Age Discrimination

is  rampant in public education, as I knew too well from personal experience, and now it is becoming formal policy in school district's like Memphis.

Thanks to RTTT and Duncan, states are willing to subvert teaching licensing laws and requirements so some cheap bimbos can be hired in place of veterans.

It has nothing to do with "quality" but saving money on costs.  This "job fair" happened last Friday, and veteran teachers were pissed off royal:

Of the 154 teachers eligible to attend Friday's fair, fewer than 100 registered, said Sheila Redick, spokeswoman for MCS teacher hiring office STARS.

Paden, who has been on the surplus list since summer, registered an age discrimination complaint Friday with Equal Opportunity Commission.

"I've been with this system 18 years. I have a master's degree in my subject area. I taught at the University of Memphis for 15 years.

"And now there is no place that wants to hire me as a history teacher in the city schools? That is absolutely absurd. I have outstanding evaluations everywhere I have been."

As a result of the teacher shuffling, all sections of physics at Ridgeway High were dissolved this week, said 13-year chemistry teacher Talya Brown.

She was not placed Friday because there were no chemistry openings at the fair, and has no idea where she is supposed to report to work Monday.

News, Etc.

Read between the lines of this article, and it sounds like bad news for Harry & David, especially when most of the execs don't even live in the Rogue Valley.

Employees sing a different tune than the absentee execs who probably can't find Medford, Oregon, on a map.

What a pair of winners:

The new CEO, Steve Heyer, lost his most recent high-profile job as chief executive at Starwood Hotels after facing allegations that he had sent inappropriate sexual e-mails to underlings.

Ross Klein, whom Heyer brought in to run Harry & David's new branding effort, left a job at Hilton Hotels in 2008 after he was accused of corporate espionage, an allegation that is a subject of a federal criminal investigation. Klein is working out of an office near his home in Beverly Hills.

Heyer and Klein have denied any wrongdoing.

Jones of Wasserstein praised both men.

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Doug and Cindy Hampton may lose their home, but I seriously doubt they will be homeless.
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Good riddance to this piece of rubbish.
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Speaking of rubbish, I am glad I didn't bother to look at Oprah Winfrey's trashing of public school teachers. As the writer of the linked post notes, Oprah is hardly in the position to cast stones at American public schools.

Misc

If you're a qualified school administrator, you aren't welcome, at least in Chicago.
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"Reform" comes to my old school district, which means it is the first step to completely dismantling the system, as is being done in larger school districts throughout the United States.
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Since Congress doesn't give a shit about the unemployed, many of them, seeing there is no hope, decide to end it all.

This is good news for Congress, for that is fewer people they have to pay Social Security, Medicare, and other government benefits.

Firing Teachers While at the Same Time Hiring New Teachers

This seems to be the latest scam going on with public school districts. It's a veiled policy of age discrimination to fire senior, veteran teachers who are more expensive and then replace them with newbies with little or no experience at all but are cheap. Then, when those newbies get a couple of years in, THEY will be replaced with still cheaper hires.

Chicago is pulling the Michelle Rhee crap of firing tenured teachers while hiring newbies:

While claiming it must cut hundreds (perhaps thousands) of jobs, the Chicago Board of Education is simultaneously advertising around the nation and locally to hire new teachers. Is there an explanation? Secret Job Fairs and hundreds of hidden job positions posted on out-of-state Web sites — plus some postings from CPS itself — indicate confusion, if not a policy of dishonesty. Additionally, a federal age discrimination lawsuit is already pending that could cost CPS millions of dollars if the pattern that seems to be there is verified in court. The charge is that CPS is dumping veteran teachers (an instance of age discrimination) while trying to hire young teachers in large numbers — despite their lack of experience and proven abilities, and the fact that a majority of the newly hired teachers leave the profession within five years.

The Education Wars: How Principals Easily Ruin Teachers' Careers

In Chicago, it's called an "E-3"; in New York, it is called a "U" rating. Other districts have other names, but the result is the same: "unsatisfactory." And once a teacher has the scarlet "U" on his or her forehead, his or her career is finished.

It's unbelievable how EASY it is for rotten or incompetent principals to ruin a teacher's career, but it happens all the time.

Here is the "E-3" in Chicago Public Schools:

The law was perhaps originally well-intentioned—designed to protect children from someone who might have experienced a mental or physical breakdown. The assumption has always been that such a situation is the result of aging and only a few older teachers might qualify for an E3. Much to the contrary, however, given the current high stress level at CPS, one doesn’t find many teachers hanging on past retirement age into their dotage. The E3 has morphed into a tool of reprisal and revenge, used by principals to rid themselves of unwanted teachers.

A great many factors have combined over the past several years to damage the reputation of American schools. Rather than address the problems honestly, politicians look around for a quick fix or, better yet, scapegoats. The E3 has yet to reach its full potential as a weapon of career destruction because it takes a particularly asocial and amoral principal to falsely label a superior or excellent teacher as unsatisfactory. That has the same earmark as lying under oath. Not all principals are ready to sink that low. The current mob of managers wouldn’t recognize good teaching if it bit them in their rigorous spreadsheets. What they do recognize, though, is the bottom line, so high-priced veteran teachers are targeted with E3s.

It's the new age discrimination. I know what it is.

The Teacher Wars II

Another post from Teachers.net's NY teachers' chatboard:

I was formerly a health care professional who changed careers
and went into teaching. I am also over 40. Statistics show
that adults over 40 fare better than younger ones, and my
professors always emphasized that fact. Adults pay for their
own education and are more serious about studying than their
younger counterparts. I went back to school and earned my
masters degree in education, later in life, when most people are
beginning their plans to retire. But I enjoy learning and
believe life is always about learning new things.

Student teaching was wonderful and there was no problem with my
age. Higher education is a the great leveler, and when you are
in school, you are treated as an equal and valued for what you
can do, and how hard you work, for the most part, not to say it
was at all easy, but a great challenge.

When you become a student teacher in the education system, you
are not a threat to anyone (supervisors), you are an asset,
regardless of your age. So as a student teacher, again I was
not a threat to anyone and did not encounter any hostility with
administration. I was hired as a probationary teacher shortly
after I graduated. Although I was on tenure track, I was
terminated in my last month before I was to be granted tenure.
It was then that I found out what “At Will” employment meant. I
found out that the school did not need a reason to terminate
you, but that they had this right as long as you were not
tenured. I found out that the union would do nothing to stand
up and speak for a teacher as long as they are untenured, even
though you paid dues.

After I was terminated, it was totally impossible to think of
being hired again as a real teacher, so I had to work as a
substitute. I met more and more new aspiring teachers, young
and old, who could not get hired, some who had been working as
substitutes for years. I met older teachers who had been
substitutes for years, yet the school would not hire them as a
legitimate teacher. And saw other things, that added much to
my “real education”, too dark and unsavory, and too numerous to
mention here. Many new teachers seemed much more qualified and
educated than the tenured teachers who were secure in their
jobs. As undergraduates, you are inundated with class
management techniques, so you can recognize when teachers do not
follow the most basic class management rules. You get a bird's
eye view of what is going on in the schools, because you are
always being shifted about in different schools and different
areas. As an educated teacher, you see that some of many of
the teachers in violate the most common sense class management
rules, yelling at their class, not implementing consequences,
rewarding negative behavior, etc., etc., etc.

When I met another substitute with a PHd who was working as a
substitute, who told me that she could not get hired in NY after
looking for 2 years, something clicked. That is when I
cancelled my plans to further my education to get a doctorate
degree, even though I had looked forward to doing this even
though I knew I could be successful in accomplishing this. I
needed a job, and was not at liberty to earn degrees in higher
education just for the sake of my own fulfillment.

The truth of the matter is, there is no practical use for higher
education in our present education system. Clearly, our
education system is not about education. We are more involved
in the systematic dumbing down of teachers and children in our
schools than we are interested in “education” in this country.
All for the financial benefits of those who are running the
system.

And yet people still ask what is wrong with our education
system?

There are real problems in public education, but those are being hidden from public view while everybody is talking about "standards" and other such nonsense.