Rhee, on the other hand, doesn’t fit Trump at all. For one, she’s highly skeptical of school choice. She strongly supports charter schools, a good but highly managed government alternative to traditional public schools, and prominently reversed her opposition to vouchers in 2013. Yet she still supports a highly regulated version of vouchers driven by applying the tests to them that public schools use, which undercuts their very premise. We don’t want to use vouchers to mold private schools into the public schools whose failure justifies vouchers in the first place, but to provide diversity of parent choice in education. That requires light regulation.
“There are a lot of people out there who sort of believe, the free market, let the free market reign, the market will correct itself — give every kid a backpack with their [sic] money in it and let them choose wherever they want to go,” she said in a 2012 interview. “I don’t believe in that model at all.” Instead, she supports highly limited and highly regulated voucher programs just for poor families, not all taxpayers. (The public, on the other hand, prefers universal vouchers to programs targeted exclusively at poor families.)
Rhee also very prominently fought to defend Common Core after parents nationwide succeeded in publicizing their bipartisan, now-majority opposition to it. She used her star power to promote Common Core in myriad high-profile fora. Her StudentsFirst organization advocated for drastically expanding government data collection of both students and teachers, and merged with advocacy group 50CAN this spring, which puts expanding government preschool programs and supporting Common Core among its core priorities. In other words, Rhee is a liberal at heart who was mugged into seeing the conservative truths about the negatives of teachers unions and education monopolies, but her instincts lean opposite Trump’s on education.
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