From California to Central Falls, RI

From California to Central Falls, RI

From California to Central Falls, RI — The fight to defend public education is heating up		Printer-Friendly E-Mail This
Apr 22, 2010 By Tom Crean, United Federation of Teachers (NYC), chapter leader (personal capacity)
In February, the school board in Central Falls, Rhode Island, the poorest and most densely populated city in the state, voted to fire all 93 teachers and staff at the city’s only high school because it is allegedly “failing.” On March 1, speaking before the US Chamber of Commerce, President Obama cited this mass firing as a model of how to hold schools and teachers “accountable.” The local school board was actually following one of four “turn around” models the Obama administration has put forward for districts to get a share of the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant. Who is to blame? The idea of wholesale firings of teachers is the logical product of the “education reform” agenda which came to the fore with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and is now going into overdrive under the Obama Administration. The advocates of “reform” focus on “bad schools” and “bad teachers” as the root causes of why children from poor communities don’t achieve their potential, as well as the persistent racial gap in student performance. Their solution is to close the bad schools and fire the bad teachers. And in their eyes a large proportion of teachers, especially the veterans, are indeed bad and need to go. As an angry blogging teacher named Mrs. Mimi wrote after the mass firing in Rhode Island was announced, “The line of argument here is that someone must be fired and since we can't fire poverty, parents, or children, teachers are the only suckers standing.” This is a classic attempt to misdirect the understandable anger of millions of working class parents and students at the state of their local public schools. Of course all kids deserve a great education in a safe