Tag Archives: Termination

Videos

John Stossel documentary on public school costs and performance

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I found this documentary on the Prof Blog.

I recommend that you watch Clip 4, then Clip 5, then Clip 6.

Part 1:

Guest Ben Chavis: (who runs a charter school)

  • Ben explains how bad schools teach self esteem and victimology
  • Ben explains how good schools teach knowledge
  • Ben took the worst school in Oakland and made it the best
  • Ben talks about the importance of firing bad teachers
  • Ben talks about the importance of discipline
  • Ben explains how students that miss school have to come on Saturday
  • Ben explains how his school gets the least of money
  • Ben explains how class sizes and teach certifications don’t matter
  • Ben says that public schools don’t need more money to perform

Guest Andrew Coulson: (Cato Institute)

  • public schools spend 4 times more per pupil (K through 12) than in 1974
  • but the reading success rate has stayed the same

Part 2:

Guest Ron Packard: (K12 online school)

  • using a public school curriculum delivered online
  • 70,000 students are learning online at their own pace
  • they have more poorer students and yet score higher than average
  • flexible schedules allows more time for sports and activities
  • the unions attacked the online schools even though they are better
  • the politicians listen to the unions and limited the number of students

Part 3:

Guest Janine Turner: (Founder of “Constituting America”)

  • children need to learn about the founding documents of the USA
  • children need to understand what America unique
  • children need to understand the notion of limited government
  • the founding documents are basic to understanding everything else

Guest Colin Hanna: (Founder of “Let Freedom Ring”)

  • the Constution is very important for people to read out loud
  • it’s also good to read it with others

Part 4: (A debate! Between Michelle Rhee and some lazy union thug!)

Guest Michelle Rhee: (Superintendent of Washington, D.C. schools)

  • public school tenure means having a job life regardless of performance
  • you can judge how teachers are performing look at test score improvement
  • you can’t look at teacher performance reviews they are always good
  • you have to look at the test score improvement year over year
  • it is almost impossible to get a teacher fired even if they are awful
  • Rhee fired lots of administrative people and costs went down
  • scores went up, and now DC is no longer the worst school system
  • more money doesn’t make students learn better
  • DC used to spend the MOST money, and had the WORST performance
  • the key to improvement is holding people accountable to perform

Guest Noah Gotbaum: (NYC Local School Board President/son of a union boss)

  • teachers aren’t to blame! most of them are excellent!
  • firing bad teachers is a bad idea! that won’t solve anything!
  • the DC schools haven’t improved! test scores don’t measure improvement!
  • we need more money! money will solve everything! it’s for the children!
  • you’re scaring the poor teachers when you talk about firing them!
  • Michelle Rhee is evil! Evil! She’s a witch! Burn her! Burn her!
  • those gains in test scores are not real! You can’t measure results!
  • test scores going up doesn’t mean that the students are doing better
  • the causes are more complicated and systemic but give us more money!

(I snarkified everything the union guy said – he didn’t really say that stuff like that)

Part 5: (Q&A)

  • Question for Noah: How much money is enough?Noah: well, other schools spend lots of money!
  • Question for Ben: Where does more money go?Ben: its impossible to tell how much is spent on administration vs teachers
  • Question for Noah: What about a voucher system?Noah: no! don’t let parents choose! that would deprive bad teachers of lifetime jobs!Noah: vouchers aren’t enough to cover a private school education!

    Ben: top private schools cost 10,000 a year less than half of NYC public schools

  • Question for Andrew: Is there any legislation to provide vouchers?Andrew: yes there is legislation to create voucher projects
  • Question for Ben: Are you cherry-picking the best students?Ben: every kid who applies is accepted there is no cherry pickingBen: we have more poor students than the average school

(I snarkified everything the union guy said – he didn’t really say that stuff like that)

Part 6:

John Stossel:

  • Americans spend way way more than other countries and we score much lower
  • teacher unions are still complaining for more money
  • teachers average 50,000 in salary a year for 9 months of work
  • teachers make way more than chemists, computer programmers and nurses
  • and school administrators waste tons of money on school
  • we spend four times as much per pupil since 1974
  • the real problem is lack of competition
  • the public school system is a government monopoly
  • monopolies are bad for consumers: less competition = high cost and low value
  • monopolies create worthless junk that no one wants
  • competition makes service/product providers accountable

Awesome! Down with government monopolies! The segment on online schools gives me hope – maybe there is a way to turn the young people away from secularism (= moral relativism) and socialism. This is another sign that there may be a way to turn this thing around if we can just get the government out of the education business and let parents choose schools that produce marketable skills. How did we ever let these union thugs produce worst test scores that poor countries with a billion times more money spent? Is this the United States of America? These unions are UNAMERICAN. They should be outlawed. First the public sector unions, then any private sector union that influences politics.

More John Stossel stuff

News

Caroline Crocker’s new book recounts her experience of being expelled

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Caroline Crocker
Caroline Crocker

Story from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

One of those incidents took place at George Mason University (GMU), where Caroline Crocker was ousted from teaching biology because she challenged to neo-Darwinian evolution and favorably mentioned ID in the classroom. Dr. Crocker later appeared in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but now many more details about Caroline Crocker’s story are revealed in her new autobiographical book, Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters.

Free to Think tells the story of a biology professor who cares deeply about students, received glowing student reviews, wouldn’t compromise her integrity when challenged to disregard anti-cheating rules, and produced high quality curricular tools. But Crocker had one fatal flaw: she would not capitulate to the Darwinian consensus in the classroom. When some GMU administrators learned that she’d challenged evolution, they told her that she had to be “disciplined” because she taught “creationism.” While GMU now denies that Crocker’s dismissal had anything to do with evolution, her book explains that this is most definitely not what she was told behind closed doors.

But Free to Think is not some sob story. It contains heartwarming and amusing accounts of Crocker’s interaction with students. What struck me were the lengths to which Crocker would go to accommodate and help students facing difficult life circumstances. It is saddening (though not surprising) that she has received many attacks on her character from evolutionists who know neither Crocker nor her story.

[…]At the very time Crocker was told by her Department Head that she would be disciplined for challenging Darwin, she received a performance review from her Provost that called her teaching “outstanding” as “evidenced by unusually high student rankings”! The Provost even praised her, saying, “This kind of teaching quality is essential for this vital educational program, and we’re very grateful for your successful efforts.”

Such statements hardly describe a teacher who would otherwise be expected to soon lose her job. Yet Crocker did subsequently lose her job, and we know exactly why. As Crocker documents in her book, her administrators didn’t want her challenging Darwin.

There’s more here.

And you can even listen to an interview she did with Casey Luskin about her new book.

I like Caroline Crocker a lot. I don’t talk about her as much as I do about Michele Bachmann or Jennifer Roback Morse, but she’s one of my heroes. I was disgusted with George Mason University for doing this to her. I remember Walter Williams saying at some point (maybe when he was guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh) that GMU is a normal liberal university with conservative departments of law and economics. That explains it.

News

Christian man fired after gay rights group contacts his employer to complain

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Story from the magazine Down East.

Excerpt:

Larry Grard admits he had “a lapse in judgment.” But Grard – who’s been a reporter for thirty-five years, the last eighteen of them at the Morning Sentinel in Waterville – says the e-mail he sent from his personal account to a national gay rights group shouldn’t have been grounds for his dismissal.

Grard was fired by Bill Thompson, editor of the Sentinel and its sister paper the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, shortly after the Nov. 3 election in which Maine voters repealed a same-sex marriage law approved by the Legislature. Grard said he arrived at work the morning after the vote to find an e-mailed press release from the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C., that blamed the outcome of the balloting on hatred of gays.

Grard, who said he’d gotten no sleep the night before, used his own e-mail to send a response. “They said the Yes-on-1 people were haters. I’m a Christian. I take offense at that,” he said. “I e-mailed them back and said basically, ‘We’re not the ones doing the hating. You’re the ones doing the hating.’

“I sent the same message in his face he sent in mine.”

Grard thought his response was anonymous, but it turned out to be anything but. One week later, he was summoned to Thompson’s office. He was told that Trevor Thomas, deputy communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, had Googled his name, discovered he was a reporter, and was demanding Grard be fired. According to Grard, Thompson said, “There’s no wiggle room.”

He was immediately dismissed.

[…]The week after Grard was fired, he said, his wife, Lisa, who wrote a biweekly food column for the Sentinel as a freelancer, received an e-mail informing her that her work would no longer be needed.

Comments to this post will be strictly moderated in light of Obama’s signing of the hate crimes bill.

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