What can Brown do for SouthComm?

It has been a while since a local reporter wrote the following about lightning-rod education reformer, Michelle Rhee, so it is time to see how the 1 1/2 year old copy stands up to reality. Writes Andrea Zelinski, circa January 2013:

Michelle Rhee is an icon of the education reform movement. She’s pushed to hold teachers more accountable for students’ performance, busted open the doors of school choice and shaken up the education establishment. She’s also thrown a few elbows and drawn criticism for her style.

A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.

The polarizing former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor heads up StudentsFirst, an education reform organization she founded just as she began setting roots in the Volunteer State. The group has already handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to state-level political campaigns and a handful of local elections here, positioning itself as a force to be reckoned with.

Back when Michelle Rhee was a rock star, this kind of fawning coverage might have flown in spite of the protests of those like me who judged it to be a load of crap. Ms. Rhee was a celebrity, and aspiring news coverage seeks to hitch its wagon to a star above all.

Now, given what we have learned about the pitiful "movement" Michelle Rhee fabricated, the SouthComm interview appears to be folly without the slightest hint of courage to probe for the truth. One makes choices, and Zelinski's (or was it SouthComm's?) choice not to challenge Michelle Rhee is inane in light of the harder questions other journalists ask:

Rhee’s StudentsFirst campaigns have done little to animate parents. In Connecticut, an investment of about $700,000 produced a [Rhee head-liner] at the State Capitol ..., which drew only about 75 people. In Alabama, where StudentsFirst claimed 17,000 members, only about 20 showed up at a meeting she called at that state’s capitol.

Revelations about Rhee’s accomplishments while she was chancellor for Washington, D.C., public schools have also sullied her self-avowed reputation for “raising achievement”....

Darkening the pall cast over Rhee’s reputation is an unresolved cheating scandal on Rhee’s watch in D.C. The alleged scandals — and what, if anything, Rhee might have known about them — have never been adequately investigated....

the stench of questionable numbers is likely to follow Rhee wherever she goes, with any new appointment likely to prompt more questioning and investigation from journalists ....

Not only has Rhee’s reputation as a results-oriented school leader gone south, but her organization StudentsFirst is not doing so well either ....

StudentsFirst, the lobbying and political actions firm Rhee started, is shutting down its Minnesota office due to a “changing legislative climate” .... Reporters at Politico noticed the office closing too and added in its daily newsletter that StudentsFirst has “pulled out of five states and laid off six staff members as the midterm elections approach,” shutting down operations not only in Minnesota but also in Florida, Maine, Indiana and Iowa.

Additionally, the reporters noted, “The organization hasn’t brought in anywhere near the $1 billion that Rhee confidently predicted she would raise when she founded the group in 2010.”

On the other hand, what StudentsFirst seems to excel at is funneling campaign contributions from its undisclosed financial backers to lobbying efforts and politicians, who are mostly Republican and mostly incumbents. So much for being a “change agent.”

The contrast between Andrea Zelinski's ode and the latest point-by-point interrogation of Michelle Rhee's actual career could not be more stark. Keep in mind that SouthComm fancies itself as "alt" journalism, but all the "alt" that we can learn appears to be elsewhere.

SouthComm is in a difficult place. They hitched their wagon to Rhee's star instead of at the very least playing devil's advocate, and now that Rhee's star is fading they don't have a shred of credibility left on the subject of education "Rheeform."

The only option they have left to save face is to gin up a promotional interview with Ms. Rhee's replacement in the anti-teacher niche, Campbell Brown, and hope she "transplants" to Tennessee, too.


UPDATE: There was evidence out there in January 2013 that Michelle Rhee was nothing more than a marginal "Tennessee transplant."

Karl Dean bent on closing public schools

In an analysis of education reformer and recent Nashville transplant Michelle Rhee, Nicholas Lemann traces the business model behind this "reform movement":

education reform proposes to take apart the main structures of schooling in America—a network of districted public schools and a unionized teaching corps. It proposes, as an urgently necessary national project, to replace them with a school system governed by metrics, choice, incentive compensation, and personnel reductions. It is roughly the same prescription that activist investors would apply to an industrial corporation of the same vintage as the education system

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has expressed admiration of Ms. Rhee in the past. The dovetail of his own budget priorities and the proclivity of reformers for corporatist flip of public education was made clear yesterday in Mayor Dean's speech to the Chamber of Commerce.

He intends to close public schools and he is letting the Chamber carry that water for him:

Metro Schools pulled me into their Twitter fight against my will

For some reason, the social media persona responsible for MNPS tweets decided to pull me into the drama resulting from pro-charter school protesters at their Bransford Avenue doors. I've never myself joined in a public protest of MNPS, and I certainly wouldn't in support of charter schools. But the communications person at the district lost his composure and decided that it would be effective spin control and triangulation to compare me to their protesters. All I did was blog--in more detail than can be contained by a picket--about my honest experiences as a public school parent the past 4 years.

Here is the sequence of tweets MNPS used to issue their talking points:

To please everyone? Really?

Metro Schools made an obvious attempt in the thread to minimize and marginalize my experiences and my reasons for doing exactly what Jesse Register encourages us to do: choose between public, private, and public privatized schools.

Okay, be irritable with me if you must, but why drag me into this drama with charter school zealots? Like I am the only person who has concerns about the privatization and commodification of Nashville's public schools? Beyond the distinct probability that there are others out there who share my experience and views, the comparison of me--an individual blogging an opinion you choose to read or not--with a group of people organizing a conspicuous, disruptive demonstration is itself silly. And there are others who have other differences with MNPS based on other reasons not even counted. Trying to please everyone? Hardly.

And again, why am I lumped with noisy demonstrators unsettling the tranquility of Bransford Avenue when all I did was blog an opinion MNPS objects to?

I resist being cast by Metro Schools in some extreme juxtaposition to people who want any and all charters approved. I have argued without fail that public education should be community-based rather than corporately-based. As far as I am concerned both Metro Schools and charter school boosters reject popular determination of public education. Both are beholden to corporate dollars and to venture philanthropists. I advocate something else: money should not be allowed to buy out the democratic process. Both bureaucratic district and education reformers are bought and paid for. Both have organized money. I advocate organized people determining public education policy.

In conclusion, public school parents, the lesson here is that if you choose to express an opinion at odds with Metro Schools you might be singled out on their social media for it. You might be dragged into a war that you never intended to fight. Either take caution or throw it to the wind.


UPDATE: more background on the protesters at Pith in the Wind. They were enabled by a Washington, DC advocacy group. And one of the protesters' targets, school board member Amy Frogge responds to their criticism in the wake of yesterday's activities.

Speaking of Pith in the Wind, I found that one of their writers made specious Twitter comments on our decision to send our daughter to a parochial school (I seem to be the "he" she refers to):

Now I recall that the last time "Aunt B" was out-of-joint me was when I questioned--in the wake of a soft-pitch interview with former DC schools Chancellor, current lightning-rod, anti-teacher lobbyist Michelle Rhee--her claim that one of her fellow reporters had actually exhibited "the fix" for journalism that Phillips predicted she would. Rhee is an acknowledged public figure who plies the high-visibility media circuit making her case for education reform. All my comments about Rhee have been made in that context. Not in the context of personal decisions of what is best for her children.

If you look at my blog post, I did not disparage Michelle Rhee for being a private school parent. I criticized the reporter for allowing Rhee to frame the debate so that she is branded as a public school parent without acknowledging that she also is a private school parent. There was branding going on by a public figure and the reporter failed to critically analyze the branding. So, asking for full disclosure is disparaging now? I tried to fully disclose in my blog post our reasons for leaving MNPS, and I'm not even a public figure. Journos are supposed to reveal the information that the rest of us may not access.

As to "all the private school parents" I have allegedly disparaged: well, I don't know what she means. While I am disposed to a well-adjusting and functioning public school system, I do not bear ill-will toward private school parents. For several years I have corresponded with other parents who have faced the tough decision to move their children out of MNPS. I do not recall expressing anything beyond simpatico with their difficulties and hard decisions. If I disparaged parents in the past, I apologize.

But again, what is the big deal with our decision? I acknowledged that there are ironies, but we are acquiescing to a degree to the system of "choice" that has been handed to us by the school district. And there is nothing ironic about the fact that for four years we chose to send our kid to an urban public school near our home in a transitional neighborhood. Has "Aunt B" ever made that choice? Eventually, it was high stakes testing married to a corporate culture (maybe even the threat of austerity) that drove us out of MNPS; it was not the inner city or our predominantly African American school.

Personal attacks on private individuals (relative to public figures like Michelle Rhee) by alt-weekly writers strike me as mean, bad faith in a system of "choice" they do not themselves question.

The Nashville City Paper missed the memo

I have already posed questions about the quality of Andrea Zelinski's recent interview with StudentsFirst zealot Michelle Rhee. But for the sake of fact-checking the City Paper reporter let's compare and contrast her observations about Rhee being relocated to Tennessee to those of Anthony Cody, a public education advocate who lives on the West Coast.

First, Zelinki:

A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.

The polarizing former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor heads up StudentsFirst, an education reform organization she founded just as she began setting roots in the Volunteer State. The group has already handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to state-level political campaigns and a handful of local elections here, positioning itself as a force to be reckoned with.

Next, Cody:

Michelle Rhee has made her home in Sacramento, ever since she married the city's mayor, former basketball player Kevin Johnson. Since landing here, she has been working to expand the influence of her lobbying group, StudentsFirst. Last fall, a school board member resigned in nearby West Sacramento, too late to be replaced in the fall election. School board members appointed a replacement, but an ally of Kevin Johnson, West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon, mounted a campaign to force a special election, which will cost of $100,000. And guess who is running to fill the seat? Francisco Castillo, an employee of none other than StudentsFirst.

Local school board races used to be small town affairs. But recently, as money has flowed into education reform across the country, we have seen local races take on national significance. And StudentsFirst clearly cares about the outcome of this local election, right in Michelle Rhee's back yard.

Zelinski might have been able to clear up the confusion had she been willing to ask Rhee to clarify whether she is a Californian or a Tennessean or both rather than running with the "Tennessee transplant" lede headlong into her interview. As things stand, I'm not convinced that she is transplanted here at all.

Thanks, SouthComm, for inducing more disarray into local perceptions in education reform.

A local reporter interviews Michelle Rhee and fails to clear a bar set for her by a colleague

Last October local SouthComm blogger Betsy Phillips introduced new SouthComm reporter Andrea Zelinski in an interesting way. Yes, full disclosure counsels that Phillips' wrote some "homer" PR fluff on behalf of the news corp she blogs for. So, take the cheers with a grain of salt and then verify for yourselves. And yes, it is remarkable that Phillips dropped a double-edged sword of praise for Zelinski qua woman (saying males "don't really know a lot about the reality of women's lives" even as she also argued that women's issues are not different than issues, like jobs, that concern males). Yes, it can be argued that Phillips takes away with one hand what she gave with the other.

Those questions are not nearly as interesting in the wake of Zelinski's recent interview with lightning-rod education reformer Michelle Rhee. Move to Phillips' conclusion, where she sets a soaring bar for Zelinski's work to be judged by: she insists that Zelinski may help "fix" the problem of reporters who "play into the way politicians frame their arguments".

Given the track record of collusion of reporters and the communications machinery of politics (evinced by the lateral professional pipeline between news and PR), such an achievement would be a dizzying prospect for Zelinski or any other journo.

Having granted that, I'm not sure she came close to the bar in her Rhee interview. Rhee, a politician in her own right, was permitted, nearly invited, to frame the arguments on her own terms.

Start with national public education advocate Diane Ravitch, who read Zelinski's interview and blogged on it. Ravitch's analysis suggests to me that Rhee effectively framed her argument without follow-up or challenge from Zelinski:

The story describes her thus: “A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.” It also refers to the “roots” she is “setting” in Nashville. Apparently, she never told the reporter that she lives in Sacramento, not Nashville. She describes herself as a “public school parent” because one of her daughters attends public school in Nashville. But she did not acknowledge that her older daughter goes to an excellent private school, Harpeth Hall School (“Nashville, TN’s only independent, college-preparatory school for girls, grades 5-12”).

One can hardly blame her for choosing Harpeth Hall. It has an 8:1 student/teacher ratio, with a median class size of 13. Class sizes in public schools in Nashville and other cities are much, much larger.

I bet that Harpeth Hall does not give standardized tests and does not evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Michelle Rhee became an advocate for small class size, and for the same goals and purposes for all children that she wants for her own child?

So, Zelinski did not do much to challenge Rhee's framing her brand as a Tennessee public school parent. In fact, Zelinski's primary follow-up on the question of Rhee's children was framed as "public or charter", not "public, charter or Harpeth Hall". If we apply Betsy Phillips' own standard about challenging dominant framing of issues and values, Zelinski lobbed no critical questions that would have basically challenged Rhee's frame job.

Where Rhee actually lives and her status as a private and a public school parent are both critical points that deserve follow-up questions by any reporter, man or woman. Either the reporter did not know that information or she chose (or was editorially prompted) not to disclose that information and follow-up accordingly.

In the end, to what "different perspective" (Phillips' term) does Zelinski's interview allude?

Zelinski describes Rhee in nearly favorable terms that the latter would probably not disagree with: "an icon of the education reform movement .... [who] pushed to hold teachers more accountable for students’ performance, busted open the doors of school choice and shaken up the education establishment." The framing here is ridiculously uncritical and by no means distinctive.

Loaded, but unpacked reform vernacular like "teacher accountability", "student performance", "school choice", and "education establishment" is hardly neutral. In fact--without acknowledging exaltation of standardized testing, without analyzing the actual choices framed by privatization and without observing that the education establishment is bankrolled by corporate philanthropy and massive government funding influenced by campaign finance--this interview is biased toward education reformers like Rhee.

Zelinski's interview comes on the heels of a PBS Frontline documentary that shows Rhee, having invited cameras into an exit interview with a principal, unprofessionally firing that principal as the video rolls. Zelinski could have raised questions about the impropriety, if not the viciousness of that, but instead, the reporter herself frames Rhee's mean behavior more favorably in a general sense: "she's thrown a few elbows". Educators losing their jobs in humiliatingly publicized fashion is hardly analogous to getting whacked on the basketball court. I still struggle to see the "different perspective" Betsy Phillips tells us Zelinski will be bringing to SouthComm reporting.

In fairness to Zelinski, Rhee is a tough cookie, a veteran of news interviews who knows how to dodge land mines. When Frontline sent Rhee some follow-up questions based on a principal who claimed to have witnessed school employees erasing and changing test answers after students turned them in, Rhee simply did not reply to PBS reporters. So, if Zelinski had asked more critical questions that actually challenged Rhee's dominant framing of her reputation, Rhee might have refused the interview.

But that still leaves the problem of the lofty bar set for Zelinski in the first place. If Rhee would not allow Zelinski to ask probing questions that might actually challenge her framing of education reform, then Zelinski cannot help but ask the questions she did, and those questions (to use Betsy Phillips own word) "played" uncritically to Rhee's advantage.

The bar had simply been set too high.


UPDATE: At her personal blog, Betsy Phillips responds to this post. I have two three replies:

• Phillips never lifts a finger to answer the primary question of my post: what "different perspective" did reporter Andrea Zelinski bring to the Michelle Rhee interview that helped her refuse to "play" into Rhee's framing of the education reform issue? For Phillips to maintain that she was merely supporting another woman is disingenuous. She made a specific claim: that Zelinski would conduct herself differently as a woman when faced with the framing behavior of powerful people. The question still stands: where is the difference in the Rhee interview?
• Phillips speculates that I see conspiracies in women "writing positively" about other women. First, I do not. What I am responding to on a material level is branding of the SouthComm product; what I am responding to on a less tangible level is the predisposed tone of SouthComm writing. I previously posted on that predisposed tone regarding the writing of one of Phillips' other colleagues (who is male) on the subject of education reform. Likewise, when Phillips blogs under the Pith in the Wind masthead, particularly when she showcases the work of other SouthComm writers (as has been the established practice at Pith for years) the writing has a marketing life of its own. Why else does Pith exist, but to promote the brand? Second, why is it acceptable that, when a critic observes continuity between the writing and the brand, s/he is opened to charges of conspiracy? (And outsiders are not total dolts. We know that writers, editors and reporters inside news companies interact with one another agree on their own frames of interpretation). By the way, at least one local journo (who is male) has responded to similar criticism with the same hyperbole that they are not told what to write. As I explained two years ago, the brand is not a bunch of disjointed pieces wrenching themselves away from each other. There is organizational and interpretive cohesion. Hence, it is legitimate to judge the SouthComm news brand as a whole. That does not mean I see black helicopters.
• Phillips seems to resort to passive-aggressive criticism over my use of the term "tough cookie" in describing an all grown up Michelle Rhee who influences policy at a national level. It was a nice try on Phillips' part, but she failed to add that the context in which I used the term "tough cookie" is an all grown up one: Rhee is a veteran who dodges land mines. There is nothing symbolically childlike or diminutive about that metaphor. On the contrary, in that context, "tough cookie" means hard-nosed, strategic, battle-wise. Phillips, who concedes she has her own agenda, seems to be reading a gender agenda that I do not have into my observations of Rhee.