This piece from Ben Smith and Byron Tau includes a point I tried to emphasize amid all the conservative eulogies for D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee:
Rhee finds the GOP adulation “a little odd,” she said. But she's also allied with a range of Democratic mayors, beginning with Fenty and Johnson and including Los Angeles' Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as Bloomberg, an independent.
Unlike many Republican executives, she said she believes public workers, including teachers, deserve the right to unionize and bargain collectively.
She's a “huge fan” of Obama’s education policy, she said, starting with his Race to the Top incentives for standards and labor flexibility.
Rhee's successes as chancellor, particularly in getting the D.C. teacher's union to agree to more accountability, came in part because she wasn't waging an existential war against the teacher's unions, and there's reason to believe the bad blood between them was more of a personal issue than a policy one, since other cities have implemented similar reforms without as much controversy. Conservatives' fixation on teacher's unions at the expense of all the other problems in public education leaves the impression that improving education is actually secondary to eliminating the right of teachers to bargain collectively. Which is why, as Smith and Tau suggest, this love affair is probably doomed.