Ex-Washington, DC schools chief escalates campaign against public education

[Hannah Bell]

When Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington, DC school system since 2007, resigned abruptly last October, some suggested she had suffered a major reverse in her campaign for school “reform...”
It quickly became clear, however, that it will take far more than an election that substitutes one big business politician for another to defeat the attacks on public education for which Rhee has become one of the most prominent spokespersons...

Thus it was not surprising that only a few weeks after her resignation, Rhee was featured in Newsweek magazine and on the Oprah Winfrey show to announce that she was founding and leading a new organization, StudentsFirst, to continue the crusade she had begun in the US capital...A major focus of its work will be political advertising paid for by wealthy backers who will be able to remain anonymous under current campaign finance rules...

The attacks on “failing schools” have absolutely nothing to do with improving education for the vast majority of the working class... The aim is to hollow out the public schools, to create conditions that will be used to further justify the destruction of public education. At the same time, a tiny layer of students will be recruited, in the way that affirmative action programs have been used in the past, to meet the needs of 21st century American capitalism, while condemning the vast majority to poverty and misery.

The demonizing of teachers and the public schools is an integral part of the attack on all public services and social programs...Rhee has been groomed to play a key role in this campaign. A Korean-American, she is being marketed as a “woman of color” who will stand up to the teachers and their unions...The strident campaign against public education has been virtually unopposed... Rhee’s supposed critics in the teachers’ unions...accept all the basic premises of the misnamed “reform” movement. Their alternative to Rhee is summed up in a recent advertisement in the New York Times by AFT President Randi Weingarten, titled “Collaboration Trumps Conflict.” It is not accidental that Weingarten, a Democrat and loyal supporter of the Obama Administration, parrots the president’s call for cooperation and bipartisanship...

One of the biggest lies of the school reform advocates is that charter schools represent a new frontier of the civil rights movement... The obvious truth is that unequal education can only be ended through the struggle against social inequality itself...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/rhee-j26.shtml

[ashling]

1. Whenever I look at her I think

Michelle Malkin