Earlier today, John Merrow posted a blog in which he asked, “Who Created Michelle Rhee?”
From the context, I assume he means who was responsible for making her the face of the corporate reform movement? Why was she praised by both Barack Obama and John McCain in their 2008 debate only a year after she started work as DC superintendent of schools? Why was she featured on the cover of Time and Newsweek? Why was she lionized in the national media?
All this, even though as Merrow now says, “I am also reporting that, after five years of Rhee/Henderson, the DC schools are worse off by almost every conceivable measure: graduation rates, truancy, enrollment, test scores, black-white gap and teacher and principal turnover.”
How did the national media miss these developments? Why did they turn Rhee into a superstar despite the lack of any accomplishments?
Merrow puts the blame on four suspects:
First, Rhee herself because she inflated her credentials (no Ne in the mainstream media noticed).
Second, he blames himself because he aired twelve (12!) different episodes on national gelb
Vision chronicling her progress in “reforming” the DC schools. Now, he acknowledges that there was no progress but he didn’t know it at the time.
Third, according to “conspiracy theorists,” THEY, the funders of the far-right created her, by pouring millions of dollars into her one-woman campaign to smash the unions, tenure, and pensions, while promoting charters and vouchers. On the list of THEY, he includes the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, Eli Broad, and Joel Klein.
Fourth, he blames the unions. If they had not been so intransigent, then there would have been no Michelle Rhee to battle them. This seems to be a stretch. Fred Klonsky takes issue with Merrow here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well let’s look at the funders posted on the PBS/Merrow site…..maybe some helped create this Rhee fiasco…some of the same old suspects, 4th from the top.
OUR FUNDERS
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Grade Level Reading Fund of Tides Foundation
The Annenberg Foundation
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The Tietz Family Foundation
The Wallace Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
I doubt that the unions could have done anything to object. There has been so much intervention to union rights that they have very little power. The union in our district actually tried several years ago to press the board during negotiations to back off and give more voice to the teachers. We have been in a wage freeze since 2007. But having voice and power to stand up for education was only met with “stop whining and do your jobs” even though our objections were not about salary but about working conditions and changes we didn’t agree with.
I am really sure there would be similar treatment of unions across the nation, particularly in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan where the goal has been to get rid of unions and institute “right to work” laws. There is no recourse for unions in these circumstances.
Merrow is partly right on ascribing the rise of Michelle Rhee to errors (or whatever) by teacher unions, but not in the way he said.
The huge betrayals of teachers in Washington DC by two of their latest union presidents, Barbara Bullock and George Parker, were large factors in giving legitimacy to anti-union propagandists.
BB and a handful of cronies ran our local union without allowing input from the membership, talked a good game, and looted our treasury of many millions of dollars for kitschy tchotchkes, fur coats, vacations, wigs, and other trash.
GP not only negotiated an agreement that legitimized “merit pay”, but also went over to the other side and ended up working for — the enemy, Michelle Rhee.
And guess who helped negotiate that sellout contract? None other than our national union president, Randi Weingarten, a lawyer who has never taught in a classroom.
We need to occupy our unions. WE are the union, not these sell outs!
Touche, Linda! To all readers: do a CORE (that’s the group that changed the CTU from the inside-out & got Karen Lewis IN) in state unions in which the leadership is weak, & then go for the national. And–DON’T let union leaders tell you that this is what the BBCers want, to destroy the unions. I’m not talking about destroying them (for the poor leaders are the ones doing that!), I’m talking about strengthening them–we need to get the leadership we deserve & pay for! You ALL know what you must do–now go & DO it! (UFT people–good luck w/your elections–hope MORE takes all!)
Shanker blog has been doing a series of posts (http://shankerblog.org/?p=8174) about how unions have grown weaker over the years and the animosity toward them by nonunion working class people who resent paying our (teachers’) union salaries. I think there is potential for bringing those underpaid working people back to unionization.
But when I read Merrow say that unions are partly responsible, I hear him saying that our unions have to branch out more and be a part of real education reform, the kind that Shanker envisioned. I don’t like saying that we union members did this to ourselves, but I do think we have to be realistic about the way the rest of the country sees us.
Forget about who created Michelle Rhee. We need good ideas on what we can do now and how we can make public education the best it can be, because there are hundreds of very wealthy and powerful idiots out there who do have ideas, and a misinformed public is listening to them.
I think John Merrow and many other people mistake a teachers union with a professional organization that monitors its members and makes decisions about the profession. Actually when the National Education Association was founded in 1857 teachers wanted it to be a professional association that would be able to make decisions about curriculum, instruction, and training and recruitment of teachers. However, state legislatures were not inclined to hand over these responsibilities and only allowed the association to confine itself to employment rights. Thus it became a labor union.
The purpose of a labor union is to protect the rights of the employees who pay dues. Once a teacher signs up, she also gets insurance that will protect her if she is ever accused of incompetence or a crime. By law, this insurance must kick in if the teacher needs it. So when a teacher is accused of a criminal act, this insurance provides him or her with a lawyer. Not surprisingly, it looks as though “the union” is defending the teacher.
All labor unions protect their employees because that’s what labor unions do. However, because teachers are professionals, many people are surprised when this happens. When teachers are treated as other professionals are, their unions will morph into professional associations, as they were first meant to be.
As an aside, John Deasy of Los Angeles Unified is also trying to place the blame for the sex abuse scandal on “the unions” but when it is adjudicated we’ll see that the alleged abusers were hired, transferred, and evaluated by administrators, who didn’t even provide minimal supervision. We’ll find that administration turned a blind eye toward transgressions and ignored the complaints of parents, teachers and students. We’ll further find out that the only thing “the unions” did was to provide legal assistance to the accused teachers, as required by law. Yes, even schoolteachers have civil rights.
Linda…thank you for being dead-on correct in the above well-stated comments.
Exactly right.
I urge everyone to research the Broad Foundation. The various programs Eli Broad has established since 2000 to train administrators, teachers mainly from TFA, and CEOs for school districts, in a long term push to promote Charters and vouchers (to privatize using public tax money), and to reduce public education, as Grover Norquist says about governemnt, to drown it in the bathtub. He uses his vast wealth and power to get these grads of his short term training programs hired by major school districts nationwide, as with Rhee in DC, Deasy in LA, and the woman who is Supt. of the Chicago schools where she recently closed 54 schools which she called failing. Also Eli and Rhee’s influence is felt in Sacramento, Ca. where her current husband, the Mayor, closed 23 schools recently.
It is like KrystalNacht in the rapid full-force assault for what they call school reform. And it is like a virus, now catching on with big business leaders across the US.
Students, teachers, and communities be damned!
Broad has been the main influence in the rise of Rhee. He escorts her to speaking engagements, introduces her as the ‘second coming’ in the field of education, grossly exaggerating her resume and abilities. He has called in chits nationally, and with the media, to promote her. Yet he is not mentioned above in the list of funders.
Big mistake to downplay Eli who has a massive ego and wants not only to be the arbiter of all things in the Arts world, but also in the Education world. He has no respect for teachers and flaunts that attitude when presenting Rhee to the public. She of course, serves her master well. Watching her on the news shows, she is so arrogant about her methods, to break the unions, to fire teachers and administrators who disagree with her (and with Eli), that you can see pathology as well as politics in her character. She is a classic egomaniac who loves power and prestige. Eli has made that available to her.
I hold the media responsible for their part, a vast part, in promoting her as the prime leader of American education. We the People, have only the belief in a free press to educate and inform us…to help us find the truth. Everyone who blogs with Diane should be writing letters to the editors on this issue and help to inform all readers about this situation.
I made sure to make mention of Eli in a previous post on the same subject, for, certainly, Broad is very much largely responsible for the rise–and continued, unwavering promotion–of his Frankenstein, Rhee. Eli Broad–the great villainthropist.
Yesterday I erroneously laid some of the responsibility at the door of the Board… only to learn from other commenters that the Mayor passed a bill giving HIM full authority for hiring the Superintendent. I cannot think of a single case where this has resulted in the hoped for “improvement” in schools… It hasn’t worked in Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia and DC and it hasn’t done much in States where the Governor thinks they can run the how better than a board. Democracy is frustratingly slow but it seems to be far less disruptive to parents and students and does result in incremental change… Businessmen and business oriented school leaders like Michelle Rhee talk about accountability… but when the results don’t change or the results DO change because of cheating THEY are not accountable… it’s unions, teachers, and underlings who aren’t “measuring up” who are at fault… And Mayors and Governors? Do they EVER make a bad decision in hiring someone to run their schools?
Goodness. I wanted to expound more on Fred’s post, but I didn’t have the words for it. Now I do. Let’s be honest here. Michelle Rhee WAS in fact propped up by the corporatists wanting someone they could use to “shake things up” and she had just the right demeanor and connections to do such a thing. I mean, who really knew about her works until Time and Newsweek started putting her on the covers? All these people who think she “means well” and seems “well-intentioned” don’t actually analyze the bulk of her work and haven’t been poring over these things the way we have, yet only now do people feel some sort of contrition, as if we didn’t see a glaring need to investigate long before, as if one not-so-puffy piece dilutes the DVD box set of episodes dedicated in her honor. We were once all lumped as “critics” meaning “ignore them.” The tide is definitely turning.
Interesting that this promoter now has buyer’s regret? How touching! His ascription of responsibility for the creation of this malevolent malaise that has reeked havoc, nation wide is accurate, although shields heavier, financial backers and perpetrators to this well thought out campaign of destruction! Linda’s list is far more inclusive of corporate
tycoons who parasitically distort and disdainfully reek havoc on the entire public system!
That being obvious, there is a prescient, Harvard/Wharton school graduate that illustrates how far reaching the fight we are in truly is! We would be chasing gophers to use a limited realization of the intense, multifaceted cabal we are dealing with. The recently published book, Banker Occupation, Waging financial war on Humanity, by Stephen Lendman is an eye-opening revelation about the true enemies of not only
public education, but public financial viability. I feel it is pivotal to be aware of the global goal of these greed filled, bankers and corporations or we will be like Don Quixote,
forever tilting at windmills and gaining no victories.
Please add to this reading list, The Price of Inequality, Joseph Stiglitz, for a Nobelist university educator in economics point of view.
Today I wrote a note to Howard Blume who was the journalist for the Rhee article in the LA Times yesterday. I thanked him for the article and stated it should have been on page one, not at the back of the paper adjacent to the obits.
But I also included many of the thoughts we educators who blog here, and my colleagues in Ca., are expressing not loudly enough, but with great accuracy, and encouraged him to do an investigative piece focused on Rhee, the billionaires, and privatization, essentially on the potential death of free public schools.I suggested he start by interviewing Diane, but then interviewing teachers and administrators. We need to get our voices out every day in media…Rhee is able to do this…and we are a huge power block. But if we just talk to each other here, how will our neighbors know what is really happening.
I was shocked at how little my UCLA lifelong learning, highly educated and professional seniors, knew about it all. They too started last term blaming it all on the teachers, but I did find some converts when they saw 14 weeks worth of facts.
I am trying to pledge to myself to write at least a letter a day to a news organization of record. If we had 100,000 teachers doing this nationwide…wow.
Well, I just got John Merrow to disclose on his blog that he belongs to a union himself, SAG-AFTRA. I have to give him credit for replying to my inquiry with the truth, since he really didn’t have to be forthright about it.
However, that’s one more media pundit who has gone after teachers’ unions without mentioning that they themselves reap the benefits of unionization.
Why is union bashing not a problem for people who belong to other unions? I just don’t get that.
Non-Union Teacher
Jeez…if he’s in SAG, he’s an actor. Why does he write about education as though he is a trained ed wonk? So much for Merrow.
I would think that union membership is because he works for PBS on Frontline. According to Wikipedia, Merrow has a doctorate in Education and Social Policy from Harvard. I don’t know if he has ever been a classroom teacher himself though.
Sorry, meant to say “Frontline etc.”, because of his involvement in other shows on PBS, too.
Merrow was a teacher. Info about that is in the Intro to his last book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Influence-Teachers-Reflections-Leadership/dp/0615431720/
Everything is true except that the unions did not create her. This is a carefully designed program of “Orwellian Proportions.” Unions have not been their best friends that is for sure. My best friend is one of the founders of UTLA and it has morphed into something unrecognizable from what was formed and the reasons UTLA was formed. But that has not one thing to do with what the corporate privatizers and hedge funds are up to and how they do it. Rhee, Emmanuel, Obama, Duncan, Deasy, and such are merely their front men for a “Few Dollars More.”
Lil Wayne: “now I’m Bill Gate-in”
As an aside: this song is too crass to quote much of. But since I am on a self-determined mission to bring music into the education debate (to humanize it even more), it is interesting how Bill Gates’ name is even found in hip hop lyrics.
Woops. I just posted that on the wrong blog post.
On to Michelle Rhee music . . .
Bobby “Boris” Picket: “now everything’s cool, Drac’s part of the band, and my monster mash is the hit of the land. For you, the living, this mash was meant too. When you get to my door tell ’em Boris sent you . . .”
Okay, Joanne, this goes with my Rhee as Frankenstein created by Broad commentary. Except that I posted almost six hours later than you. (Laughing anyway.)
My question is, how do we identify who will take her place?
Harold–are you asking this in order that we be prepared to kibosh the new kid in town before he/she becomes the great savior of American children?
Rhee was born out of media types and profiteers. Too many people in the media have done everything possible to blame the teachers in the schools for urban failures. The teachers were an easy scapegoat. Unfortunately PBS, TIme, and Newsweek helped to promote the propaganda while profiteers saw an opportunity to take this bs for all it was worth. Teachers don’t have high powered jobs with high powered friends who would have been advocates for public ed. Instead, I blame media people like Merrow who put people like Rhee on tv and radio and never provided true investigative journalism. The media bought into the idea that people like Rhee would provide a no nonsense approach and get “lazy” teachers to work. I’ve seen so many interviews where media people kiss the rear ends of Gates and other super wealthy people. Rhee was born out of media kow towing to super wealthy reformers and walking all over teachers who lead ordinary lives without super wealthy friends. The idea that unions helped to create Rhee is silly. The media didn’t do their job from day one.
How many teachers in America has Merrow interviewed? I wish someone would do a large investigative piece about what teachers in America are going through. Start with charter school teachers please!!
DeeDee. Do you mean because for some Charter schools are their only option for employment and they miss public? (I really do want to know–my state has not been hit yet but I know it is in the works). Expound on that if you would.
For some teachers, charter schools are their only option . . . That is how my question should read
Yes. All charter teachers I know are trying to get into public schools. Charter schools are low paying (you never get raises), have no retirement (no pensions/no 401 k. They have massive turnover. Why? The financial part as well as poor treatment. The charters hire unqualified family members who have no business being in leadership positions. They hire people as principals who have never taught in their lives (nightmare). The massive staff turnover leads to constant dysfunction in the school because people don’t know what people did the year before and have to learn the job. On top of that, the people aren’t qualified and it leads to greater dysfunction. The school I’ve worked in has had 6 different teachers in one classroom alone in SEVERAL subject areas. How is this “turning around” education? It’s NOT!! The CEO makes tons of money and hires unualified relatives. The teachers have virtually no supplies. This is the future of education when you corporatize like the idiots from the US DOE are promoting. Fight the corporatization of schools at every turn!!
Dee Dee…you hit the nail on the noggin. With so many young people who graduate from good schools and still cannot find a jog, TFA is a way to go to find instant employment, even though it is low pay. Also, what most of the public does not understand is that many of these hungry but naive recent grads must also sign a contract that puts them on call 24/7 so parents and students can reach them constantly. Although this may benefit students, it is killing off these young inexperienced teachers who rarely stay in the field of education. Too often they flee right to the unemployment office.
It is super stress for them and for the students who must endure endless new faces in their often sub standard classrooms. And all this while the generally Broad trained CEOs live well on large incomes…paid for by OUR taxes.
The people like Gates and Broad are so egotistical that they can’t admit that what they’ve unleashed is complete garbage. This is a crime and students are getting LESS than what they had before. This is not an answer to the achievement gap.
They know it’s garbage.