Schools Roundup: Balls in the Air Edition
With a little over a month remaining in the school year, things aren’t slowing down for Michelle Rhee. Never mind that the D.C. Schools Chancellor is being named in what looks to be a time-consuming vanity lawsuit by Washington Teachers’ Union vice-president Nathan Saunders, or that City Council Chair Vincent Gray is messing with her budget. The woman has work to do.
As we mentioned this morning, Rhee has begun the process of notifying many DCPS principals that they will not be reappointed for the next academic year. Rhee’s spokesperson, Mafara Hobson, told DCist that while the Post reported that up to 30 principals will be dismissed, decisions are still being made. Although she couldn’t comment at this point on any specific criteria used to evaluate the administrators, it’s likely that over two dozen principals will be fired before the end of the month as part of Rhee’s compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and her desire to create a high-performing culture within the District's schools.
Hobson said that principals who fill any vacant leadership positions will come from a combination of candidates found through DCPS’s nationwide principal search and from within the district. D.C. Wire also points out that certain contract clauses might allow some fired principals to fill different roles within the school system.
An Education Endorsement: As has been reported, last week Rhee mentioned that she supports the education plan of John McCain “far and away” over those of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. She’s a committed Democrat, but she’s also right on this one – although it took McCain until after he secured the nomination to start paying any attention to education, he has been the only candidate to speak strongly in support of reforming NCLB, which despite its execution flaws is a critical law, or to openly embrace accountability reforms like merit pay, which would link part of teachers’ compensation to their effectiveness. (Last summer, Obama started strong on merit pay, but later backed off under union pressure.) Meanwhile, Clinton and Obama are “pandering, quite frankly, to the teachers’ unions and other folks,” Rhee admonished, citing the Dem’s frequent NCLB-bashing applause lines.
Mathews Makes Sense: In a surprisingly thoughtful column yesterday, the Post’s Jay Mathews argued that those union officials and “schools advocates” protesting the placements of teachers at the 23 schools scheduled for closure are actually doing students a disservice.
Despite complaints that excessed teachers from the closing schools should be automatically transferred to the same schools as their former students, Rhee has worked to make sure that district principals will have the authority to choose which teachers to hire to fill any vacancies, contrasting with long-held policies demanding that principals hire teachers with the most seniority, even if more effective candidates are available.
Mathews writes, “This is, of course, another one of those issues about adults that gets in the way of addressing issues about children and getting them the best teachers available. It might be a good time to shed that old desire to make the grown-ups comfortable, and introduce our kids to the useful discomforts of challenging lessons and demanding teachers, and principals who have the power to put that formula in action.” We chimed in on this issue last week, essentially agreeing that there’s little point to expensive practices that put teacher job security above student achievement.
Schools Notes: The in-fighting Washington Teachers Union gets mediation from representatives of its parent union, the American Federation of Teachers ... Earth-friendly school buses are on their way to DCPS... Tomorrow, famed jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis will help kick off the Capitol Jazz Project, a new initiative to get more music instruction for DCPS students.