Michelle Rhee, Wisconsin, and the Attack on Teachers

[texshelters]

Michelle Rhee, Wisconsin, and the Attack on Teachers

Michelle Rhee has proven she is willing to fire people. Her short but impactful (less than three-year) stint as Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, where she earned $357,000 a year, proves that. I too could fire 300 teachers as Rhee did for that much money. If I could only fire 300 politicians who blindly support this “reform”, we would get somewhere. I would start with Obama’s Education Secretary Arnie Duncan.

Alfie Kohn explains how the desire to fire and blame teachers has developed in our nation and how Michelle Rhee and other “experts” take political advantage of this framing.
They emerge from a specific cultural context. Specifically, this double-barreled strategy seems to reflect:
* an arrogance on the part of decision makers that expresses itself in a predilection for top-down control -- doing things to people rather than working with them;
* the low esteem in which the profession of teaching is held. (It would seem outrageous for professionals in most other fields to be told how to do their jobs, particularly by people who aren't even in their field);
* a widespread tendency to blame individuals rather than examining the structural causes of problems -- something that distorts our understanding of such varied topics as cheating, self-discipline, competition, character education, and classroom management;
* the outsize influence on education of business-oriented models, with a particular emphasis on quantification and standardization; and
* the assumption that teaching consists of filling up little pails with information. If learning were understood instead as the active construction of ideas, it would seem odd, to say the least, to mandate certain teaching styles or a single curriculum for all students at a given grade level.
While there's no official name for the dual strategy of micromanaging teachers and trying to root out the bad ones, it might as well be called 'Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach'.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfie-kohn/operation-discourage-brig_b_777148.html
Can you imagine someone going into a hospital, looking at a few charts and then firing half the doctors because they weren’t performing to a set of medical testing data? Most members of Congress would lose their jobs if they had to perform to criteria many of them want to impose on teachers, and they would not put up with it.

Teachers are an easy target in our society that looks for simple solutions. They will be easier to control if Governors like Walker of Wisconsin and others can eliminate the collective bargaining power of teachers’ unions.

The full article here:
http://texshelters.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/michelle-rhee-wisonsin-and-the-attack-on-teachers/

Peace,
Tex Shelters

[markpkessinger]

1. A BIG K&R!

I would add that the strategy of targeting teachers dovetails rather nicely with the desire in some parts of the GOP to dismantle public education altogether.

George Will has a truly obnoxious piece in today's Washington Post slathering praise on the Teach for America program. As I pointed out in a series of comments I posted on that article, there is an incredible amount of Ivy League elitism built into the assumption that merely by virtue of being a student at a Harvard or a Yale or a Princeton, those persons are being held up as the Great White Hope of troubled inner city and rural schools. The ability to teach comes to a rare few as an innate gift; to most, it comes as a result of years of education, hard work and years of experience in front of a classroom. A person trained at a lowly state teachers' college will generally be far better equipped to deal with the realities of a classroom than a non-education major from any Ivy League school. The last thing these troubled schools need is a series of privileged preppies looking to bolster their altruism bona fides on their upcoming grad school or Goldman Sachs job application. Perhaps if we began to treat teachers like the dedicated professionals the overwhelming majority of them are, then maybe it wouldn't be so difficult to staff these "troubled" schools.

[texshelters]

6. Thanks for the Will link

you are correct. I think the best teachers I know were from state schools and know how hard school can be for others, for they struggled themselves.

Peace,
Tex Shelters

[swilton]

2. Michelle Rhee

had such a toxic performance in the Washington DC schools that she became a lightning rod....The mayor who hired her had many sins of bad performance and was later primaried but Rhee's policies and personality contributed to that fiasco.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. Duncan and Rhee are just the most visible.

What frightens me is that they were hired by Democrats.

[Enthusiast]

5. There's not a dimes worth of difference.

Tell me we aren't experiencing a Democratic Administration that is engaged in an attack on teachers. I won't vote for Obama again. I made a horrible mistake the first time.

[texshelters]

7. You are right Stinky

national Democrats are all behind this "reform". Even Gabrielle Giffords has bought into this.

Grijalva still isn't sold, but he won't go out on a limb against Obama on this, yet.

Peace,
Tex Shelters

[Wilms]

4. k&r n/t

[midnight]

8. To the people who know more about this women, did she just appear out of nowhere or has she been

part of education?

[texshelters]

9. Read my article and follow

the links and you will learn where she is from.

http://texshelters.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/michelle-rhee-wisonsin-and-the-attack-on-teachers/

Peace,
Tex Shelters