And Susan: yes, that’s it exactly. This is also the reason why people systematically undervalue child care workers’ labor. Because everyone does it at some point, there’s an assumption that anyone *can* do it full time equally well.

See Diane Ravitch’s comments in particular: “Her poll numbers were an embarrassment for Bloomberg,” Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and a research professor at NYU, says in an email. “Presumably, she was brought in to convey his message, and they found she couldn’t talk in public because she had a penchant for flip remarks and knew nothing about education. [There were] too many tough issues for her to deal with.”

As you’ve noted, Historiann, there’s quite a dose of misogyny in the idea of teachers as dumb, unruly, and insufficiently controlled by scripts, metrics, and bean-counting. The Arne Duncanish hero that Joel Klein played rescues us by imposing masculine order. Cathie Black is unruly herself, being female, and for that she must be punished. (Michelle Rhee may have got a partial exception by being Asian-American, a/k/a model minority.) Nobody thinks that her superstar track record in corporate America–she earned a fortune in tough times–justifies giving her the keys to the schools.

A couple of months ago I was driving through NYC listening to a city councilman on the car radio. He would not stop screeching about how UNQUALIFIED Black was. Cathie Black coming in was exactly as (un)qualified as Joel Klein, who gets held up as the exemplar of what city schools need.

It sure seemed to me that Black was just another educratic fraudster in the tradition of Rhee, the dopey jock Arne Duncan, and the new junior U.S. Senator from Colorado.