Freedom Line Blog

If the next Republican president has a brain in his head — and if the federal Department of Education must remain (it sadly seems as if we’re beyond a day when cabinet departments can disappear, their very existence now functioning as prima facie evidence of their worth) — he’ll pick Michelle Rhee to be his Secretary of Education.

Rhee spent three years as the chancellor of Washington D.C.’s public schools — one of the nation’s worst (and most expensive) educational systems — before resigning in the fall of 2010 with the election of a new mayor. During that time, Rhee was a game-changer, firing nearly 250 under-performing teachers in one blow, closing down failing schools, and devising an extraordinarily clever workaround for tenure reform.

These days, Rhee is running an education non-profit and living in Sacramento, where her husband, former NBA star Kevin Johnson, is the mayor. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend, she demonstrated why — in addition to her impressive record — she has the chops to be the next Secretary of Education; Because she not only has a strong grasp on first principles, but an artful way of presenting them:

Q: You are archenemy No. 1, according to the teachers unions. Do you see a way to work with them rather than wage war with them?

Rhee: First of all, we definitely did not wage war on the union. In fact, the union has very little to do with what we’re focused on really at all.

What we are focused on is a pro-kid agenda. And if we have to fight the existing district bureaucracy, state legislators, teachers, whoever is standing in the way of kids getting the education they deserve and trying to protect the status quo, and maintain the way things are, we’re going to be willing to fight against any of those.

I believe that the teachers unions are doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. They were designed to be professional organizations that protect the rights and privileges and pay of their members. … The problem is that we don’t have an organized national interest group with the same heft as the teachers union that’s advocating on behalf of children.

This, it seems to me, is a remarkably sober response to the ever-expanding influence of teacher unions on education policy: I will not decry you, I will simply defeat you. Game on, Madame Secretary.

The news just keeps getting worse for the primary resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  With his party facing historic defeat in the congressional midterms, President Barack Obama should also be worried about the coming crack-up among two vital parts of his base: teachers unions and wealthy liberal donors.  The first wants job protection; the latter better student outcomes.

Their collision course is expertly analyzed by Alvin Felzenberg.  A sample:

We have seen hints of rising tensions between these two elements of the president’s base for over a year. First, there came David Callahan’s “Traitors to their Class: The New Super Rich,” in the New Yorker, an account of how the information-based elites that rallied to Barack Obama break with their fellow Democrats on such matters as free trade, “card check,” and, yes, public sector monopolies over the delivery of education. There was the now infamous District of Columbia mayoral primary, which pit the reformist mayor Adrian Fenty against challenger Vincent Gray. No issue sparked greater controversy than the record of school superintendent Michelle Rhee, who Obama publicly hailed along with Fenty in a televised presidential debate. And no public official prior to Rhee has spent more time thinking of what D.C. children should be taught and evaluated since Thomas Jefferson. While Rhee proved Fenty’s greatest asset in his re-election campaign, the unions clearly did a better job in getting out the vote than did parents whose children benefitted from Rhee’s efforts.

Read the entire article here.

H/T: U.S. News & World Report