Tag Archives: Choice and Competition

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Michelle Rhee dismisses 241 teachers from DC public schools

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From the ultra left-wing Washington Post. (H/T Wes Widner)

Excerpt:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced Friday that she has fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals under a new evaluation system that for the first time holds some educators accountable for students’ standardized test scores.

[…]Dismissals for performance are exceedingly rare in D.C. schools — and in school systems nationwide. Friday’s firings mark the beginning of Rhee’s bid to make student achievement a high-stakes proposition for teachers, establishing job loss as a possible consequence of poor classroom results.

The Washington Teachers’ Union said Friday that it will contest the terminations.

[…]Although the teachers dismissed for poor performance represent only about 4 percent of the city’s 4,000-member corps, Rhee also announced Friday that 737 other instructors were rated “minimally effective.” Under IMPACT, they have one year to improve their performance or face dismissal. Rhee declined to speculate on how many might be sacked next year. But she said that over the next two years, “a not-insignificant number of folks will be moved out of the system for poor performance.”

[…]…few tenured educators have faced dismissal for poor performance. Rhee said that according to her staff’s research, no teachers were fired for lack of effectiveness in 2006, the year before she was named chancellor.

[…]The great majority of teachers routinely received evaluations showing that they met or exceeded expectations. At the same time, the District compiled one of the weakest academic records of any urban school system in the United States.

I wrote about Michelle Rhee before here. You need to understand that teacher unions are the backbone of the Democrat party. Every vote for a Democrat politician is a vote against quality education for children.

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Videos

NJ Gov. Christie smacks down reporter who accuses him of being “confrontational”

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This is a must-see I found at Hot Air.

He’s not my favorite Republican, but that is pretty funny.

And he supports school choice

Although New Jersey is dominated by teacher unions, the Republicans passed a school choice bill.

Excerpt:

A Senate committee approved legislation today creating scholarships for students to attend private schools during a raucous hearing held in front of the Statehouse Annex building.

Hundreds of demonstrators, mostly students from private and charter schools, gathered to rally for the bill. Supporters said it provides students a chance to leave failing public schools, while opponents said it undermines the public school system.

The bill (S1872) could fund $24 million in scholarships for up to 4,000 children the first year. After five years, up to 20,000 children would receive $120 million in scholarships, they said. More money would be set aside for grants to public schools. The funding would come from donations by corporations who would receive tax credits equal to their contributions.

[…]A similar bill has previously failed to gain traction in recent years. Now it has bipartisan backing in the Senate — it’s spearheaded by Lesniak and Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Union) — and Gov. Chris Christie’s support.

[…]African-American churches, led by Black Ministers Council Executive Director Rev. Reginald Jackson, held a press conference earlier this morning to support the legislation. He said people need to decide whether to support school institutions or the children.

“Why do we insist on supporting a failing system?” he said. “When are we going to decide our children are more important.”

The only people who don’t like school choice are unionized teachers who don’t want their customers (parents and children) to have a choice to fire them if they don’t perform. Would you like it if you could only buy one kind of shoe? Or one kind of gaming console? Then why do you put up with government-run monopolies when it comes to your children’s education? Let teachers who are good be paid more, and let teachers who are bad be paid less. That’s just common sense.

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Commentary

Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s fight against the Washington, D.C. teacher unions

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I’ve always believed that the best way to learn about a topic is by understanding the topic as a fight between two opposing teams. And that’s how we’re going to learn about the Washington D.C. school system in this balanced post at the libertarian magazine Reason.(Not the usual conservative stuff I post 100% of the time)

Here’s the situation:

D.C. is a divided town. In the heart of the capital, the federal government hums along, churning out paperwork and disillusioned interns at a steady clip. But the rest of the city is in pretty miserable shape. The District of Columbia Public Schools rank below all 50 states in national math and reading tests, squatting at the bottom of the list for years at a time. More than 40 percent of D.C. students drop out altogether. Only 9 percent of the District’s high schoolers will finish college within five years of graduation. And all this failure doesn’t come cheap: The city spends $14,699 per pupil, more than all but two states and about $5,000 more than the national average. Yet as unlikely as it seems, D.C. may prove to be the last best hope for school reform in the United States.

But then, a reform-minded superintendent named Michelle Rhee appeared:

In July 2008, Rhee revealed her opening gambit with the teachers union: She offered the teachers a whole lot of money. Under her proposal, educators would have two choices. With the first option, teachers would get a $10,000 bonus—a bribe, really—and a 20 percent raise. Nothing else would change. Benefits, rights, and privileges would remain as they were. Under the second option, teachers would receive a $10,000 bonus, a 45 percent increase in base salary, and the possibility of total earnings up to $131,000 a year through bonuses tied to student performance. In exchange, they would have to forfeit their tenure protections.

But the teachers said no to her offer:

Teachers simply don’t believe that it should be possible for them to be fired—not by a principal, not by a superintendent, not by anyone. Unions and other opponents of the reformers prefer to stick with warmed-over solutions that have been failing for decades: smaller class sizes, more teacher pay, and more job security.

Then Rhee tried to tie teacher license renewals to performance, but the unions said no:

In 2008, after Rhee’s office released a statement about tying teacher licensing to student outcomes, the Washington Teachers Union (the dominant local union) sent an email message to its members stating, “This proposed regulation would not benefit DCPS teachers, as a teacher’s true effectiveness should not be linked to a teacher’s right to renew his or her license.” The message went on to explain that it was “dangerous and discriminatory” to “require a candidate to demonstrate effectiveness to continue teaching in a District of Columbia Public School.”

Children benefit when parents can get a voucher so the parents can choose a better school, and especially when they can choose charter schools or even private schools or even homeschooling – anything is better than public schools. But the unions don’t want parents to be able to use a voucher to choose a competitor. Unions want children to remain in failing schools so that the union members will not loose their jobs.

The article continues:

In pre-Rhee D.C. the single glimmer of hope for many families was the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships Program. Funded by a separate congressional appropriation of $14 million, it offered vouchers to kids in failing schools, allowing them to attend private school instead of their assigned public school. The program took no money from the city budget and was hugely popular with parents and kids; since 2004 more than 7,200 students had applied for a limited number of slots. Last year 1,700 kids were accepted. Next year there will be none. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama had promised to let scientific results determine his education policy. In office, however, he let political influence kill the program even as initial studies were showing positive gains by students and high parental satisfaction. The National Education Association, which is consistently one of the biggest single donors to U.S. political campaigns, pressured the Democratic Congress to eliminate funding for vouchers in 2009. Obama promptly signed the death sentence into law.

The fight over vouchers and charter schools—both of which serve as workarounds to the ossified hiring/firing rules of public schools—is playing out all around the country, with teachers unions usually coming out on the winning side.

[…]Teachers unions contribute more than $60 million a year to political campaigns, topping contributor lists at the state and federal levels, and nearly all of the money goes to Democrats. That investment buys the continuation of the status quo plus some platitudes about class size and teacher pay from every prominent Democrat. Reformers have virtually no presence on Capitol Hill.

On the one side, there is the courageous, no-nonsense superintendent Michelle Rhee, parents and children. And on the other side, there is the Washington D.C. education bureaucracy, teacher unions and the Democrat party. The unions are winning. Do parents care to understand what is stopping their own children from succeeding?

The shocking thing in all of this is that Rhee is a Democrat, and hardly a conservative. She’s no hero of mine, but at least we share the same enemies on this issue.

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