DC school head, Michelle Rhee, gets political in CA, toots own horn.

madfloridian

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Tue May-25-10 10:43 PM
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DC school head, Michelle Rhee, gets political in CA, toots own horn.

I am amazed she would go to California to see her fiance, Superintendent Kevin Johnson, and publicly brag about laying of 266 teachers in DC. That takes a unique kind of nerve, I think.

From the Sacramento Press yesterday:

Rhee urges top school officials to get political

Picture from Sacramento Press of Rhee speaking at a Sacramento Press Club luncheon Monday

School district superintendents should find ways to gain political support from community members, according to Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. At a Sacramento Press Club luncheon Monday, Rhee urged the city�s businesspeople, media professionals and politicians to back Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jonathan Raymond in his efforts. These groups should �give this man some cover,� Rhee said.

Superintendents are not elected to their positions, but they can benefit from making alliances with groups, she said.

�When you are a superintendent and you want to do bold things that might not be popular, you have to have some political capital," she said.

That's pretty obvious. Advocating playing politics with schools.

Rhee, who is engaged to Mayor Kevin Johnson, gave the example of layoffs she made last fall. She said that because of a budget crunch, she laid off 266 teachers. Rhee said she changed the way layoffs had been carried out, deciding that the criteria for a layoff should be the quality of a person�s work instead of the length of time they have worked for the school district.

The business community�s support of her criteria was helpful, she said.

�The business community were the ones who were my strongest supporters of this,� she said. �They came out and said: This is how we run our businesses. We would never run an organization in a way that you were just ... getting rid of people based on how many years they�ve been there instead of looking at what they produced for the organization.�

Running schools as businesses assume students are robot like objects who fall in the widget category in business.

A dangerous concept.

She actually says that she and her fiance are not planning changes to CA schools right now...but maybe down the road.
What an arrogant statement.

Rhee, who praised government systems in which mayors run schools, said she and Johnson were not planning any efforts to reverse California law to allow mayors to manage schools. However, she did say that an effort to change state law could be worthwhile later.

�Now, a few years down the line: Is this something that might be appropriate?� she asked rhetorically. �Absolutely.�

Her hiring in 2007 involved shocking figures for the public school sector. It reveals the path down which we are going.

2007 DC school leader Michelle Rhee: $41,250 signing bonus, $275,000 annually, $27,500 annual bonus.

Pays to have those business types on your side.

She laid off 266 teachers...falsely accusing them of being "miscreants, abusers, and/or child molesters".

Last summer Rhee told DC Council that economic necessity was behind the firing of 266 experienced teachers and other school personnel. Now she is telling the media that the fired teachers were miscreants, abusers, and/or child molesters. If they were child molesters or abusers, why have no police reports been filed? If they were not child molesters, why is Rhee lying to the media and slandering the 266 fired DC teachers? Is she desperate to shift the focus from her own role of damage controller for her beloved, Kevin Johnson, who stands accused by the Inspector General of Americorps of sexual misconduct with students of his St. Hope School in Sacramento?

..."Shortly before going on the air, Gray said he was stunned by Rhee's disclosure about sexual assaults, because she mentioned nothing about it in the October hearing on teacher layoffs, or in the course of a one-hour meeting he had with her last week.

"Educators are mandatory reporters of incidents like this," Gray said. "What she needs to do is very quickly corroborate this." If there is proof, it raises another question, he said: "Why was an alleged budget problem used as a basis for dismissing people who, according to her, engaged in abuse and sexual molestation of children?"

Now it appears a judge may be questioning the validity of the layoffs.

Last year there was a blog at Huffington Post which so perfectly described her tactics.

Mass Teacher Layoffs in D.C. Amount To One Hell of a Power Play by Michelle Rhee

He listed her criteria:

Her latest gambit might be her wildest. How can someone hire nearly 25% of their work force over the summer and then less than a month into the school year throw up her hands and move to lay so many off?

Here's how:

Step 1: Hire a lot of Teach For America rookies and people who agree with you.

Step 2: Put in place impossible-to-meet standards for teacher performance to make anyone a target for sacking.

Step 3: Announce there has been a budget shock and a reduction in force is unavoidable because of the economic downturn. Pretend you somehow didn't understand in July 2009 how bad our budget situation would be in just two months. The teachers to be reduced will be selected out of those with less than stellar "performance" (and practically everybody will be vulnerable).

Step 4: Get rid of whoever you want, sidestepping due process and remaking the teaching force in your image.

He calls it a "brand of shock therapy" that is "attractive to observers who love words like "bold" and "hard-charging".

Her type of tactics are happening over the country so quickly we can not get our breaths.