Rhee and The Teachers Union, Round 63....

Oh how I love this woman.  Michelle Rhee has fired 241 of the lowest-performing teachers in the District of Columbia (just under 4%) and the union is going to the mattresses.  The Rhee/Fenty team has decided that the District's schools can no longer be the nation's laughingstock--and they've done something about it. 

If Rhee were the CEO of a company, the measures she's taken to produce performance would be lauded universally.  But since public education is treated as a sinecure for the ineffective and inefficient, her actions invariably raise a ruckus.  I can't wait for the WaPost series on the honorable, hard-working teachers let go.

Note:  some 76 of the fired teachers were let go due to a lack of proper licensing required under No Child Left Behind.  This statistic is the most troubling one of the lot--I know this because I know a DC teacher who was let go as a result of a license issue in the early days of the Rhee administration.  Here's the deal--NCLB did in fact, create standards for teacher licensing; however, the District's IMPLEMENTATION of those rules defies common sense.  My friend was given an ultimatum in which she had to go and complete some three additional classes in order to be certified to teach in the District--when she could have taken the Metro to Virginia and qualified from day one.  You see, her MA in Teaching English as a Second Language was PAID FOR by NCLB, and the curriculum was developed specifically to address the provisions of NCLB for teacher certification.   Yet for some reason, DC added to the requirements, and the rest is history. 

The State Of Publik Edukashun

Iowa middle school language teacher (HA!) Terry Hoffman organized a group of students to protest school spending cuts.



Looks like she should have been covering grammar that day instead.

H/T: Reason.com

Kathleen Parker's Teacher Muse

I'm not that big a Kathleen Parker fan--I have referred to her as "our side's Maureen Dowd" more than once and apparently the Pulitzer Committee agrees, bestowing this year's prize for commentary upon her.

That said, this is a lovely column, evoking many memories in me of great teachers I had who challenged and inspired me. Art Sharon. Jack Kunz. Jim Forrest. John Jenks. Sam Evangelista. Men of great wit and learning, men of superb intellect and poise. Marianne Brindisi belongs on any list of great and influential teachers in my life, branding me with a love of the German language that persists to this day.

I come down on teacher unions hard in this column, but my goodness, how I respect teachers....ironic, and perhaps inconsistent. But it is what it is.

H/T: NRO

The Teaching Profession

We've got a bit of a dust-up underway with an anonymous writer who has undertaken a spirited defense of the the teaching profession. Only problem is, no one was attacking the teaching profession--just a group of them acting together under union influence.

If you have the time, it's worth reading this longish piece from the NYT magazine on building better teachers. It gives the reader an appreciation of the challenges of modern education and the truly tough row that today's teachers have to hoe.

But I think the anonymous teacher defender pretty much gets it right in one of his or her posts--we are concentrating so much on teachers because society has given up on families. Two trends should be looked to as having contributed to the decline in US education--the ongoing demise of the traditional family (through divorce and illegitimate birth), and the dramatic increase of women in the workforce. The education and socialization of children in our society has been largely contracted out, and we look to today's teachers to pull off what the family was responsible for in decades past. This is not a good strategy for the long-haul.