Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager who writes a widely read education blog, and Kevin Carey, the policy director at Education Sector, have both eviscerated Washington Post columnist Colbert King for his recent piece, ?Time for Rhee to go.? Carey wrote that King's words encompassed ?whole worlds of incoherence and crankery,? and Tilson called the piece the ?sleaziest column? he had ever read. But in its bizarre consideration of conspiracy (e.g., that D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who just married [will soon?marry] a black man, actually dislikes black people and is trying to remove them en masse from their jobs in DCPS), in its whacky comingling of September 11th hijackers and death and teacher firings, in its contradictions (e.g., Rhee is doing good things for schools but must nonetheless lose her job), and in its embrace of suspicion and racial tension and its refusal to face facts, King's column is a crystallization of precisely the sort of opposition that Rhee has encountered from the start. Most types of criticism can be considered, debated, rebutted, accepted, rejected. But not the type of criticism that King sets out. To believe as King does is to rebuff all discussion, to be willingly misinformed and proud of it.
?Liam Julian