Some big news this afternoon from the Examiner’s Leah Fabel: District of Columbia Public Schools is but “days away” from performing a purge of “ineffective” teachers and employees. According to Fabel:

DCPS will release the actual number of teachers fired, as well as those who earned acceptable and extraordinary rankings, before the end of next week, [DCPS Deputy Superintendent Kaya] Henderson said at a Thursday morning briefing. The final numbers are not complete, and she used the word “sizable” as a relative term in relation to the 6,600 employees subject to the evaluation. She did not give an estimate of what “sizable” might mean.

The cuts are not due to budgetary reductions — unlike when 229 teachers were let go back in October 2009. Instead, these cuts are based on the District’s controversial IMPACT evaluation system, which rates teachers and other DCPS employees on a scale from “ineffective” to “highly effective.” (A somewhat cruel system, as anyone who’s experienced a large office performance evaluation can attest.) On the bright side, teachers who are rated as “highly effective” in their evaluation will be eligible for the lucrative performance bonuses which were included in the new union contract.

While the evaluation and its potential rewards and consequences for DCPS employees have been known for quite some time, any time people start throwing around the words “firing,” “teachers” and “sizable,” well, an uproar can’t be far away.