When an oped piece came out yesterday criticizing Diane Ravitch for flip-flopping on her criticisms of various Bloomberg school reform ideas, some folks (Whitney, Andy and the performance pay mafia) seemed pretty happy about it. Today, however, Elizabeth Green in the NY Sun reports that the column was actually the result of some good old opposition research done by the NYC Department of Education. That doesn’t mean the criticisms of Ravitch are all off, of course. It just shows you how far some people will go to try and swat away an annoyingly persistent and knowledgeable critic. Next thing you know, the NYC DOE will be staging fake press conferences and paying columnists to help them out, not just supplying dirt. Ravitch’s response is coming out tomorrow, she says.