Who won?

Modified from 12/08/08 Time Magazine Cover (includes this article)

Near the beginning of the Olympics, Michelle Rhee introduced the first in a series of videos using the Games as an analogy for her view of the state of our educational system in the United States. On July 22nd, Ms. Rhee, the founder and CEO of Students First, shared the video below on Meet the Press (about 34 minutes in).

Since then, Ms. Rhee has written an opinion piece for USA Today and shared another video on CNN espousing her Olympic-Education analogy. All this attention has me wondering why Ms. Rhee has become the spokesperson for education reform. It also has me concerned that thanks to the attention that she gets from an often unquestioning news media we are focusing our efforts on the wrong things when it comes to improving schools (I wrote about it here). But no one seems to be listening. Well, the success of MTT2K in using satire to grab the media's attention got me thinking...

I am grateful that John Golden was once again willing to join me in what is probably another Quixotic endeavor. Amazingly, we were also able to get Nancy Flanagan to be a part of our amateur acting troupe. It is my hope that this short skit will highlight some of the issues we have with both Ms. Rhee's stance on educational reform and how some in the news media have embraced it.

  

If you are interested in the original script (which includes links supporting some of the points that we make), you can find it here. I want to thank John, Nancy, and Luann Lee for their writing contributions. In case you are interested in playing your own version of this game, you can get an apple piñata here.