no taxation without representation
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Someone stole my laptop. I have filed a report with the police; but I am advised the the chances of recovering it are very poor.
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Seriously, I have a cash flow emergency and would really appreciate your support..
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If you have steady employment, and are not overburdened with debt, this blogger would be especially appreciative of your support.
If you have steady employment, and are not overburdened with debt, this blogger would be especially appreciative of your support.
They make a fetish of reaching the lowest common political denominator, rather than advocating for something which actually solves the problem.
I am a DCPS graduate (and Harvard graduate, and current assistant professor at a liberal arts college), and I find Michelle Rhee’s actions as chancellor deplorable.She certainly is “hard-charging” but the only results she can show is having fired many people. Anyone with any familiarity at all with DCPS (or with many urban public school systems, see Kate Boo’s excellent piece on former Denver schools chief and current U.S. Senator, Michael Bennet) can recognize that the people are not the problem. I had many great and dedicated teachers, and several teachers who were great and dedicated before the system burned them out. A very small minority were simply not good teachers under any system (but then again, I had some of those at Harvard too).
Rhee has been given far more power and authority than any previous DC schools leader, and in her current crusade against tenure, she is effectively saying that it is not enough, she needs more power. She is going to crash and burn, leave DCPS is far worse shape than she found it, and declare victory. People like yourself and others in the adoring national press who have gone along with her manufactured image as a hard-charging reformer will move on to the next thing, never realizing how much damage she has actually done, never questioning the assumptions that she has taken to their logical conclusions.
Here are a few:
Is the biggest problem that there are too many bad teachers? What evidence does she have for this claim?
If she does have a magic formula to separate bad teachers from good ones, and applies it to fire, let’s say, the lowest 30% of the teachers in DCPS, how is she going to replace them? Where are the hundreds of great teachers lining up to teach in such a place? Good teachers know that any arbitrary magic formula is unlikely to separate good from bad, and will likely choose a school system that gives them some freedom to be creative.
Along with the quest for “higher quality teachers” and the attack on tenure, comes an attack on the notion that one can learn how to teach, and that experience helps. This is a dangerous road to go down, and it devalues the profession of teaching, by making it not a profession at all.Rhee fired the principal of one school, handpicked the replacement, then fired the replacement after only a few months. Does that sound like a good manager?
I hope that the many political and business leaders in DC also try to give all of DCPS students the opportunity to get a high-quality education, but I am profoundly disturbed by the efforts of Rhee and others that suggest that a high quality education is the result of teachers who are “high quality people” rather than dedicated people who work in a functional and supportive system.
