So Michelle Rhee is announcing her resignation tomorrow, and I have one request for anyone who is tempted to comment on her "style," a la Maureen Dowd: please don't.
If you're tempted to write about how Rhee closed schools in a high-handed manner, please consider instead the policy issues: how schools are often some of the few public institutions in very poor neighborhoods, and how Rhee's discussions did not raise issues of how the same properties might still be used for the neighborhoods, if not as schools. That's urban policy, not style.
If you're tempted to write about the infamous "broom" picture, think instead about the dilemmas of firing significant numbers of mid-level managers in a public bureaucracy when those managers are often well-respected residents of middle-class neighborhoods. I forget whether Mike Petrilli or Rick Hess mentioned this issue, but one of them did in a recent "Education Gadfly" podcast, and whoever did is correct. That's urban politics, not style.
If you're tempted to write about Rhee's semi-insulting comments about teachers delivered in whatever tone of voice you infer, please write instead about IMPACT and the contract with WTU: the attempt to impose a new evaluation system and the bargaining she drew Randi Weingarten into. That's the management of power, not style.
If you're tempted to write about the "style" of Michelle Rhee in any way, you need to persuade me that a different person with a different style would have faced fewer or different problems with the same substantive decisions. Some things would have been different, but you'll have an uphill battle in the argument. Marshal some good arguments if you're so inclined.
I don’t think you can separate the two. In politics, style and substance are linked. I can’t persuade you that someone with a different style would have achieved different results any more than I can prove a negative. Counter-factual history is pretty, but it’s also fiction.
I am in complete agreement with this. I love that you’re more focusing on policy than style. Unfortunately, too many people are so superficial in their dissections of the ed-reformers that it actually strengthens their points. Policy is the critical component. Thank you for this.
Style is a part of politics. The best example is IMPACT. The same evaluation system in the hands of of Tom Payzant would be a valuable tool. In the hands of evaluators ordered by Rhee to “go hard or go home,” it can’t be trusted. Since it couldn’t be negotiated, IMPACT must either be monkey wrenched, or taken away from Rheeocrats. Only then could it be trusted as an institutionalized system.
You yourself alluded to closing schools that represents both educational and urban politics. You yourself describe schools as social organizations.
All social organizations are politics. All tests, assessments, and grades are political. All evaluations are politics. We don’t need the venom of scorched earth politics being dumped on our school where the poison just rolls down hill polluting children’s educational environments.
I bet its true in all areas, but in the social organizations that are schools, we hear the music not the lyric. The words articulating policy are never, never, never as important as the way the words are communicated. Its not even close.
And that gets back to the exchange over TNTP which also uses words as tools, not as things that have meaning. That why I asked your opinion of how many of their words do they believe.
The strange thing about Rhee, and one of the reason why she was so dangerous, is that she seemed to really believe the extrme things she said.
I understand the difference between classroom instruction and management, but we also need to remember that the politics of education is about educating children, not just destroying your enemies. Whether you call it style or you call it common decency, were Rhee a classroom teacher and pulled the type of stunts she pulled, she should have been fired.
And by the way, repeating falsehoods during termination processes crosses the line from style to illegality when done under oath. In politics we can admire rogues who are stylish in urinating in peoples’ ears and calling it rain. Several times Rhee crossed the legal line, and often came close to perjury. The ends justifying the means style of politics, by creating a culture of dishonesty, does substantial harm to kids.
John,
When I think of the Maureen Dowd-ish style of commentary, I don’t mean perjury or orders to subordinates that rip apart relationships in schools (which are the allegations in your comment). I meant the “if she hadn’t talked meanly in public or posed with a broom” comments I’ve seen here and there. I don’t give a horse’s patootie whether she posed with a broom, and that’s the point I was trying to make.
You say patootie, Rhee says crap, let’s call the whole thread off.
I should submit this at your last post, but you gave the proper characterization of the issue of students’ rights to an education vs. discipline. Which, by the way, the another reason why I prefer Dowd over Goodman. Its an issue that Dowd would tackle with her wonderful style, but that respectable people duck.
Well meaning people must examine the events that led to this victory.
That would include certainly the policies, and the speed and depth to which they were carried out, (latter two might be interpreted as style).
It would include the political mood. Why did Rhee lose the election in 2010? Would she have lost in 2009? 2008? (clearly not) What was different on the ground?
It would also include the style of the scheme’s hapless spokeswoman. They used her to taunt us. She became the powerful symbol of our enemies, and they cheered every demeaning, insulting word.
Her status as symbol, derived in large part from her style, is what makes this a national victory. Were DC’s reform policies really the most noxious and vile? Perhaps.
And the style issue matters to understanding how they chose this symbol. It was part of her role as Chancellor in DC, and perhaps her life in education before (and after?) It may help explain why our enemies at Teach for America chose to promote her and not someone else.
So please, talk, policy, style, rise, fall. But it would be nice to draw some lessons for our next battle.
I think that drawing a line from Rhee’s service in TFA to Fenty’s defeat is too direct, not very plausible (for one thing, I suspect most DC residents have no clue where Rhee started).
I did not mean to draw a straight line from TFA to Rhee’s defeat.
Rather, I offered that her style may have led to her promotion by TFA. Certainly there’s nothing else about her that separates her from the majority of TfAers. There’s no evidence that she was a particularly good or bad teacher, or that she distinguished herself in some way. There is a boastfulness, an arrogance, and an air of superiority that she had at least by the time she was at (New Teacher Project?)
That same style may have led in part to her defeat at the polls.
Her story has been mythologized and promoted in that form to the point where I bet quite a few DC residents know where she came from. Not that it really matters.