Michelle Rhee has backed out of the “flat-earther” driveway and is heading for the border when it comes to USA Today’s report that connected cheating with D.C. students’ testing gains.
The darling of Republican governors took to the megaphone of liberal politics — The Huffington Post — with an argument that maintains students and teachers didn’t cheat, but reiterates her efforts to investigate the test results and applauds her successor’s decision to continue investigating.
After the USA Today article ran, Rhee infamously said, “It isn’t surprising that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved for DCPS students unless someone cheated.”
Her blows have since softened — she walked back the comment, but then said WaPo education scribe Jay Mathews quoted her out of context — but her HuffPo piece is Rhee’s most reasonable response yet.
She points to D.C. students’ sizable gains on the federal NAEP tests, which are essentially tamper-proof, as an indicator that the results made under her polarizing leadership were legitimate.
