Intercepts

This is a satire, right? Please tell me it's supposed to be funny. Please.

Actually, they should credit Joel Klein for going to Albany and successfully begging for the right to hire and retain thousands of teachers who'd failed a basic competency test. Thank him for years of granting tenure to anyone who drew breath, He's done a great deal to advance their cause.

In fact, the New York Times just wrote an article detailing the utter failure of his reforms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/education/16scores.html?ex=1352869200&en=5aca14524e3ffe5e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Personally, I'm not surprised. I've long maintained there are three key elements to good schools, in this order:

1. good teachers
2. reasonable class sizes, and
3, decent facilities

As Mayor Bloomberg has opted for none of the above (even choosing to place new schools on toxic waste sites) his lack of results doesn't surprise me at all.

I've never supported bad teachers, ever. Opposing ineffectual reforms, in the narrow minds of those who designed this website, may equal support for bad teachers. But I have to work with bad teachers. With all due respect, I know more about them than you or the clowns who put up this site ever will.

They really ought to remove my name from their site, and replace it with that of Mayor Bloomberg. He adores bad teachers. Without them, who would he blame for his abysmal failure to address the rampant dysfunction in city schools?

Diane Ravitch? That hasn't worked out so well.

I don't want bad teachers teaching my kid, or yours, or anyone else's. And the quote they lifted from my website (which I did not happen to write) does not remotely indicate otherwise. It’s unfortunate that small-minded people feel the need to slur working teachers without even remotely examining their positions

Yes Brett, it's a satire. It's a satire on the response to the "solution" to the problem of lousy teachers as proposed by the NEA and similar, noble agglomerations.

Somewhere, several years down the line after a lousy teacher's been identified as such, maybe, if there's no other conceivable alternative and there are still people mean-spirited enough to insist, yeah, fire 'em. After a couple of years of "counseling" and "mentoring" and shuffling from school to school and ignoring parent's complaints.

If after all that there are still people who insist on dismissal of someone who shouldn't be allowed to take care of livestock, OK.

But it's important to understand that there's no such thing as a bad teacher (especially a dues-paying union-represented teacher), just a misunderstood teacher who'd actually be a good teacher if students, parents and administrators weren't so awful. Why teachers would be able to do their job and the entire, silly subject, this "bad teacher" nonsense, would go away.