Michelle Rhee’s Organization: “They’ve Become Like the Gun Lobby in Tennessee”

Jeff Guo has a good piece at The New Republic on how Michelle Rhee’s StudentsLast First organization has centered on Tennessee to push its anti-teacher union agenda. Yet despite the massive amount of money it and its corporate supporters have poured into Tennessee politics, they have received almost nothing to show for it. Tennessee Governor Jim Haslam hired Rhee’s ex-husband, Kevin Huffman, to run the state Department of Education. Rhee considers it her personal mission to crush Tennessee teacher unions and promote her own brand of corporatized education. But it turns out that the people of Tennessee resented huge amounts of money poured into local school board elections and began voting for opponents of the recipients of that largesse precisely because of it.

This hardly means Tennessee is going to become a pro-teacher union state. Probably some of Rhee’s insidious agenda will end up passing next year. What it does suggest is that Rhee has a very poor understanding of how politics actually work outside of Beltway board rooms and corporate fundraisers. In the end, money doesn’t always actually buy votes. Especially when it looks like your children are being used for an experiment.