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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Oprah and her warrior woman, Michelle Rhee

Oprah Winfrey may imagine that she runs a serious policy forum on her television show. You know, the one on which she routinely features: celebrities; hoarders (Aug. 5,6); dieters; people facing unusual crisis, such as a woman who had a tumor that covered half of her face (Aug. 2), and a woman who discovered her dead husband’s mistresses (July 30).

But she doesn’t. Shows recently aired include:

• 09/14/2010 Exclusive - How Wynonna Judd Survived the Ultimate Betrayal
• 09/13/2010 Oprah’s Farewell Season Premiere with Special Guest John Travolta
• 09/08/2010 Harpo Hookups - Cher, Justin Timberlake, will.i.am, Usher
• 09/07/2010 Women Who Claim They Were Child Brides in the USA
• 09/06/2010 Stars of Reality TV: Fantasia’s Comeback and Ruby’s Revelations
• 09/02/2010 Oprah’s Make Over My Man Crew Strikes Again
• 09/01/2010 The Most Talented Kids with Justin Bieber and Charice
• 08/31/2010 Oprah Says Goodbye to Nate Berkus: The Grand Finale
• 08/30/2010 Oprah and Simon Cowell: The Farewell Interview
• 08/25/2010 Inside Sex Addiction Rehab

So yesterday when she aired the show called “Waiting For Superman - The Movie That Can Transform America’s Schools,” her viewers should have known that they were watching an entertainment show with a show woman -- not an educator -- as host.

Anybody expecting a serious policy discussion -- even with Bill Gates, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and film maker Davis Guggenheim as guests -- was sorely disappointed, though some people may have been fooled.

The tone of the show was set when Oprah, with her vast background in education reform, kept calling Rhee a “warrior woman” as if that were a good thing.

For those who don’t know, Rhee stormed into Washington D.C. three years ago, vowing to fix the long troubled system with a brand of reform that in fact resembled battle. Rhee listened to no one but herself and made no effort to explain her decisions to the people who were supposed to carry them out. Even the U.S. military knows that victory often requires winning the hearts and minds of the people.

She also sometimes found herself in trouble by saying things in public that she later had to take back, such as when she said she had fired teachers who had physically or sexually abused students, leaving the impression that the number was more than what the record reflected.

The defeat of Rhee’s patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, last week in the city’s Democratic primary was in large part a referendum on Rhee and her reforms. The Oprah show was taped before the vote, and one can’t help but wonder whether the discussion would have been different if had been taped afterward.

On the show with Rhee were Gates, whose foundation has spent a few billion dollars trying to reform schools, with little so far to show for it, and Davis Guggenheim, the man behind “Waiting for Superman,” a tendentious documentary that casts Rhee as an angel and public charter schools as wonderful.

Funny that Rhee’s job is to improve the traditional public schools, not the charter schools (which educate fewer than 5 percent of the kids in the country), though the whole discussion of the show was about the joy of charters. Rhee did not raise her voice one time to defend the schools that it is her job to fix.

There was a lot of other silliness about schools and teachers on the show that went unchallenged. For example, the issue of teacher tenure was raised and Guggenheim declared that all teachers get tenure after two years and can’t be fired.

That’s ridiculous, as noted by teacher Anthony Cody in this post on the Teacher Magazine website, entitled "OprahPaganda?" You can read here about the myth of teacher tenure, which, in fact, is hardly a guarantee of lifetime

And, as my colleague Bill Turque wrote in this post about the Oprah episode, Rhee said some other things about teachers that don’t seem to square with reality.

Rhee, during a discussion of how to deal with ineffective teachers, minimized the significance of professional development, saying that it was not fair to ask parents to put their children in the classrooms of educators who might be better in a year or two. She noted that she was a parent, and said, "There is no way I would put up with that.” She got big applause.

Rhee the warrior.

But Rhee the chancellor set up a system that does exactly that.

Her IMPACT teacher evaluation system gives teachers the chance to improve, and that is what is happening with more than 700 D.C. teachers judged "minimally effective" on last year’s IMPACT evaluations. They’ll be given a year to improve or face dismissal.

And, as Turque points out, she did not attack teacher development in the city’s successful application for $75 million in Race to the Top money; rather, she promised to establish “a wide and deep array of of rigorous professional development opportunities" for teachers.

Perhaps, Turque wrote, even more puzzling was Rhee’s answer when Oprah asked about the difficulty in firing teachers. "You have to meet literally a criminal standard," she said, which is true when pursuing cases of sexual misconduct or corporal punishment.

But firing teachers for poor performance -- next to impossible in DCPS for years -- is now an option through IMPACT if their scores are low. That’s how 126 teachers were dismissed this past summer.

Let’s not forget Winfrey’s own personal involvement in school reform. She funded and established a $40 million school for girls in South Africa. Why, she was asked several years ago, did she not help schools in her own country? Here was her response:

"Say what you will about the American educational system—it does work. If you are a child in the United States, you can get an education."

And then she said this:

“I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.”

It should be noted that earlier this year, Winfrey settled a defamation lawsuit that had been filed by a headmistress at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. Winfrey had accused her of performing poorly at her South African girls school after the 2007 sex abuse scandal in which a dorm matron parent was charged with abusing six students.

At the end of yesterday’s show, Oprah announced that she was ending her Angel Network with six $1 million grants -- all charter school networks.