Washington Post
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Jon Stewart invited Michelle Rhee on “The Daily Show” Monday night and, while he didn’t skewer her the way some Rhee critics would have liked, he kept challenging her about whether her brand of school reform unfairly targets teachers. He also said something that Rhee and other reformers could take to be something of a slap: that there has been “no real innovation in education since John Dewey.”
Rhee has been making the rounds on television to sell her new memoir, “Radical,” and most of the interviews have been little more than puff pieces. But Stewart, whose mother is a teacher, tested her. He politely but firmly pressed her on the view of teachers, who think that new teacher evaluation systems, which Rhee pioneered as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools from 2007-2010, unfairly rely too much on student standardized test scores. (Assessment experts say the scores shouldn’t be used to evaluate teachers because they are unreliable for that purpose.)
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