# At age 44, Emperor Hirohito announced to the people of Japan that he was not divine.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is 45. Past time for truth in disclosure.
# When Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia was 44, Ben & Jerry named a flavor in his honor.
What might be a good flavor for Arne?
# At age 44, George III lost the American colonies.
Arne is about to destroy American public education.
At age 45, George Orwell wrote 1984.
Arne invites the Business Roundtable and Achieve to direct the writing of the Common Core national standards.
# At age 45, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.
We can hope for a similar fate for you know who.
Few people in modern history have the potential to do such damage, but Arne is well on the way to becoming one of that elite group.
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Duncan has endeared himself to many teachers.
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Tomorrow marks the first official day of "work" for the new WCSD superintendent Heath Morrison. You can watch a video of him introducing himself and talking about some of his beliefs here.
Note all of the buzzwords like "stakeholders" and other privatizer lingo. He's an Eli Broad Academy "graduate."
He says he looks forward to meeting with people; however, he may rue the day he came out to this "world class school district," aka "wholly corrupt, shitty district."
As I've said very often, more and more school districts are being taken over by privatizers with Enron philosophies, and they found an ingenious way of subverting tenure laws (which say teachers MUST have the right to due process--but teachers like yours truly find due process is a joke, given the criminality school districts pull in administrative hearings--I am still shellshocked over my illegal dismissal and the various criminal acts, including probable bribery, committed by the crooks who spearheaded it) by creating false paper trails or finding some loophole to throw older and/or veteran teachers out so as to not be sued over age discrimination, and younger teachers get denied tenure and thus districts don't have to pay retirement benefits when these teachers don't become vested. In other words, these terminations of thousands of teachers throughout the country are for the most part not as a result of true misconduct but as a result of trumped up charges by administrators who want to save money. The bottom-line philosophy by bottom-of-the-barrel administrators, starting with the principals without principles at individual schools, has infested public education.
This is from a New York teacher, but it's apt everywhere in the country:
Why do they do it? They do it because, as my former principal once said, when I asked her why she would not implement some of the policies we thought would enrich the school for the children, because we "won't pay (her) mortgage." They want position, power and money, at all costs, regardless of what it does to others or how evil it proves them to be. They want numbers: accountability numbers: teachers fired; progress numbers: regents scores and high attendance.None of this proves anything, and teachers, not any other group: parents, students, guidance, school aides, ADMINISTRATORS, within education, are being held accountable for it all.
It's all politics, and I challenge those who believe that the bureaucrats who attack teachers are right to demand that the kids who attend the worst schools simply be transferred to the so-called best ones. You'll see that there is no change. Even the charter schools, which claim to be so successful, have high rates of expulsion of their students. Teachers are only one part of the system, and they should be held responsible for holding up their end, just as much, not more or less, as others.
I've also worked, as you have, though not to the same degree of effort, to get people in power to acknowledge what's going on, with little success. The people who do seem to listen are professors of education and a few of the reformers that can look beyond the "teacher quality" craze and into comprehensive quality in the field, which is what I believe is needed. Politicians, however, don't seem to care.
Anyway, thanks for what you're doing. Too many people are being destroyed, as a result of what's taking place. I have friends on the verge of total collapse, who've had nervous breakdowns, suffer from nightmares, or, because of situations similar to mine, are unable to find work and are near the end of their rope. I vividly remember the line, at the Manhattan UFT, which went around the door and to the elevator, of people appealing their U ratings, crying while on line, mostly all probationary teachers.
People spend years, trying to enter a profession where they feel they might be able to save lives. Instead, they're used as scapegoats and thrown away, by people who lack conscience, values or principles.
Why do they do it? It's the same answer as to why an unneutered male dog licks his balls--it's because they can, and there's nobody overseeing the corruption.
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