NYC Educator: Edfluenza

NYC Educator: Edfluenza:

Edfluenza

I was pretty surprised to read that, in the United States, if you're rich and you kill four people you suffer from "affluenza" and aren't guilty. After all, if you have the handicap of growing up with all that money, how are you to know that common people are not dispensable and ought not to be murdered? Mater and Pater never had time to tell you that, what with their high-powered jobs and gala luncheons. And they let you know early it was OK to accuse nanny of stealing the jewelry and have her deported back to the foul region from whence she came.

I've just been alerted by someone on Twitter that there is another little known malady called Edfluenza. Symptoms include imposing untested and/ or failed notions on national education systems. For example, you might wish to rate teachers by their test scores and fire the bottom 5% or so. You would do this even though it failed miserably in your own company, and caused failure after failure.

Or you might decide that the way to help schools is to close them and replace them with smaller ones. Of course, you would say nothing to the many districts that have adopted this practice even after it was pretty much established to be an abysmal failure. After all, by this time not only you, but also cash-strapped municipalities had been pouring millions into this program, and you couldn't just say, "Hey, I'm sorry you wasted all that money." After all, being reformy means never having to say you're sorry.

Or maybe you'd spent hundreds of millions designing a set of standards that had never been tested anywhere. Maybe you