Rhee(constitution) In D.C - Harbinger Of Things To Come In LAUSD
The reconstitution of a school by making teachers reapply for their jobs or by replacing administrators is to education reform what blood letting is to good health. For the most part, it is not who is doing the teaching of administrating, but rather what they are administering. If I had a mechanically perfect car, but decided to put polluted old gasoline in it as its source of energy, I would have performance problems no matter how many parts on the car I decided to change.
One of the hallmarks of failed public education reform is that the majority of solutions that politicians and out-of-touch school district administrators continue to propose in no way deal with the polluted fuel system that has shown itself incapable of supplying the relevant energy that is so desperately needed to allow teachers and administrators to effectively do their job. While the first blush response is that the teacher is not doing their job and this is what is causing the failure, a more educated approach would clearly rule this out by showing that it is the mismatch between subjective student level and relevant teachers' skills that is causing the continuing failure of students to achieve reasonable annual academic success.
The Washington Post article states "150 teachers at those schools must reapply for their jobs if they want to remain." Nowhere in this plan is the gulf between these students subjective academic level in English and Math and the grade-level that they have been disingenuously put into for political correctness ever been addressed. That being the case, it doesn't matter if the teacher is the most capable and conscientious teacher there is, the foundational skills to benefit from the teacher are not present in the student and the relevant pedagogic approach is not in the training of teachers who might know their own subjects well, but lack the specialized skills to deal with these students deficits so they might understand enough of the standard English foreign language that their teacher is using to try and communicate with them.
Turning one of these schools -- Stanton -- over to a Philadelphia-based charter school organization called Scholar Academies will have no greater success unless they attempt to align these failed students academic abilities with a teacher having the relevant skill set to engage them. What Chancellor Rhee is doing in Washington, D.C. and Superintendent Cortines is starting to do in LAUSD and other big-city minority dominated
