The Wake County School Board voted along party lines to fire Superintendent Tony Tata Tuesday.
The move came after two days of closed door meetings to discuss "confidential personnel matters."
Republicans on the board expressed their dismay at the vote.
"I think this is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time for the wrong reason," offered John Tedesco.
Tedesco said paying Tata a quarter of a million dollars in a separation agreement was a waste of taxpayer's money.
Of course he isn't qualified:
Still, Tata's qualifications for leading the Wake schools are scant. He completed a 10-month course in educational leadership at The Broad Center in Los Angeles, which is like being trained by Art Pope and the Civitas Institute in Raleigh to run the LA schools. His job in Washington, under the controversial schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, was to handle procurement, logistics and food service for a system with 45,000 students—compared to Wake's 143,000. His title of chief operating officer overstates his authority; when Rhee left, another subordinate replaced her.
Washington's public schools are notoriously bad, and Rhee, who's since resigned, was brought in to take names and fire bad teachers. Wake's schools are far superior, and the challenge of improving them is unlike anything Tata has undertaken. As Carolyn Morrison, a minority-faction board member who voted against hiring him, said, "He has had no experience with instructional leadership. I don't think General Tata would consider me qualified to be appointed as a brigadier general," said Morrison, a former school principal, "if I had only a short course [at Broad] and 18 months of experience in the military."
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