Well-nigh impossible to change the mind of the Rheetards with something as marginal as glaring evidence of her greed and utter lack of principles. Nope, it would take, minimally, sworn testimony from Jesus Christ himself (and they’d still want a lie detector test, video documentation, and a signed confession from Rhee).

Michelle Rhee is an archetype, a zealot free of scruples.
And she’s in love is “Me, Me, Me”, while saying she’s for pupils.
She lies and bullies, charms and worms — and some say, “She’s the greatest.”
But in the end, she’ll meet herself — as Caesar did, in Brutus.

Okay, after reading all the hate comments on this article, I felt I had to chime in.

First off, I give quite a bit more than a crap about education. I am a ‘junior’ in high school who skipped first grade and started homeschooling myself after 5th grade because I was so far ahead of my classmates it wasn’t even funny. I have scores of 5 in no less than 8 Advanced Placement exams (8th grade: Biology, 9th grade: Calculus BC, Computer Science, Physics B, 10th grade: Physics C Mechanics, Physics C E&M, Music Theory, and Chemistry), am taking four more this year (Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Statistics, and US Government/Politics), and I intend to pursue majors in business- and computer science-related fields, so I have considerable interest in making the educational system better, even if it’s only because I don’t want anybody else who’s smart to go through the misery that I went through.

Next, I have a statistic. According to Wikipedia, 59% of charter schools have a waiting list. Why is that? They must be viewed as better by a significant amount of people, and I argue that the reason is that the charter schools must have high student performance or they will have their charter revoked. Thus, they have a much higher stake in teaching students well than public schools do; as a consequence, the quality of education is much better. This has been verified to as close a degree of accuracy as educational studies can prove. So what else is different about charter schools?

The answer is, absolutely nothing. All the benefits follow from the conditions attached to the charters; notable government regulations generally applied to regular public schools do not necessarily have to be included in said charters. Their teachers don’t have to be unionized, for example. This introduces a side effect which most people are slow to realize is actually a benefit: competition in the teacher market. What happens if a charter school teacher is sub-par? He/she promptly gets fired, because the charter school can’t afford to have bad teachers. What happens if a regular public school teacher is sub-par? Nothing, because teachers’ unions require tenure for their constituents after a short time period, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to fire tenured teachers. Result? A school filled with good teachers.

I note that the concept of tenure was originally introduced as a benefit for university professors who had worked at said university for a sizable chunk of their career and who had been proven to be top-notch, in order to keep the top-notch professor working at the university. I ask you, readers – if you ran a school, would you award tenure to a public primary school teacher with only five or so years of experience? I know I wouldn’t; determining the quality of the teacher would be more of a guess than anything. And yet public schools do it quite frequently, because the unions tell them to do it and threaten to cause a shortage of teachers for hire if they don’t. Now, what does that cause? Public schools have the responsibility of educating the vast majority of our citizens; if the grammar level of even the least capable person who finds this site is represented by, and I quote:

“I bet you negative nellys also call your selves CHRISTIANS.Well I have your sign.(I hate commys but I are one)Putting all the power in the hands of big corp’s is ignorant as HELL!!! And if you believe the rich mans mantra that a divided government is best your an ASS!! Must you be reminded that the good book says THAT A HOUSE DIVIDED WILL NOT STAND!!!!!!!!!!!!! You unknowingly are bringing communism to our government!! Reaganomics already put us into a FASCIST Nation! So subtlety not from ME! Your all JACKASS’S if you think otherwise!” – @Dennis

Then, something must not be working.

It shouldn’t be hard to see that the teachers’ unions have a vested interest in not allowing the proliferation of charter schools, just as the Soviet Union had a vested interest in not allowing capitalism to proliferate, Southern plantation owners had a vested interest in not allowing freedom for slaves, the scribe industry had a vested interest in not allowing the proliferation of Gutenberg’s printing press, and how King Herod had a vested interest in not allowing Jesus Christ to live. The teachers’ union’s argument is that all teachers are alike and therefore deserve one uniform wage, but it can easily be seen to be painfully untrue. If you have kids, you might try visiting the school they go to and listen in to the schoolwork for just one (count it, one) day. The results should horrify you. Why, at my local high school, there has been more than one kid who’s decided to make out in an empty classroom with his girlfriend in preference to showing up for the AP exams at the end of the year!

Anyone who’s gone through what I have should be able to figure out on their own that something needs to change; it just falls to people like Rhee to tell us what, even if we don’t listen at first. I pity the poor woman; she’s going to be fighting an uphill battle until everyone realizes what she’s telling us and charter schools take the battlefield by storm. But I, for one, am going to assist her in any way I can, because I hated my public school experience, because I don’t want to see more of our jobs being filled with incompetents and being shipped to China, and because I believe that education is a fundamental right, on par with life and liberty, and that anything limiting it hinders the natural progress of civilization.

If only they would stay in Vegas …