Rhee fires 241 D.C. teachers; 165 cited for poor performance

[Jenne]

Richer schools don't usually get Title I because they're not lower-performing enough.  But yeah, I do agree that NCLB is just fucked up six ways to Sunday.  It's like the health care deal we just "got," it's the "best thing we could get," so it's what's going to stick.  It unfortunately leaves "behind" all the kids whose parents don't give a rat's ass, and those who just can't, for whatever reason.  And then the fact it's a GODDAMMED UNFUNDED MANDATE is another stick in the craw.

[Adios]

Washington (CNN) - The House is expected to vote Tuesday on a scaled-back version of its original war funding bill, which would drop billions of dollars for unrelated domestic programs, including money to help struggling states avoid teacher layoffs.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/?fbid=fL9v4Hjua92

[Zyzyx]

Having a parent who has worked in a Louisiana school system for 30+ years, it's pretty easy to see how NCLB has hooked the hose to the poopnozzle and turned it on full blast. The middle school at which she works is watching helplessly as the budget cuts head their way. A few years ago they had some of the highest standardized test scores in the parish, lucky them, but now that the inevitable decline is on its way the money will slip out with it, putting pressure on administration who are mercenaries disguised as middle-aged women in business suits.

In the meantime the kids refuse to work. They act like shitting animals, breaking/stealing whatever they can, whipping their dicks out under the desk to compare size and taking as much as they can without giving anything back. Public school down here is the lunch dole, a place to store your brat so you don't have to raise him yourself - because kids like that are innocent, their parents are just a vision of what they will become. Down here, people think teachers should be dealing with other people's inadequacies at child-rearing for them, mindlessly handing away their offspring to the state and screaming whenever someone asks them to take some fucking responsibility. Oh, and if you really love teaching, you should be doing it for free. The conservative wingnuts agree and are the main proponents of this because they want to keep seeing the smudgy folks fail in a state-run system, smugly advancing their agenda.

I give thanks to Strife, the Mother of Competition that I got an education at all! That I got into a decent college, got a decent education, because I wanted to better myself and not live like another state ward.

[Cain]

-

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Bump:

Thanks to the boom in lobbying and government contracting, the nation's capital is no longer a town of middle-class bureaucrats - it is now one of the wealthiest places on Earth, and one of the planet's most unequal cities. With the Beltway's rich typically sending their kids to private havens like Sidwell Friends, the D.C. public school system ends up serving a disproportionately low-income student population, which means it needs a lot of money if it has any chance of succeeding. That's because economic status is such an enormous factor in educational achievement and because successfully combating poverty's deleterious effect on educational achievement requires extra resources for "wraparound" services. To help raise that capital, private foundations in recent years swooped in with resources.

It sounded great - suddenly, there seemed to be no need to raise taxes on the cash-bloated multinational corporations stationed in D.C. The celebrated philanthrocapitalists were in the nation's capital to save the day! Except for one problem: the foundation money came with an implicit and then-unprecedented threat. Championing the punitive, unproven and often counterproductive pedagogical agenda of standardized testing, draconian school shutdowns, mass teacher firings and union-busting charter schools, the conservative foundations gave Washington, D.C. residents the hostage-taker's ultimatum: if they and their democratically elected city councilors did not obediently submit to the corporate "reform" agenda of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, then there would be consequences. More specifically, if they ever removed Rhee from her public office, then the foundation money would be summarily withdrawn, and kids would be harmed.

Backed by these corporate heavies, Rhee told residents who were critical of her destructive and cheating-plagued term that when it comes to public education policy in her city, "It's not a democracy." The result of the hostage taking thuggery? As PBS Frontline reported, after Rhee's tenure, Washington is "still among the worst in the nation and D.C.'s high school graduation rate dead last." And yet while the hostages suffered, Rhee has been handsomely rewarded for her loyalty to the hostage takers, as the same plutocrats bequeathed her a high-paying job and a well-financed corporate front group all for herself.

Just saying.

But corporations will always do what's best for us!

Right?

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

The invisible hand knows best!

[Pere Ubu]

Rhee, and like-minded leaders in other school districts, contends that the best way to overhaul schools is to intensively monitor the performance of every adult, including janitors, and measure it by multiple yardsticks. For teachers, that includes evidence that their students meet or exceed predicted rates of growth on standardized tests, a metric known as "value-added."

Pffft, because everyone knows that schools should be run just like any other business, with carefully constructed evaluations of performance and proper graphs and PowerPoint presentations showing "rates of growth".

Because we're not at all dealing with human beings and a process that can't always be evaluated numerically and education isn't a vital part of society that shouldn't be treated like selling potato chips.

[Bu🤠ns]

Rhee, and like-minded leaders in other school districts, contends that the best way to overhaul schools is to intensively monitor the performance of every adult, including janitors, and measure it by multiple yardsticks. For teachers, that includes evidence that their students meet or exceed predicted rates of growth on standardized tests, a metric known as "value-added."

Pffft, because everyone knows that schools should be run just like any other business, with carefully constructed evaluations of performance and proper graphs and PowerPoint presentations showing "rates of growth".

Because we're not at all dealing with human beings and a process that can't always be evaluated numerically and education isn't a vital part of society that shouldn't be treated like selling potato chips.

Not to derail or anything but what's up with that?

That mentality is fucking EVERYWHERE.

[Pere Ubu]

That mentality is fucking EVERYWHERE.

CORPORATIONS ARE HOLY BLAMELESS CREATURES AND WALK AMONG US AS GODS 

[Kai]

Rhee, and like-minded leaders in other school districts, contends that the best way to overhaul schools is to intensively monitor the performance of every adult, including janitors, and measure it by multiple yardsticks. For teachers, that includes evidence that their students meet or exceed predicted rates of growth on standardized tests, a metric known as "value-added."

Pffft, because everyone knows that schools should be run just like any other business, with carefully constructed evaluations of performance and proper graphs and PowerPoint presentations showing "rates of growth".

Because we're not at all dealing with human beings and a process that can't always be evaluated numerically and education isn't a vital part of society that shouldn't be treated like selling potato chips.

Not to derail or anything but what's up with that?

That mentality is fucking EVERYWHERE.

Not only is it run like a business, but it's also pseudo-scientific. They claim objectivity, since their measures are numerical values, yet unlike scientific procedure, a failure of a model does not lead to a change in said model. There's no reason a numerical measure /couldn't/ help make decisions, but when failure of the model leads to the continuation of the model i.e., hypervigilance in the form of termination, well, isn't that the very definition of insanity?

Either that, or their values are such that the model is doing exactly what they want.

[Reginald Ret]

This is fucking depressing.

[Bu🤠ns]

Rhee, and like-minded leaders in other school districts, contends that the best way to overhaul schools is to intensively monitor the performance of every adult, including janitors, and measure it by multiple yardsticks. For teachers, that includes evidence that their students meet or exceed predicted rates of growth on standardized tests, a metric known as "value-added."

Pffft, because everyone knows that schools should be run just like any other business, with carefully constructed evaluations of performance and proper graphs and PowerPoint presentations showing "rates of growth".

Because we're not at all dealing with human beings and a process that can't always be evaluated numerically and education isn't a vital part of society that shouldn't be treated like selling potato chips.

Not to derail or anything but what's up with that?

That mentality is fucking EVERYWHERE.

Not only is it run like a business, but it's also pseudo-scientific. They claim objectivity, since their measures are numerical values, yet unlike scientific procedure, a failure of a model does not lead to a change in said model. There's no reason a numerical measure /couldn't/ help make decisions, but when failure of the model leads to the continuation of the model i.e., hypervigilance in the form of termination, well, isn't that the very definition of insanity?

Either that, or their values are such that the model is doing exactly what they want.

Crazy.  That's always been sort of what kids tend to suspect.  Even growing up my fellow classmates were subjected to a lot of new experiments with various programs.  And it's almost they do it to show that they're doing something rather than actually improving. 

It's more like a shuffle rather than a actual plan.