Don't expect to hear about this
on the Washington Post editorial page
The
Wall Street Journal is the classic example of a newspaper where the reporters frequently do good, grounded-in-reality work while the editors hew closely to a pre-ordained, heavily politicized worldview. But
Media Matters shows how, on the subject of Michelle Rhee, the
Washington Post's editors have been, in the words of one of the paper's own education reporters, "steadfast, protective and, at times, adoring." (The blog post in which reporter Bill Turque said that was removed from the
Post's website.)
Media Matters offers a litany of cases in which the Post's editors attacked Rhee's critics and lauded Rhee—led by the editorial board's refusal to engage with the cheating scandal that took place on her watch.
Why? Because, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt told Media Matters, editors' support for Rhee's overall project trumped everything else, including cheating:
"Our view was that by abolishing the elected school board and taking full responsibility for the schools and then appointing a strong chancellor committed to a strong set of reforms, Mayor Fenty offered the best opportunity in a long time to actually make progress. And that if this chancellor missed, it might be a long time before the stars would align again and a serious attempt to improve the public schools would take place. Over the four years, our view was that Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee took a lot of hard decisions that were necessary. After four years the schools were in much better shape than they had been four years before and that was measurable and demonstrable."
So, for Fred Hiatt and the rest of the Post's editorial board, defending Michelle Rhee (even from the paper's own education reporters) was more important than whether the alleged improvements came through cheating, and more important than whether the alleged improvements even held up under scrutiny. In fact, they did not: Under Rhee, gains on one key test held steady at the rate her predecessors had seen, while gains on another were largely due to the fact that she changed which students took the test and how results for students who did not take the test were recorded. Those factors coupled with demographic changes and cheating account for the overwhelming bulk of the the improvements Rhee claimed and the Washington Post's editors were so insistent on crediting her with.
Not that we thought much better of the Fred Hiatt editorial page, but now we have it from him: The Washington Post's editorial page is concerned with broad political projects, not with any pesky details that might point to gaps and problems in those projects.