Hat tip Daily Caller and Education Week
When the Occupy movement was running amok across America during the past couple of years, they distinguished themselves not just by their thuggish, anarchistic tactics, but also by occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism. Now here come the union types and Occupy types who showed up at the Department of Education. One public school teacher called out an education reformer as "an Asian bitch."
http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/10/occupy-thug-calls-michelle-rhee-asian-bitch/
Michelle Rhee, in case you didn't know, was previously the head of the Washington DC school district. That is until the union bullies decided they didn't want reform in the district. They just wanted to maintain the (low) status quo and their jobs. Rhee was run out of her job.
Of course, Rhee, who is of Korean descent, belongs to one of those minorities that can be insulted with no penalty (like whites and Jews). In fact, in education circles, the success of Asian-American students in schools and universities has created a lot of envy in certain quarters as well as distress in others. In California, the academic elite often discusses ways to cut back on Asian-American enrollment in universities because they are so heavily over-represented because of their own merits.
None dare call it racism.
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5 comments:
Rhee was a poor administrator who never made much impact on the quality of education. She lost her job because a newly elected mayor didn't choose to keep her on.
Wrong. She was shaking things up and trying to reform a poor school system. There was an organized attempt to remove her.
Yes Gary, she was "shaking things up" and "trying to reform a poor school system." There was, from the beginning "an organized attempt to remove her."
But, her shaking up wasn't doing anything particularly beneficial or praiseworthy -- only her vision of what might be had arguable merit -- she did not achieve reforms, and the demands to remove her were impotent so long as the mayor who appointed her retained office. When he fell, she fell.
She did have plenty of opposition. That would impede anyone. But she wasn't particularly skilled at dealing with the opposition, nor of mobilizing anyone else to be inspired by her vision. She was ineffectual, at best.
I've seen lengthy interviews with her. Her rhetoric was unimpressive, uninspiring, full of pat little cliches, and lacked substance.
W#asn't she trying to hold subpar teachers and schools accountable? That of course, is a cardinal sin to the unions and educational establishment.
I could join you in a critique of teachers unions, just as I had my own critique of ossified thinking in the union when I was a shop steward.
(For an example of the latter, see:
http://siarlysjenkins.blogspot.com/2011/03/providing-sick-days-and-keeping-abuse.html)
Basically, the "work product" of the teachers is a set of human beings, not machinery coming off the assembly line. Metal parts can be tested mathematically for quality. Children are not so easy to quantify. I'm all for reasonable job security, good pay packages for a damn difficult job, but there are at least two sets of "human rights" at issue, and both need to have their place at the table. You can get by with merely competent factory workers, you need superlative teachers.
That said, you can talk all you want about the problems that you'd like to think, and Michelle Rhee would like to think, she was somehow addressing.
She didn't get the job done. Whether she was really trying to hold sub-par teachers accountable, or whether she was just talking a good talk that she thought would make for cheap political grandstanding and keep her job secure for another year, is not at all clear.
She doesn't seem to have inspired much support from parents, which is a rather telling failure in itself.
Its not good enough that concerned pundits and bloggers mourned her departure. There's not much evidence that anyone in DC, who allegedly should have been benefiting from her concern, notice anything missing when she left.
You know the eternal argument about communism Gary... but our intentions were good... wouldn't a world free of exploitation be a good thing... if we only had one more chance... you sound a bit like that, championing what you hoped Rhee stood for, rather than judging her by the results she achieved.
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