Michelle Rhee: For Teacher Appreciation Week, Let’s Push for Lower Pay and Benefits

Michelle Rhee: She Knows Everything About Teaching--She Taught for Three Whole Years!

Hi, I’m Michelle Rhee, former D.C. public school chancellor and founder of the organization Students First.

It was during my long three years of teaching that I came across a great way of dealing with students.  Taping their mouths shut!*

That’s how I’d like to treat the teachers. What I say goes.  My way or the highway.

That’s why I have constantly praised the educational systems of countries like China and Singapore.  I want America to be one of the most rigid authoritarian regimes too!  There’s no room for creativity or mamby-pamby critical thinking skills.

The only thing that matters today is standardized testing!  Using these tests I will select only the children that meet my standards so that I can create a master race, an army of children that will–

(Sorry about that, sometimes I get carried away.)

As I was saying, it’s important to realize how important teachers are.  That’s why I want to fire so many of the most expensive–whoop, I mean, experienced– teachers and bring in young, inexperienced ones.   If they burn out, there’s plenty more where they came from.  And unions? Who needs ’em?

My idea: keep the teachers in chains and the kids with their mouths shut in the basement.  I’ll be upstairs with the fatcats making money out of privatizing the schools!  Could somebody please pass the shrimp?

[*All humor aside, she actually admits she taped second grade students’ mouths shut as a “lesson!]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/2010/08/michelle_rhee_first-year_teach.html