This is a good article. Principals and other administrators trained in this scheme will exacerbate the already scandalous practices in public schools of targeting veteran or older teachers and replacing them with cheapo bimbos.
How would you like to work for this guy?
Roche is a product of the "New Leaders for New Schools" training of principals. According to information provided to Substance, he served as the assistant principal at Boone Elementary and Noble Street Charter School, among other places.
According to teacher Kathy Jacobs, the 'New Leaders' program includes a 60-page Rand Report which includes counseling out so-called 'low-performing' teachers who don’t buy into a principal's philosophy and 'rigorous curriculum and data driven instruction.' The aim of the program seems to be to create an executive class of principals — the "CEOs of the schools" — just as executives in private business (especially banking) have created the greatest economic crisis in modern times.
Roche's behavior, whatever his instructional philosophy, has struck most teachers as bizarre.
"He cut off all our padlocks on the cabinets without telling us and he threw out all the textbooks," Jacobs said. Jacobs said his reports when he suspends teachers or teacher aids or gives unsatisfactory ratings are silly.
"He’ll say stuff like 'Research says you shouldn’t take any more than 16 to 19 seconds to move from center to center' — and these are eight year olds," Jacobs told Substance. "In my whole 36 years of teaching I have never heard of teachers being suspended without pay."
Zellman, who serves as the literacy coach, said Roche implemented a new reading and writing program — courtesy, he said, of the Erickson Institute — that is based on read alouds with no textbooks, something especially difficult for English language learners or others who need extra help.
Another Erickson Institute feature he tried to force the teachers to do is videotaping.
According to Debbie Hines, the fourth grade teacher, the administration was asking all the teachers to agree to videotaping lessons in their classrooms. When Hines said she refused, Jeffery Porter, the principal-in-training, said that this would hurt her teacher evaluation.
Read the whole article; it gets better.
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