Grover “Russ” Whitehurst was ousted from his job as head of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Whitehurst had previously been research director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the George W. Bush administration. He was, of course, a big supporter of testing and choice. He even created an annual ranking of the districts with the most school choice. He gave Brookings, once known as a liberal think tank, a rightwing gloss.

In 2012, Whitehurst fired me as a Senior Fellow at Brookings, an unpaid position. I had been at Brookings since 1993. From 1993-95, I was in residence and wrote a book there on national standards. I had originally been offered the Brown Chair at Brookings but turned it down because I wanted to return to Néw York City.

Whitehurst said he was removing me from my unpaid position because I was “inactive.” At the time, my book “Death and Life of the Great American School System” was ranked as the #1 social policy book on amazon. Inactive? Hardly.

The day I was terminated, I posted on the Néw York Review of Books blog a piece that was highly critical of Mitt Romney. Whitehurst was a Romney adviser. A few hours later, I received an email from Whitehurst saying I was no longer a Senior Fellow due to my inactivity. He later said there was no connection between my anti-Romney post and his decision to drop me from a post I had held for many years, without any notice or conversation.

It will be interesting to see who replaces Whitehurst, whether liberal, conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative.