That Bee Eater Rhee Business

Watch The Education of Michelle Rhee on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

[Was meaning to get this posted yesterday but ran into time issues...]

Michelle Rhee is widely regarded as a grifter and con artist among segments of the educational community.

Her tenure as the DC public schools chancellor was tumultuous and divisive. This Frontline episode gets in to the tumult and divisiveness, but it barely explores the upshot of her brief sojourn in DC: becoming a national political player through her lobbying outfit, "StudentsFirst," which is closely aligned with the public school privatization efforts underwritten by the likes of the Arnolds and the Kochs and others of their ilk.  It may or may not be of interest that she is married to one of the headliners of public school privatization, former NBA player and current Sacramento, California, mayor Kevin Johnson. His St. HOPE and other charter school efforts remain deeply divisive in his own home town.

Though I have never encountered La Rhee myownself, I have had some dealings with KJ, and I would say "grifter" and/or "con man" is something of an understatement. What makes it kind of weird, though, is that it's not because he doesn't provide any value from his end, it's more because the way he sees it, everything is a Deal, and the Deal is his ostensible reason for being.

He seems to have conned a lot of people into doing things that they otherwise might not and somehow he winds up with lots of money in his pocket in the end -- or in the cash box of one of his innumerable for- and non-profit enterprises -- and that makes him happy. Well, judging by his overly toothy grin anyway.

I notice La Rhee has the same sort of massive-toothed grin -- when she gets her way. When she doesn't, oh dear... pout...

From the indications in the Frontline piece, Rhee is in it for the Power, and if it looks like her wings are going to be clipped, she's out. Buh. Bye. For her it's not so much the money, it's the control of the money, what she can do with the money. Her tenure in DC was tumultuous because she was high-handed, obsessive, intentionally cruel.... and often wrong. This last barely comes through in the Frontline piece, but while she claims huge gains in student achievement as measured by test scores when she was cracking the whip, in fact, it appears that while there were gains, they were modest at best, and the "massive" gains were bogus, either through direct manipulations of the test scores (which hasn't been officially proved) or some other means. Once security protocols were in place which limited or eliminated the possibility of cheating, test scores fell to more likely and modest levels.

In other words, the gains she touted under her strict -- and some would say demonic -- rule were actually quite small and might have been achieved through other,  more humane, ways.

Her educational theories might be relatively reasonable or they might have been naive or crackpot, but it is her personal hostility and utter lack of human compassion, as demonstrated by her treatment of DC school employees, as well as students, officials, and the People of DC, that primarily put her at odds with practically everyone in DC and got her out on her ass in the end.

She defends her cruelty in much the same way that the usual neo-liberal suspects do -- as something necessary for the Revolution they espouse. It is a revolution of privatization more than anything.

Rhee uses the rhetoric of Revolution proudly -- as do many neo-liberal ideologues -- but it seems to have missed the notice of many observers and commentators. Or if they notice, they tend to like it. Perhaps in the end, they might profit or be able to wield immense arbitrary power over others, even the power of life and death if they play their cards right. This sort of power or the money that makes it possible is intoxicating. A Revolution that is going to give you that -- or that you believe will -- is hard to resist. It's a very different animal than a People's Revolution as conceived in the many resistance movements around the world that seek to better the human condition for everyone.

As for public education... it is a battle ground, isn't it? And so it has been for nearly all of its existence in this country. Public education has been deeply resented, feared, denounced, and often interfered with by a vocal and sometimes very powerful minority throughout its history. I'm a product of California public education primarily in the 1950's and 1960's, during a period of extreme expansion and the accompanying growing pains, and any honest assessment would acknowledge both good an bad in kind of education we received. The major benefit of the kind of education I received is that I learned how to learn. It's not something that seems to be taught any more.

But public education in my day was fraught with fads and propaganda and all sorts of nonsense, including infamous episodes of witch hunting and Red baiting, and of course toward the very end of my high school days, it was fraught with student rebellion which ultimately led to street battles with Authority and all the social and cultural upheaval the '60's are notorious for.

Much of the information we were fed was straight-out propaganda about America The Wonderful, including many lies and distortions about American history and the Evils of Communist Russia. The truth, or something like it, would come out eventually, because it was still possible to learn how to learn, and primary research could still be undertaken with few restrictions.

Schools were not prisons in those days and they were not run like prisons. One didn't feel oppressed in school -- at least I didn't. One wasn't surrounded by suspicion, searches, surveillance, armed guards, high fencing, razor wire, locked gates, intricate permissions and so on. "Security" was barely thought of.

Despite a media obsession with Juvenile Delinquents (it was intense), there was actually very little of what we were supposed to be so very afraid of -- Youth Running Wild In the Streets, gangs of Young Toughs, and all the rest of it. There were Toughs, yes, and there were nascent Gangs, but they were rarely if ever what they were made out to be in the hyperventilations of the media of the era. "Style" is not the same thing as "action." A hair do is not a gang fight.

On the other hand, one wasn't treated like a Precious Treasure by parents or school authority. Far from it. There were certain general expectations of both behavior and educational accomplishment. Failure to meet them could be and sometimes was harshly punished -- though not necessarily physically.

The social melieu was that of the aftermath of the Depression and World War II; it was still highly, some would say rigidly, militarized, organized, and characterized by enforced conformity. Physical punishment wasn't typically necessary under the circumstances. Psychological persuasion was quite effective in enforcing a certain level of adherence to social and cultural norms.

One thing to keep in mind is that the differently abled were not necessarily accommodated in public schools at all. Sometimes they were, but it was rare. There was a separate and not necessarily equal system for the blind and the deaf and the crippled and the defective (as they were known in those days).

Schools were not necessarily racially integrated, either. Sometimes they were (such as some of the elementary schools I went to), but often they weren't. In the South, of course, racial integration was a huge and divisive issue, but it also affected public schools in the North and West, and it's not wise to pretend otherwise. There were riots over it, and not just in the South.

There were private schools, primarily Catholic. I don't recall anything about them until I was in high school, and they didn't seem to be all that different -- except that nuns taught the classes, and students had to do certain religious rites and rituals during the school day. No big. I heard about corporal punishment in Catholic schools, but no one I knew ever reported being subjected to it.

I'm one of those who claims that public education promptly went to shit after my high school class graduated. It's not so far from the truth, either, because Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California the year I graduated, and he set his people to work transforming and undermining public education (which he was politically opposed to in any case) as soon as he was inaugurated. His vow was to crush the student rebellions then under way and to make them impossible ever again in the future.

Well.

Here we are, eh?

Of course Rhee and KJ and all the rest of the Edumacation Reformationists (ie: those neo-libs intent on privatization) are too young to know anything about this. They are the product  of the period after the transformations of public education put in motion by Reagan. What they believe is what they were taught after the Reagan Revolution.  One of the intentions of the Reagan Revolution was to destroy public education.

Oh yes.

So. They have nearly accomplished their goal, and if Rhee's "StudentsFirst" lobbying outfit is successful, it will mean the final end of what we used to think of as "public education" in this country.

If they had something decent to replace it with, I might have a better opinion of the effort, but they don't, so I don't.

Grifters and con-artists rarely offer anything better, do they?

[When I get some time, I may add some additional links...]

Envisioning That Better Future -- Four: Educating Ourselves

Everyone should have the right to -- and access to -- a free public education all the way through advanced degrees if they're up to it. This right should not in any way be compromised or questioned, any more than a right to adequate and accessible health care should be.

I got an education myself about just what has happened to public education in this country during the early weeks of the Occupy Movement. I literally had no idea how bad the economic situation was, especially for college students. I had no idea that a public college eduction now cost so much and that the majority of the financial burden was being placed directly on the shoulders of students and their families, and that those costs could neither be paid off through employment (there were and are no jobs for millions) or be discharged through bankruptcy.

This situation is simply debt-slavery for many, many millions. There is no escape.

The economics are one side of the dilemma faced by so many modern students; the other side is the deplorable -- unconscionable -- quality of public education itself. I've been aware that the quality of education has been on a declining path for many a long year, but I was oblivious to how bad things had gotten.

One of the important aspects of public education in the Pre-Reagan Era was learning how to learn -- which led to life-time learning whether or not one engaged in formal research and study. One learned the techniques of learning fairly early in one's education, and so one was always learning; no topic or study was out of bounds, one pursued one's interests as one saw fit and information was available.

But that aspect of education seems to be gone now. Students don't learn how to learn any more, they learn discreet topics, and then only partially. They don't follow their own interests, they are channeled into particular occupational categories and needs. Nor, shockingly, do they learn critical thinking skills; instead, they are often taught to simply accept what they are told by Authority and often to follow commands of Authority unquestioningly.

Good heavens! What happened?

So in addition to paying an arm and a leg -- and their firstborn -- for the privilege of being educated at all, students are having to put up with absolutely crap educational standards that don't even begin to advance or support the notion of learning as a good thing in and of itself.

Clearly, the Powers That Be don't consider adequate public education -- especially higher education -- to be a public good at all. They see it as a privilege for an elite, not for the common people at all.

One of the primary impetuses for the Occupy Revolution has been the crabbed and extraordinarily costly -- and ultimately deceitful -- nature of what passes for a modern public education. Students provided much of the energy for the rising in Wisconsin last winter, and students and recent graduates have been at the forefront of the Occupy Rising throughout. They are the ones who have seen their futures stolen right out from under them, and they have been the ones bearing the brunt of the repression as well. But then I'm coming to the realization that that's been their lot in life all along.

Repression is the hallmark of modern public education.

And that has to change fundamentally.

The Internet has provided a means -- that previously could only be imagined -- to provide a free and quite public education for the masses that includes such things as learning how to learn and critical thinking that have been long absent from the classroom.

What it doesn't and can't provide is the classroom itself. One of the things I discovered in the early weeks of the Occupy Movement was that classrooms could be spontaneously generated and that people would almost automatically attend -- because they truly wanted to learn, were almost desperate to do so. And they wanted to do it in direct connection with others of like mind.

How to translate that desire and those resources into the education of the Better Future we envision is still a work in progress, but there is no doubt that completely overhauling and revising education in this country is a key factor in the Rebellion that's taking place.

Education is the core project of the Revolution.

It is through education that we create the Future we want to see.