A Reader's Digest-type version of this insanity can be found here.
Rhee is only 39 years old, with very little in the way of teaching experience, which appears to be par for the course with this new crop of administrators being forced upon teachers and taxpayers. From Wikipedia:
Rhee taught in Baltimore, Maryland as a recruit of Teach For America for three years. In 1997 she founded the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization which works with needy school districts to recruit and train new teachers. In ten years, the New Teacher Project has expanded to forty programs in twenty states and recruited more than 10,000 teachers.
Through the DC Teaching Fellows program, Washington, D.C. participated in the New Teacher Project, and was successful in recruiting highly qualified applicants. On June 12, 2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced that he had chosen Rhee to replace superintendent of D.C. public schools Clifford Janey and become the schools' new chancellor. Rhee initially rebuffed Fenty's offer, but relented when promised wide latitude and significant authority in decision-making as well as strong mayoral support for her proposed initiatives. New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein highly recommended her to Mayor Fenty.
Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality, National Center for Alternative Certification, and Project REACH.[citation needed] She was a special guest of First Lady Laura Bush at President George W. Bush's 2008 State of the Union address.
Not long ago administrators were teachers who taught for many, many years before going into administration, got into it just prior to retiring, and actually were very empathetic towards teachers because they had been there. Now we have nothing but fuckwads from principals on up who are way too young for the responsibility or were basically unfit to be in a classroom and thus promoted to oversee teachers and other administrators. It won't be long before all administrators will have MBAs, totally inappropriate when it's supposed to be about children and not the bottom line.
Make no mistake: school districts all over the country are full of these fuckwads, and as a result public schools are going into the shitter--on purpose.
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Washoe County School District will find that whites will be in the minority by 2015.
Or perhaps they won't, with all of the Hispanics moving out of the region because of the shitty economy.
Now remember, this new superintendent, Heath Morrison, is basically a privatizer with little teaching experience prior to going into administration. I don't think he is there for the long haul, anyway; WCSD is just a stepping stone to the big leagues.
This made me laugh out loud because of the obvious naivete or bullshit being spewed:
Get the best teachers to teach the students who need them the most
“In public education in general, we tend to give the kids who come to school with less, less school,” Morrison said. “So they get the most inexperienced teachers, they get the largest class sizes and they get the most disengaging classes. And then we wonder why they continue to struggle. Most people would say, ‘Why aren’t you trying to find ways to encourage the best principals and the best teachers to work with the students who have the highest needs.”
Well, if you want good teachers, quit hiring nepotisms. It is unconscionable for a principal to hire a mother and her two daughters as teachers in the same building. Nepotism invariably breeds corruption. If you want good principals, quit promoting the weakest teachers into these jobs and quit hiring careerists who don't give a shit about the kids but see their jobs as public relations managers. And quit hiring people under the age of 50 or 55 for these jobs.
By the way, you can't do "year-round high schools" anyway given the way higher education operates. Besides, the argument that going to school "year round" helps kids learn better is a crock of shit; there is no evidence of that. The reason there continues to be year-round schooling is because many teachers somehow like the frequent breaks.
I despised it totally. Summers off are very short anyway, and one has to be able to decompress from the previous year because teaching is very labor intensive. Year-round doesn't even allow that; I felt like I was on a goddamned treadmill.
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