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Sunday, January 30, 2011

School Tech Connect: Joel Klein Is Misinformed

School Tech Connect: Joel Klein Is Misinformed

Joel Klein Is Misinformed

What an astonishing lie by Joel Klein, who has taken to bashing U.S. teachers overseas.


Joel Klein is a liar and an unethical person in general. He is also misinformed. On those rare occasions when I indulge someone on a tenure discussion here in Illinois, the person I am talking to has utterly no idea how due process works, what the steps are, and how it's written in law. People have all kinds of idea about what "tenure" is, none of them based in reality.

In general, when a principal thinks that a "tenured" teacher is not meeting doing well enough, he has to have the balls to tell the teacher in writing what's wrong and develop a plan to improve, with benchmarks and a timeline. I have only worked with a couple principals who didn't have the capability to manage these tasks; all of the others were completely in charge of teacher remediation.

In my time, I've served as a local president and a principal. As a local president, the first thing I had to do was