Posted on 06/19/2009 4:49:46 AM PDT by freespirited
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, following through on promises to dismiss teachers deemed ineffective, has fired about 250 tenured and novice instructors this week for poor performance or failure to obtain a license, union officials said yesterday....
The dismissal of 80 tenured teachers is a landmark of sorts for the school system, which historically has fired only a handful of instructors each year for poor performance. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
She wasn’t joking, was she.
Just 250? From that rat hole school system?
What she found in the school system is endemic to the DC govt. Too bad she isnt mayor.
It’s a start!
NEA will be all over this...... but way to go. More of this needs to be done. I’m a teacher & I wholeheartedly believe tenure should be done away with this and merit pay should be implemented. But no can’t do that thanks to Jimmuh Cartah’s policies he started!!!
I had an idea -
if a parent or guardian were required to serve detention with their unruly student....
I don’t know the whole story, but I hope it’s not political and is truly a legitimate performance issue.
Good for her.
I wonder how many the union will successfully have reinstated.
“I don’t know the whole story, but I hope it’s not political and is truly a legitimate performance issue.”
I don’t know the story either, but the way things are going the fired ones might be Republicans or, worse yet, Conservatives!
It took decades and how many lost generations to find one person with this much integrity? She will be challenged in court and they will seek to remoive her for this.
We should send her e-mails of encouragement because we know she’s going to get flamed.
And their replacements will be arriving from Chicago.....any day now.
“... hired permanently.”
Frightening! Like Supreme Court Justices????
Poison the well, so to speak, with permanently placed, mediocre, Liberal instructors (misdirecting the education of generation after generation of voters) and fill the Supreme Court with America-Hating, communists...
Why not just dismantle the whole apparatus of the country at once?
Probably all minorities now with compelling personal histories. Look like great potential upper level NEA material.
I’m sure that there are 250 or more incompetent teachers in DC, the big question is whether these are the ones.
It just seems far too easy for bureaucrats to use this kind of move to get rid of people they don’t like because of political, personal or other reasons.
I'd wonder, too. I can see "failure to obtain a license" would seem a legitimate reason, but I lived in suburban Maryland years ago and just getting a driver's license or registering a car in DC was a major problem.
In any case, I think trying to reform the DC public schools by firing a few hundred teachers is like trying to dry out the ocean using paper towels.
“With graduation rates of somewhere near 50% the union must be proud of their work.”
That is double the Detoilet grad rate!
Good point ... this is a likely problem in a lot of places, but probably not in this particular hellhole. Wouldnt surprise me if there is not a single Republican or conservative to fire in the D.C. public schools.
Ms. Rhee is in for a tough time. Most of these teachers are black. She is Chinese or looks to be. Charges of racism are bound to come up. She states that in the fall she plans to use the 90 day rule to fire even more teachers. She now has to find replacements (qualified people who want to enter a zoo of a school system) to replace these loads with.
I look for Ms. Rhee to be replaced first, but I hope I am wrong.
I guarantee that if they retained the same percentage of teachers as the graduation rate on an annual basis, you’d see miracles occur in the public education system.
Can she oversee the congress??
Pray for America
But are they actually going to stop paying them? There was a story a while back about DC teachers who had been laid off for years, and the school system was still mailing them their paychecks.
FTTU!
Please...There is already enough of a police threat that hangs like a cloud over government schooling. Please don't give the government school Fascists any creative ideas.
It is the threat of armed police action that prompts property and business owners to pay their taxes to support this monster.
Google the words, “Truant and Police” and you will see how heavily the jack boot of police, courts, and foster care can come down on kids and parents who refuse to bow to their government school masters.
Hey - Fenty's gotten meters into cabs. That's enough of an accomplishment for an entire CAREER in this town.
No way there's 250 Republican/Conservative teachers in the DC schools. There might be TWO.
Can’t get any lower than they already are. No, exit exams (and not these silly little ones written on an 8th-grade level) are needed, and teachers who can’t get their kids to behave and learn long enough to pass shouldn’t be in a classroom to begin with. I never said word one about lowering standards. However, if we performed our jobs in our current industries the way teachers did theirs, you think we’d be employed for longer than, say, half a second?
And for parents who just have a case of the give-a-s***s, maybe that’s exactly what they need. Parents have abdicated all responsibility and concern over their child’s education. Wasn’t that way when I was growing up, that’s for sure.
Hey, it was just an idea I threw out.
After all, the problem with education is the parents and the [intentional] destruction of the traditional family.
Just thinking of a way to make the parents have some consequences for their poor parenting.
Actually, do we know if the union should be proud or not?
It could be, that given the overall IQ of the student population, maybe the schools are doing a pretty good job of getting the kids through. Really, what is the percentage of children who should be expected to pass given their IQ, and how many would simply not have the brain power to do it?
If 100% of the nation's children can meet the requirements for graduation then the requirements are too low and we a doing a grave disservice to the bright kids who forced to languish mind-deadening cesspools of boredom. ( I call that emotional child abuse.)
If a 50% graduation failure rate is to be expected then we subjecting the dull children to a daily torture of frustration and failure. ( I call that emotional child abuse.)
Just thinking of a way to make the parents have some consequences for their poor parenting.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Personally, if it were a private school, it might be a good idea. KIPP schools hold parents strictly accountable, and they seem to be having good success.
That's been repeated every decade for the last fifty years.
We are in agreement, though I'd just prefer vouchers.
I can understand your frustration ...But...please not from the government.
Government schools are already prisons for children who have not committed any crime. Children are marched around like prisoners. It is the government who strictly assigns with whom they will or will not assemble. The government strictly prohibits free speech, press, and expression of religion during their prison-like school day. The government orders them to eat and use rest room facilities on schedule, and their play areas look like prison exercise yards. Some schools even look like prisons with their chain link fences and barbed wire.
Then....When kids ( who have committed no crime) ****rationally*** rebel against being treated like prisoners, they and their parents are hauled before courts and threatened with hard-time prison.
Pleae read post #34.
The solution:
** The fundamental problem here is —spiritual—! Ultimately, only the gospel can reach these families and change their hearts. Force without the love of the gospel will ( rightly) only harden their hearts and sow profound resentment and disrespect.
** We must work to shut down government schools, and work to open private schools. Only private schools can reach these parents with the right mix of righteousness, love, and, sometimes, hard consequences.
Precisely. The people who are always making phony charges of racism will be all over this.
The teachers have a union, dammit- she won’t get away with the firings. Look for her to have an “accident” of some kind, probaly set up by some teamster thugs subcontracted by the teachers union.
Nice work, if you can get it!
Give the parents some say in where they send their children to school — a voucher system perhaps — Oh, that’s right, that’s already been shot down for Washington, DC, kids.
It is very difficult to get a group of people who are coerced under threat of law into sending their children to poor and dangerous schools to cooperate with those schools, especially if they’ve been through that system. They have nothing but contempt for the system and all who run it.
Nothing good came out of the Carter years.
The NEA was too busy renting it's facilities to ACORN for their big wankathon.
Now there's a pair, the NEA and ACORN. Imagine how much social carnage they could wreak if they decide to work together.
WHAT??? A... (ohmigod) MERIT-BASED SYSTEM???? Who...? How...? In America??
I do not buy into that argument only because in many cases there have been schools set up in the most impoverished areas of
Harlem, Patterson, NJ, and East LA. just to name , where have students have excelled.
Low or no expectations, poor teachers and no parental buy in will give you the 50% rate. You only have to point to the 2,000 kids in Washington on vouchers attending private schools to see where to point your finger.
Without knowing the IQ’s of those who failed how can we know if they had a reasonable chance of graduating.
Really,...realistically, what percentage of children can be expected to graduate?
Also...To expect that all children will graduate from high school and to **force** them into this educational environment has consequences. Those children who can not succeed will be continually frustrated day by day by work that they will never master. I consider this emotional child abuse.
By the way, I think the KIPP schools are doing a great job! I would like to see more of them.
You must be a teacher. I come from a different era. How many could have succeeded, but were pegged as potentially great for the “day labor” pool. Where and whence I came from the Irish Christian Brothers made sure you learned whether you wanted to or not. And yes if I had not had them pushing me every step of the way I would have never graduated.
And yes if I had not had them pushing me every step of the way I would have never graduated.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
That you are posting on Free Republic means that you are well above average in intelligence. I am certain that your teachers could see that, indeed, you were a bright guy.
But...Really, what percentage should be graduating from high school?
If it were so easy that everyone could do it, then what value would the diploma have? Also...If it were that easy, the bright children would be bored out of their minds. There time would be grossly wasted, and the bright child would be artificially retarded in his academic development! ( A form of child abuse, in my opinion.)
If we put children who will never master the work because they simply do not have an IQ high enough for the task, then what are we doing to these children? We are setting them up for daily failure. ( Another form of abuse.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.