Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel is right: Florida is better off for Michelle Rhee's not being interested in moving here. Thomas writes of Commissioner Eric Smith, "I've never met anyone at his level so uninterested in self-promotion and so totally absorbed in the mission." I also don't get any hint of self-promotion from him. Sometimes you don't have to scream to get things done, and when people get things done without the screaming, I think we leave them in place.
And then there's Rhee's new initiative, which she proclaims is not a war against teachers' unions, and about which Liam Julian lauds her goal "to separate the opinions of actual teachers from the institutional opinions of their unions." Ah, the messiness of democracy, including union democracy: both Michelle Rhee and George Packer were sent packing by DC politics. I suppose one way to view the world is to see a problem with living in a place with open elections: sometimes you are going to lose. You can claim the result was not really democracy, or the winners don't represent the real public (or the real teachers). And I'm glad Rhee landed on her feet, but I wish Liam Julian and others wouldn't try to spin her new initiative as being the true leader of teachers, whatever that might mean. That's shades of Mr. Booker T. Washington and others, if you catch my drift, and contradicts their criticism of unions.