RiShawn Biddle appreciates measured analysis but thinks the K-12 realm could also stand some “bomb-throwing, bombast, even plain and blunt talk.” I agree, which is why every week I try to toss at least few grenades into the ed-policy echo chamber. But I am a writer, not a public official. Public officials should be more restrained. Furthermore, if one decides to plant dynamite it ought not be easily defused; but when New Jersey’s governor calls teachers the only professionals who are not judged by their job performance, he basically leads us to the wick and hands us a bucket of water. When Michelle Rhee drones on and on about American education’s “crisis”—a “crisis” that has been occurring for decades, at least—she, too, disarms her own explosives (Biddle himself says I fail to “consider the urgency of this moment”).

One awful thing about the teachers’ unions is that they don’t run (publicly) on facts and logic but on hollow rhetoric. Randi Weingarten is obviously not dumb, but she usually sounds dumb; catch her on radio or TV and you’ll hear some of the most insipid sound bites ever concocted. And now the Rhee Coterie—with its limp logic, exaggerated claims, and fanaticism—is mimicking the unions that it fights. One can agree with much that Rhee, Christie, and their pals believe, but when they become emotional geysers (“crisis,” “urgency,” “think of the children, my God, the children”) they deserve censure.

—Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow