Michelle Rhee
Critics of Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown, her successor as the face of corporate education policy, are
meeeaan, a very serious analyst
argued Tuesday at TPM Cafe. Never mind that Rhee gleefully invited reporters to film her firing people and Brown is refusing to disclose exactly whose big money she's fronting for, and that both push disastrous policies, their critics are just so mean, it's terrible. Of course the education debate has many voices and some of those may occasionally be legit unpleasant, but in real life, there's no comparison between some person being mean on the internet and the kind of damage that people like Rhee and Brown support are doing every day. Let's take one recent case. Remember the Georgia state senator who's trying to close down an early voting site
because too many black people might vote there? Yeah. That guy. Let's talk about his ties to StudentsFirst, the organization Rhee founded.
State Sen. Fran Millar not only thinks that having an early voting location in an area "dominated by African American shoppers and ... near several large African American mega churches" would be a big problem—he'd prefer "more educated voters"—he's also been the state Senate Education Committee chair. In that role, he lavishly praised the StudentsFirst state education report card. That report card doesn't focus on results. It focuses only on whether state education laws conform to StudentsFirst-preferred policies—basically states are graded on whether they attack teachers and privatize education sufficiently. The National Education Policy Center labeled it bunkum. But to Millar, it was "a thoughtful, well-researched tool that will help guide lawmakers toward putting policies in place that have the power to transform our schools." In other words, he saw it as his marching orders.
And no wonder. StudentsFirst has endorsed Millar and has given him $4,000 in direct contributions since late 2011. So this is the kind of politician Michelle Rhee built an organization to support—an education committee chair who doesn't want black people to vote because they're not educated enough for his taste. This is not a first. In recent years, StudentsFirst has named a Tennessee legislator as "reformer of the year" who co-authored a "Don't Say Gay" bill banning teachers from talking about LGBT issues at all and, in Millar's own state of Georgia, has named a "reformer of the year" who repeatedly sponsored anti-immigrant bills.
I'm sure someone on the internet has been mean to Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown. But the policies they support are destructive to tens of millions of American students and teachers, and Rhee's organization at least has been totally willing to back legislators whose bills attack gay students, immigrants, and black voters—as long as they also support legislation attacking teachers and taking the "public" out of public education.