeered by a bunch of ill-informed, intellectually lazy, bought-and-paid-for edu-celebrities. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Ben Chavis, Steve Perry, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, and a few others are pushing an agenda that has little evidence to support it; worse, they are rarely questioned by well-informed journalists as to the specifics of their plans.”
Rhee has never been challenged directly. I wish some radio or TV host would invite us to debate the issues.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wasn’t offended that Stewart had her on the show. Or that he let her talk. He offered counterpoints. I felt he treated her about the way he treated Donald Rumsfield.
I’m offended that you haven’t been booked on the show. No writer who truly understands education and the harm being done to it by corporate reformers could provide the counterpoint to Rhee and her ilk the way you would.
I believe Diane’s been on the show a couple times.
Good to know but sorry I’ve missed her!
I was on Jon Stewart’s show in 2003 with the release of “The Language Police” and in 2010 with the publication of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.”
I am crazy about Jon Stewart.
His mother was a teacher in New Jersey.
He is a wonderful interviewer and he cares about teachers and public education.
Critical public affairs programs are not allowed on the air except for PBS’s Bill Moyers and his niche audience and few others on that channel. Michael Moore, for example, was booted out of his wonderful TV Nation expose some years back, too critical of corporate America. Colbert and Stewart use rhetoric of satire as a comic discourse which is oblique, not direct. If they switched to rhetoric of public affairs and questioned figures like Rhee or Duncan or O’Reilly in depth, they would be fired and shut down as was Michael Moore. Mass media fit the center-right profile of corporate-govt politics and allow only some comedic obliqueness for left-leaining critiques. Rhee would have gotten the shellacking she has richly earned had she appeared on Moyers, but she knows it and won’t go there.
I think Ira is wrong here — I think Colbert and Stewart could get away with direct questioning, but only so long as the rest of the show was funny.
Michael Moore is more Mother Jones than Jon Stewart, sure, but Stewart does make important –and direct– indictments of parts of our system. He usually, however, does not do it in the interviews. He does it in the montages and juxtapositions in the show.
I think they may be more powerful for being part of the comedy. Don’t get me wrong — I was disappointed that Stewart did not bring up a lot of things about Rhee that we find at Valerie Strauss or, our friend, the Jersey Jazzman. She got off easy and i wish she had not. But Stewart is a satirist, not an investigative reporter. But he is effective and his obliqueness should not be criticized more than HL Mencken’s sardonic wit.
Ira is right that investigative reporting is a thing of the past in Television, but let’s not blame Stewart for not being an investigative reporter, although the show has had its moments in that regard. He is a satirist, however, and that is where his influence comes from.
Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist and a founder of the Yippies, often called himself an “investigative satirist.” That could fit Jon Stewart quite well.
If anything, the pressure should be on Stephen Colbert to not have such a soft spot for so-called education reformers, and to invite Diane on his show.
This is what really gets me. The people that are being listened to are the peolple that don’t have any expertise in the subject they are talking about. Yet the people who are experts are being ignored. I can’t understand this. I could maybe understand this if it was one expert saying this is wrong, but it isn’t. Hundreds of experts in education are saying that this is not just wrong but it is dangerous to the children,
Come on!
Both Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein are experts in their fields — dismantling public education and making them privatization ready.
Come on!
Both Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein are experts in their fields — dismantling public education systems and making them privatization ready.
We made similar comments about EdWeek’s Rick Hess’s supposedly “straight up” (but in reality, vanilla) interview of Jason Zimba, one of Common Core math’s authors. We’d love to cross-examine Zimba, McCallum and Daro.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2013/02/rhsu_straight_up_conversation_sap_honcho_jason_zimba.html
I thought Jon Stewart asked her good questions, she just evaded them.
Love JJ, but he is wrong to think the ed deformniks are “ill-informed, intellectually lazy, bought-and-paid-for edu-celebrities.”
For instance, are they ‘bought and paid for’? Umm, okay, yeah, maybe.
But he is at still wrong about the ill-informed and intellectually lazy parts —
that is not what they are, it is what they are counting on most people to be.
Because in public discourse of social issues we want to believe that we are rational beings who will be swayed by statistics and facts. But, if you read George Lakoff, http://www.thelittleblueblog.org/ he makes the case that it is emotion and metaphorical framing that has the greatest impact.
For example, I don’t believe that the name “No Child Left Behind” was at all accidental. To the conservative right base, Left Behind is a biblical reference from Revelations that means to be left on earth after the rapture. For a group that believes that there is a dangerous secularization of education — teaching evolution vs. creationism, removing prayer from schools, attempts to remove God from the pledge of allegiance — NCLB is about saving children’s souls. If parents can get vouchers to faith-based schools, they are saving their children from the secular public schools.
Rhee’s rhetoric isn’t vacuous, it’s calculated to trigger specific frames. “Merit” pay plays right into Lakoff’s “strict father figure” model of the right. I haven’t broken it all down, but the right is extremely effective at framing issues to reinforce their ideals.
As important as the facts and statistics are, to change public opinion, we need to change the frame in our public discourse on education.
I enjoy JS just as much as anyone, but having been a teacher, now a victim of the draconian rule of outing older teacher and issuing in a new, yearly crop of novices, save a 3-5 week Prep course, I fail to find any justification for ALL the cable and network shows that defer to this purveyor of destruction, who could well play the queen of hearts as they share a similar, evil line, “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!! In my mind if one is silent in a head on discussion with someone who is intent destroying any vestige of public education, teachers’ rights, tenure, union, etc. it is just like pleading “No Contendra” in a court of law! To chuckle over her vicious attacks on teachers, as well as her cruelty show to her highly limited career in a classroom is like interviewing Benedict Arnold and sharing a light moment over his traitorous acts! Since she claims to be an “educational expert” her likewise traitorous acts to teachers across America is just as abhorant and doesn’t deserve any humorous minimalization about the nation-wide damage she is inflicting!
My suspicion is that JS wanted her but she only went on if she could have the questions before hand. That meant she could evade to her heart’s content and why (I felt) JS’s heart wasn’t really in it.
Here is a link to Michelle Rhee being interviewed on BBC…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18592185
(It gave me an error the first time I tried to play the vidio but it was fine when I did a reload.)
The union teacher gave her a pretty good challenge!!
That BBC interview was awesome! I love her stink face when the union teacher started in on her. Priceless!! If I was more tech savvy I’d make a gif of her face. This
This is why I watch BBC news.
I totally agree! SO SAD THAT WE HAVE TO GET BRITISH, GERMAN AND OTHER COUNTRIES TO GET NEWS…BECAUSE OUR FARCICAL VERSION OF NEWS IS TRULY VACUOUS AND IN THE POCKET OF CORPORATE AMERICA…NOTHING THAT DOESN’T FEATHER THEIR NESTS GETS ON THE US NEWS, REGARDLESS!!
Rhee will not debate you, Diane. She cannot match your substance, and she knows it.