Michelle Rhee Is A Bad Ass

We’ll be honest, this could just be our Vietnam-era “Asian fetish” popping up again, but ever since we saw D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on NBC Nightly News last week we’ve been dying to do her on a … err, do a story on her.

Sorry ’bout that … we flashed back to a bamboo hut for a second there.

Anyway, Rhee has all over the press lately – cover of Time, in Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, an appearance on 60 Minutes and now a mention in the most prolific of all media outlets, ours.

Why is she so famous? Well, perhaps this quote from her Time cover story explains it …

“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn’t respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

We don’t know any other way to say this except to come right out with it … we’re aroused. Like, literally.

Rhee is pissing off teachers and principals in Washington D.C. like it was her job … and come to think of it … it is her job. She’s doing things like firing people who aren’t performing and insisting that pay raises be linked to (gasp) results.

Not surprisingly, in a bureaucratic world where free rides and evading responsibility for the lives of children have been the norm for decades, Rhee’s methods are engendering a little resentment.

From the Washington Post:

Some parents, teachers and school activists said the combative, sometimes disdainful tone she has struck in the press has alienated constituencies she needs to mobilize if she hopes to turn the system around: teachers, parents and school principals. Cathy Reilly, head of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators, called the use of a broom on the Time cover “disrespectful and denigrating.”

“I don’t know what she was thinking,” Reilly said. “I don’t think sweeping things out is the way to go, and that way of relating to people metaphorically sends a message right down to the children.”

Yeah, and that message is “get your sh*t together.”

Seriously, we’re in love.

The only question is how quickly can we fire our own utterly worthless State Superintendent and hire Rhee (and her broom) to come down to South Carolina.

Be honest, people … we could use a woman like this to shape up a system as rotten to its wasteful core as ours is.

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