Michelle Rhee is attracting attention because she is that rarest of persons: A CEO dedicated to busting her industry's union.
You'll not find this description anywhere else, because Michelle Rhee is the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, and this automatically makes her an education reformer, even though her strategy so far has consisted entirely of firing a bunch of principals and attempting to remove all employment protections for teachers in order to put the fear of God in them, coupled with paying certain high performers exorbitant salaries in the conservative's classic strategy of drumming up support for their polices. She's basically using a few high-paid teachers to convince all the rest of DC's educators that, with hard work and pluck and, um, American spirit or something, they too can earn six figures while teaching high school, so lets all support policies that benefit only those few at the top out of our unfounded hopes that everyone can be at the top!
Anti-union rhetoric is at a fever pitch, especially when it comes to our schools and automakers. There's a lot that needs to be said about this, and I'm sure Sir Charles will weigh in with his years of expertise in this are. But let me at least explain one thing that Ezra frankly gets exactly wrong in this post. In it, Ezra quotes an email correspondent on the issue of tenure:
So I read this article about Michelle Rhee and the end of tenure in DC,
and I have some serious misgivings...As a grad student studying to be a
math teacher, I am all for reform. Who needs tenure? I should only get
better at my job as I get older. That's how most jobs work. If I need a
guarantee not to be fired...well I just don't.
What are they teaching kids in graduate school? Tenure is "a guarantee not to be fired?" The problem with these debates is that so many of them occur in places like LA, New York and Washington, DC - and the key factor linking all these cities' schools is not that they're urban or poor, but that they're in liberal cities. They aren't in states where the State Board of Education establishes requirements to teach Creationism in science class, where campaigns against reading lists are as predictable as the sunrise, where teachers work every day with the very real threat of losing their jobs because of out-of-control religious fundamentalists.
Except for tenure. Anyone who thinks tenure is a guarantee not to be fired is naive and uninformed at best. Tenure isn't any thing, it's just a set of rules for terminating an educators employment. If there is a poor teacher that's never held accountable for his or her poor teaching, it's not the fault of tenure, it's the fault of lazy, ineffective and frankly incompetent administrators. School principals, district administrators and superintendents are supposed to be the experts. That's why the national average salary for principals is almost $80,000/yr and over $120,000 for superintendents, while teachers are paid an average of just under $35,000. Administrators are paid the big bucks, relatively speaking, because they're supposed to be able to handle things like getting rid of incompetent teachers.
So Michelle Rhee can earn her salary just like everyone else. If the teachers' unions in DC are constantly opposed to eradicating tenure, maybe it's not just because they're fossilized anachronisms intent on protecting their own interests at the expense of the children in their care. Maybe it's because eradicating tenure is a bad idea. It was a bad idea 100 years ago, it's a bad idea now and it will be a bad idea 100 years from now when Grover Norquist's trust fund great-great-grandchildren are still arguing for it. Maybe the unions oppose it because they understand that it's not their job to make sure Michelle Rhee's job - for which she is paid $275,000 and gets a district car and driver - is easy. It's the unions' job to make sure that teachers, who do the real heavy lifting in our schools, are given the freedom and other tools they need to effectively educate the district's children.
Supposedly there was a time when the right-wing argued in good faith, when there was an actual nuanced debate in this country between reasonable people on both sides who sincerely wanted to make things like public schools work. I don't know, because in my adulthood the debate has consisted of people who think public schoosl and Social Security are prettty good ideas pitted against crazed right-wingers frothing at the mouth as they attempt to completely dismantle every public institution they can get their grubby hands on. If progressives find themselves in agreement with union-bashers and anti-tax zealots, perhaps it's a good idea to wonder why instead of uncritically accepting it.
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