Renee Mitchell’s column in thee O today bubbles over with enthusiasm for new Portland Schools Foundation executive director Connie Van Brunt.

Mitchell mentions that “blogger Terry Olson began an online debate about whether Van Brunt—described as a ‘high powered charter school proponent’—was the right fit,” and reprints Van Brunt’s comment from that blog to the effect that Terry‘s got it all wrong. Mitchell completely fails to check up on what Terry was saying—Van Brunt is a big-time charter schools advocate; she was chief education officer at the Chicago Charter School Foundation—and breezes through the rest of her hagiography of Van Brunt without giving his valid concerns another thought.

This is what irks me about public schools politics in Portland. Everybody wants to talk about personalities; nobody wants to talk about policy. This is very convenient for those with a corporate schools agenda, since they can bring in these smiling faces who spew platitudes about closing the achievement gap and supporting our public schools while peddling policy that hurts students, teachers… and neighborhood public schools. Vicki Phillips got a pass on this for three years, and now we’ve got Renee Mitchell greasing the skids for Van Brunt.

I don’t know if Mitchell is a stooge for this agenda, or if she’s just fooled by the happy talk. But make no mistake, what the Portland Schools Foundation is pushing is not in your interest if you want strong neighborhood public schools in Portland.

Welcome to Portland, Connie.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:34 am and is filed under Politics, Portland, Public Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.