Friday, April 23, 2010

Ship of fools

Here's the latest from the Ownership Society

Even as Arne Duncan is predicting 300,000 teacher layoffs in what he describes as an "education catastrophe," OS cheerleaders Jay Mathews and Mike Petrilli are breaking out their pom-poms.

WaPo's Mathews ("Job losses bad for teachers, not necessarily for education") claims that devastating the nation's teaching corps, while bad for teachers (and their families and the national economy) may actually be good for education. It will make those remaining teachers more "conscientious" says Mathews.
"Schools usually compensate for losing teachers by raising class size and giving the teachers who are left more kids to handle." 
Fordham think-tanker Petrilli simply puts it this way:   
"Districts need to learn to live with less.”

4 comments:

  1. What Matthews calls making teachers more 'conscientious" ( a non-sequitur if there ever was one)is call "labor discipline" by management and HR ideologues.

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  2. Remember, this isn't about the grown-ups. Firing 300,000 teachers is "for the kids."

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  3. I think there should be a subtitle on Petrilli's comment, like in "Annie Hall," only it would be: Kids? F*** 'em.

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  4. I love caroline's comment. Furthermore, it's funny how, only 5 years ago, everyone kept talking about how many more teachers we need in the system and how many vacancies we had. Now, we're going to have less teachers despite that huge hole. I guess we should get used to lecture halls for our neediest students.

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