Michelle Rhee is is a one-person PAC. She is raising hundreds of millions of dollars from rightwing billionaires and foundations and corporations to subsidize her program.
What is her program? Destroy teachers’ unions; eliminate tenure and seniority; privatize public education. Having failed to transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, she now wants to privatize public education everywhere.
When I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I learned from a Democratic state senator that Rhee had poured $105,000 into a race between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Democrat. The difference between them? The conservative Democrat supports vouchers. My informant said, “Candidates here will jump through hoops for a contribution of $1,000. Getting $105,000 is unimaginable.” Rhee bought the election. The voucher-loving Democrat won. He added: Most of Rhee’s money goes to conservative Republicans.
She is trying to buy a seat in Connecticut now. A reader writes:
Rhee’s fraud of an organization has nothing to do with students, teaching or learning. It is a political lobbyist group that secretly slithers around the nation passing our billionaire donated cash to influence and bribe politicians. Her dirty donations push the privatization, anti-union, anti-public school, collective bargaining busting, teacher trashing dogma down their throats. Here she is a pariah and getting her money is the kiss of death here in CT:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I may be late on this, but why was Rhee selected as the face of reform? anyone know. I am just not getting the why of selecting her.
Don’t feel bad, Cynthia. You’re certainly not the only person who’s apparently late to this show. I’m guessing that just like during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Rhee and others of her ilk still perceive most Americans as knuckle-dragging buffoons who either cannot or will not take appropriate action. To borrow from from Anonymous, “Expect us.”
As near as I can tell, it’s because she’s a hot, ballsy female – traits which seem to attract certain kinds of mercenary rich right-wingers (note, not all right-wingers are Republican).
Well, “hot” is a subjective thing. There’s no accounting for taste.
Hot not…sleazy yup! I always get a dominatrix vibe when I happen to view her and then I click away ASAP.
Mean, tough, not “hot”
Like a dominatrix in a field of soft-hearted compassionate people
I put her in the same league as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, etc. I think the same kinds of guys who find those two “hot” also find Rhee “hot”.
Perhaps as simple as she is a well off (daughter of physician) well connected (private prep school, Cornell and Harvard alum), brilliant self promoter.
None of her glory stories from her teaching days seem to check out, none of her ” accomplishments” as Queen of DC have improved anything for the students there (flat scores, cheating scandals in her wake).
And yet, the press seem to just swallow every word she says.
Brilliant conn artist.
I still cannot find her “glory stories” from her teaching days. Did she bring any innovation to the classroom? Did she present locally or nationally to share her “glory?” Rhee spent 3 years teaching- most likely average teaching. Where’s that “famous Liberal Press” to “rat her out”? Pft. Rhee is now working her black magic in Michigan with the governor, & the republican think tank, The Mackinac Center. Despite less than convincing data to support the efficacy of Charters, they have uncapped the restrictions on Charters- no accountability measures needed obviously. The MC strongly connected to the Devos family, a family famous for trying to move vouchers for pvt education in Michigan. Rhee is the Fox News of Ed Reform- noise and half-truths, over substance and fact.
She is an excellent public speaker. That’s just a fact.
Actually I disagree. She can repeat the same talking points ad nauseum. Have you ever seen her challenged, questioned in any way? She shuts up pretty quickly…and then just goes back to her memorized schtick.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18592185
She does her best when appearing at the millionaire and billionaire boys’ clubs. Put her in a forum and have her questioned by Diane, Leonie, Matt Farmer, etc….she would never take the challenge.
That was my experience on a panel with Rhee. When I challenged her “facts,” she backed off and turned to another fantasy shtick. Someone else challenged that one, and again she retreated.
Right except that she needs a truth squad to follow her.
She was the fairest of them all.
I also have great distrust for Michelle Rhee. And I’m very concerned that there are major questions about her, her organizations, and the people she’s connected with that have yet to be answered.
The three major questions about Michelle Rhee are as follows:
1) How much money has Michelle Rhee made since she started parading around the country, selling her “education” ideas? Rhee refuses to discuss this at all. Yet, she’s clearly a public figure, with great influence and she’s also heavily involved in influencing elections—taking huge sums of money from various wealthy sources and handing it over, with definite strings attached, to candidates of her liking.
I’ve heard estimates of $2.7 million, on average, each year, since Rhee left her job in Washington D.C. She’s become very wealthy but refuses to let anyone know how much she’s making from a “social service” group.
Why not? Why is Rhee refusing to be open and honest with the public? Why is she covering up her income and its source?
2) Is Rhee using the money from her “non profit” organization and using its tax status for questionable or even illegal purposes? Is Rhee legally entitled to use her organization’s revenue for personal enrichment? And do her contributors know that their donations are being used for both Rhee’s excessive compensation and her influence peddling?
3) Is the mainstream media failing in its job to scrutinize and follow up on Rhee? For months, Rhee was one of the people being investigated for a major, serious cheating scandal during the time she ran the Washington DC schools. Many questions needed to be answered, but the “investigation” seemed to take a very long time to commence. Then, we heard very little about it—with some notable and praiseworthy exceptions, like Michael Winerip, who has since been dismissed from the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/education/duncan-and-rhee-on-panel-amid-dc-schools-inquiry.html?ref=michellerhee
The “cheating investigation” was a laughable whitewash. Rhee was barely “investigated” and that “investigation” was all done within Rhee’s old school district—carried out by one of her HAND-PICKED CRONIES!
This absolute whitewash was so extreme, so egregious, that you might think IT would then become subject to great criticism and controversy. Not a chance. It was as if the major media organs had already invested to much in “Our Girl” and decided to circle the wagons in her defense. And it came just in time for Rhee’s re-emergence everywhere, as she struts around, arrogantly pontificating, while looking like a Jackie-O wannabee.
Here are two of the ONLY pieces I saw that took the Rhee Cheating Scandal Investigation seriously, and denounced it as an egregious whitewash. Are there others?
I’m hoping that some individuals will sue Rhee and the Washington DC schools to force a REAL investigation. All citizens—in our nation’s capital and everywhere—need to know the full and absolute truth.
Actually, Jay Matthews of the Washington Post devotes his column to this issue (the non-investigation of the cheating scandal) periodically. Problem is, it’s never a front page story.
Diane…. correct me if I read this wrong, but I think your new book coming out next year has an entire chapter dedicated to Rhee and it may blow away all her claims to fame. Baltimore was NOT a miracle. DC was not a miracle. And now she is riding high on other people’s money while experimenting on other people’s children. She will go down in history as the Bernie Madoff of education deform.
You got that right.
I only saw two pieces that revealed how outrageous it was for this phony “investigation” of the DC Schools Cheating Scandal to pass by, almost without ever being noticed by the mainstream media.
It was a clear whitewash. And now Rhee is back, more arrogant than ever, looking as if she and her clandestine empire are untouchable.
Kudos to Jay Mathews for this excellent piece: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/dc-schools-cheating-report-thin-and-biased/2012/08/11/569d3f5c-e40d-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html#pagebreak
And thanks to Valerie Strauss for her very good contribution: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-deafening-silence-on-test-cheating/2012/08/11/d4d565e2-e2fb-11e1-a25e-15067bb31849_blog.html
And here’s a very good summary on a lesser known blog: http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/whitewash-by-dcs-inspector-general-on-cheating-on-high-stakes-tests-in-dc-public-schools/
Again, it’s up to US to continue to ask these questions. Why weren’t any questions related to this cheating scandal asked of Rhee during the recent “Education Nation” series on NBC, for starters?
Corporate education form is a form of looting and social vandalism, and has as its point person the sociopathic Michelle Rhee. Though it’s usually pointless to psychoanalyze public figures, Rhee is a special, extreme case. It says much about the times we live in that the Overclass would invest so much in someone like this.
Has this woman conned and hustled her funders along with most others, or is she an accurate reflection of the viciousness at the heart of corporate reform?
Sociopaths are usually defined as people suffering from a personality disorder characterized by:
– Compulsive Lying: see her fabrications about her Baltimore years and tenure in DC.
– Coldheartedness/Lack of Empathy: “Want to see me fire someone?” and her appalling use of her daughters to make a political point about how coddled American children are. As the Memphis Commercial Appeal – in the state where her ex-husband is the Education Commissioner – reported, to make a point about how children should not receive praise, Rhee said, ” ‘My girls play soccer. They suck at soccer,’ said Rhee, whose young daughters sat cringing in the crowd.” (http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jul/18/state-of-education/?print=1)
– Narcissism, Superficial Charm and Glibness: the woman is a 200-proof distillation of self-promotion and talking points.
– Manipulativeness: see her interference with an investigation into sexual harassment charges against her future husband, Kevin Johnson (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2009/11/20/what-was-michelle-rhees-damage-control-for-kevin-johnson) and deceptive marketing practices for StudentsFirst.
Readers of this blog could add their own favorites. Again, the real question is not so much Rhee, who will crash and burn one day, but whether she is truly indicative of the pathology pulsing at the center of the hostile takeover of the public schools, and if so, how to counteract that poison.
Good post, Michael. I concur.
Rhee’s pursuit of former NBA star, Kevin Johnson, is particularly telling, given that he was already under investigation for more than one incident before they met. Johnson’s voice was even captured on the voicemail of a 16 year old girl, telling her that he’s “sorry” for what he did to her. Wow.
Here’s some more on Johnson: Even more troubling, Johnson continues to reap government tax dollars for youth programs while he remains dogged by questions about his predatory behavior with teenage girls. A little-noticed section of the joint November 2009 report by GOP Sen. Charles Grassley and GOP Rep. Darrell Issa on Walpin’s firing revealed that the AmeriCorps inspector general’s investigator “became aware of allegations of inappropriate contact between Johnson and three female St. HOPE students.”
Their stories mirror a similar incident involving Johnson (then 29 and playing for the Phoenix Suns) and a 16-year-old girl dating back to 1995.
Johnson’s attorney, Kevin Hiestand, approached at least one of the St. HOPE students describing himself only as “‘a friend of Johnson’s,'” and “basically asked me to keep quiet,” according to the student. She had complained to St. HOPE officials that Johnson groped her sexually after instructing her to grade papers with him in her apartment. The report also highlighted what clearly looks like a hush-money and witness-tampering attempt: “According to her interview with OIG investigators, about one week later, Kevin Johnson offered her $1,000 a month until the end of the program, which she refused to accept.”
Erik Jones, a teacher at St. HOPE, reported to the police that one of his students told him Johnson “started massaging her shoulders and then reached over and touched her breasts.” Jones quit his job in protest over the seeming cover-up of Johnson’s harassment and wrote in his resignation letter that “St. HOPE sought to intimidate the student through an illegal interrogation and even had the audacity to ask me to change my story.”
Another student recounted for investigators how Johnson “kissed her cheek, brushed up against her” and touched her thigh on various occasions — as well as flipping up her skirt on a St. HOPE-sponsored trip to Harlem. She didn’t report the incidents to AmeriCorps officials at the time because she “feared she would be terminated.”
Another St. HOPE official, Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez, also left Johnson’s nonprofit over the whitewash. Michelle Rhee, Johnson’s fiancee and former D.C. schools chief, was a St. HOPE board member at the time.
The Grassley-Issa report noted, “According to Wong-Hernandez, Rhee learned of the allegations and played the role of a fixer, doing ‘damage control'” and vouching for Johnson’s character.
He’s a “good guy,” Rhee told Walpin. Taxpayers — and especially parents of teenage girls and AmeriCorps workers in Sacramento schools — should beg to differ.
She ought to be locked up–not praised.
With her pedophile husband…
Click to access Phoenix_Police.source.prod_affiliate.4.pdf
Not to put too fine a point on it, but he is technically an ephebophile. Not that that is much of an improvement.
You are responsible for my vocabulary growth over the past weeks. Yes, you are correct. Now we know why her girls live with their dad.
Gosh, Linda, I had to look up Alan’s word. Another one of the new things I’ve learned today.
When all the reform rats have finally been flushed out of their holes and backed into a corner by the enraged masses that are fed up with the corruptness of their lies, I suggest we have a tar and feather party. Ahhhhh…sweet justice!
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As for Rhee and the term hot:: Beauty may only be skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone. She would encourage me to start a monastic order in a remote desert if she were the prime exemplar of feminine charm. My sanity would demand solitude.
In Nashville, Rhee or her lobby spent quite a bit on the last school board election. The charter advocate and incumbent chair received around $110,000. She lost. However, the others who got financial support in that race won. I think the candidates age had something to do with it as inner city Nashville is trending younger and Whiter.
You who are interested in this topic should be following the events in TN and Nashville specifically where the school board rejected a Great Hearts charter 3 times. The GOP governor cut $ out of the fund the city receives from the state govt in response. That’s thanks to new legislation aimed at destroying public education, er I mean facilitating charter applications.
Wait a minute…she spent three years in the classroom? Three years? At three years you have only just begun to figure out who you are as a teacher. Believing you know enough to determine what should and should not go on in a classroom after such minimal experience is another case of willful ignorance. Good heavens, who put her in such places of authority? And why haven’t we collectively laughed her out of a job? What a joke.
Let’s not forget that she bragged about taping students’ mouths when she was a teacher. Where was her principal? Sounds like she was one of those bad teachers who should have been fired!
I’m sure there is a special place for Michelle and her husband, Kevin “16 Candles” & “Hey Gurl- Are you 16?” Johnson. I’m just not sure where.