Critics and watchdogs, in the best cases, help keep leaders honest and organizations accountable. The D.C. government has a number of them, particularly when it comes to the public schools. But sometimes rhetoric can overshadow reason, even if there is a legitimate point to be made, as was the case last week in a letter from the usual suspects to Council Chair Vincent Gray opposing nominations for researchers to conduct an independent evaluation of the schools takeover and Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s efforts.
There are a few legitimate concerns. The nominations are late, having arrived in April when expected in September, and the $750,000 over five years that the evaluation is expected to cost will come from a private organization, the Public Education Fund, instead of taxpayer money that would be subject to more transparency. But the biggest objection is that the researchers chosen are Kenneth Wong, chairman of the Brown University School of Education, and Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, both of whom have experience studying mayoral takeovers of school districts, but both of whom also are viewed by some as less than impartial. At a hearing last week, Gray noted that Wong testified in favor of the D.C. mayoral takeover legislation and that Hess published an op-ed supporting Rhee in the Washington Post last September. Does this mean that Wong and Hess are incapable of criticizing Rhee and Fenty when necessary, or that their expertise in mayoral control won’t be an asset? No, but they are concerns worth discussing.
However, the letter activists published also included the following charge against Hess:
AEI is the think tank that funded projects such as The Bell Curve, by AEI scholar Charles Murray, which caused outrage around the nation because of its racist conclusions that blacks are of inferior intelligence to whites and Asians, and The End of Racism, by Dinesh D’Souza, which declared that racism in the U.S. has ended and that the days of affirmative action are over. We should not be hiring such an institution’s directors to judge the success of our school reform efforts.
Basically, they called Hess a racist.
Marc Dean Millot, the Education Week blogger who allowed the letter to fill his usual Friday guest column space last week, was rightfully annoyed, calling the attack, “McCarthyism from the left,” and in a follow-up post, argued that, “if your objective is to score political points with your own allies, it’s fun to smear people. But McCarthyism is not only unethical, it is a very poor strategy for winning the middle to your side. Indeed, if Dr. Hess is appointed to monitor DC school reform, one reason will be that the backlash to this ridiculous charge will swamp the substantive issue of conflicts.”
Watchdogs are one thing, but when advocates start to argue for the sake of attacking, it can warp the validity of some claims that actually should be heard. The council has yet to confirm nominations, but as the posts are supposed to be filled by September 15th, look for a decision within the next few weeks.
