[The below is a guest post written by Joanna Bujes, and edited (for markup) by Ravi]

Rhee’s Framing of the Debate on Education

On the evening of February 7, Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of DC public schools and the public face of the opaquely funded StudentsFirst, addressed an audience of some four thousand people at the Paramount theater in Oakland. This lecture was one of a number of lectures purchased as a series, and did not imply any particular interest in Rhee or in education by the older and relatively affluent crowd attending, the sort of crowd one finds at similar series, whether theater, ballet, or classical music.

As I have never heard Rhee speak before, I cannot say that she tailored her talk to this particular audience, but given her consummate skills as a public speaker, I would be very surprised if she had not.

The lecture was divided in three parts. First, Rhee introduced herself and described her leadership of the DC public schools; next, she outlined her fundamental principles about education; finally, she answered questions from the audience.

Since his exit from the Obama administration, Larry Summers has parroted the party line that the administration would have loved a larger stimulus but it was just practically i.e., politically infeasible. This line that the administration was united in accepting the need for a larger stimulus was always questionable given Christina Romer’s portrayal of conflicts within the economic team; but now there is more to back up the suspicion that there were opposing views on the size and Larry Summers (as is almost always the case) prevailed with his support of a smaller package. Paul Krugman parses through Ryan Lizza’s report on Summers’s memo to Obama:

The key thing I took away from the memo is that it does not read at all like the current story the administration gives for the inadequate size of the stimulus, which is that they knew it should be larger but had to face political reality.

Instead, the memo argues that a bigger stimulus would be counterproductive in economic terms, because of the “market reaction”. That is, Summers et al were afraid of the invisible bond vigilantes.

And to the extent that there is a political judgment, it’s all in the opposite direction: if the stimulus is too big, we’ll have trouble scaling it back, but if it’s too small, we can always go back to Congress for more.

via Larry and the Invisibles – NYTimes.com.