Oh this is wonderful news!
I do hope everyone gets the chance now to be entertained with Chancellor Rhee's minstrel show. It does Al Jolson proud. She doesn't blacken her face but she does Black dialect as part of her routine. It was a big hit at this year's opening of school meeting.
The new white Teach For America missionary teachers just hooted when Rhee described a field trip she botched in her few days of teaching. She did her impression of one of her panic stricken children. "Lawwwd Ms.Rhee whatchu gonna do!!!!??" Rhee boomed, drawing a big laugh. "Lawwwd Ms. Rhee whatchu gonna do!!!!??"
But a transcription doesn't do Michelle's racist comedy justice. You got to listen to it here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/08/13/VI2010081305444.html
I know recent events have really tested people's confidence in Chancellor Rhee. I mean everyone seems to be calling her a pathological liar or a degenerate sociopath incapable of human warmth or an enabler of sex with underage girls or a bumbling incompetent who was never qualified to run a convenience store much less the DCPS.
Oh for those days when national attention flowed to Michelle and she didn't have to seek it out so cravenly or supply praise to herself. Remember the lovely picture of Michelle on the cover of Time magazine gently sweeping a classroom with a broom? And isn't that where she shines? Those incomparable people skills! The leadership by example! How many $275,000 a year Chancellors will get in there with the custodians to keep things in order.
And remember how loyal she can be when her man, chicken-hawk charter school operator and Mayor Kevin Johnson, gives special tutoring to 16-year-old girls, lots of 16-year-old girls. You know when Michelle falls, she falls hard. How many other women in a position of great power would risk it all to cover up child molestation? It's the stuff of romance novels and indictments. Thankfully the one DC teacher that she said had sex with the student wasn't her betrothed and he could be let go along with 265 other teachers several months after the incident.DC voters can let the greatest source of confidence be that celebrated but mysterious period of Michelle's life that has only been explained by one man. Through an uncommon talent for fiction writing, the WAPO's education maven Jay Mathews, has constructed a fairy tale to chase away all the doubts. Thank you Jay, how sweet to recite your fantasy against those troubling poll numbers for Mayor Bill Gates, er I mean Adrian Fenty!
"The Fable of Michelle Rhee" by Jay Mathews.
Once upon a time, there was a young Ivy League missionary with a couple years to kill before getting on with her life's work. Rather than backpacking through Europe or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro after a safari in Africa, our intrepid heroine plunged into the mean streets of Baltimore where children who live in poverty test poorly.
One day the missionary-princess was struck down like St. Paul on the way to Damascus. "Sit the poor children in a circle," the voice told her. And sit them in a circle she did.
Her students forevermore scored like rich children on tests. And they all lived happily ever after.
Just take my word on that. I swear its true. No, no really, stop laughing. How rude. Ok, that's enough, get up off the floor. Geez, its a fairy tale. You know like Pinocchio?
Paul Moore, Miami
4 comments:
I don't think Rhee's imitating kids is "racist" comedy, as Moore says in the 3rd para. In lots of performances, actors portray the way kids talk and act to a T: there's a lot more meaning to what students say and do through re-enactments like this. It's not a bad thing per se.
Two things, though, appall me about Rhee's speech. One - that she admits to putting masking tape on the kids' mouths to prevent them from speaking. Teachers are being brought up on charges these days when they do that.
Secondly: She admits to doing a ton of things wrong as a first-year teacher and that she had no classroom management. She's therefore absolutely making the case for not putting so many newly minted BAs with inadequate training (TFA kids, etc.) into our public schools as so many chancellors are doing these days. It's not good for kids — especially the needier ones.
It should also be pointed out that, with the fetish for so called data-driven instruction becoming a pandemic, Rhee is unable to document the miraculous claims she makes for her second and third year as a teacher.
As Paul Moore, correctly points out, the woman is a sociopath. Her type usually are the worst type of liars: those who believe their own lies.
The Daily Howler blog has written about the lack of documentation for Rhee's claims of miraculous success with her second and third year of teaching. There are a number of reasons that "unable to document" is being far too kind.
According to Daily Howler Bob Somerby, who himself was a public school teacher in Baltimore, the Baltimore newspaper was doing a series following classroom test scores at the time, a process during which this incredible test score miracle would surely have been noticed and covered, but there was not a word. The test scores from that era have been lost or are somehow not available. Rhee's colleagues of that time have been vague about whether the miracle claims check out. And also, Rhee herself started changing her story after people like Somerby began asking sharp questions. She started by giving specific figures for the supposed astounding rise, but by the time of Time's now-famous puff piece, she had retreated into vagueness herself.
It's pretty clearly a case of brazenly lying on her resume.
She sounds like a moron.
She would be fired for the tape on the mouths. If a teacher did DC did that now, she would have a press conference to fire that teacher.
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