As I was browsing through my saved article archive looking for articles to post for this week, I came across one that I really liked. How many of you remember the story of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island? This was a somewhat big news story before our television screens began doused with BP-bashing, oil leak coverage, and shots of the biggest scumbag on the planet – Joran Van Der Sloot. If you don’t remember the Central Falls High School story, let me quote from the New York Times to remind you what happened up in Rhode Island:
A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.
The board voted 5 to 2 to accept a plan proposed by Schools Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire the approximately 100 faculty and staff members at the chronically underperforming Central Falls High School on the last day of this school year in June.
The plan will also create a new school governance structure and requires the high school’s new teachers to take part in “professional development” that meets federal standards.
How is that for education reform?! The folks who made this decision up in Central Falls, Rhode Island are patriots – these are the type of people who put their necks out on the line to make a decision that would not be popular with the local people or the brainwashed masses, but was absolutely in the best interests of the students.
If you don’t remember, the response to this action was major protests by the teachers saying that they shouldn’t have been fired. Perhaps that would have been a good time for their to bring up the overused catchphrase of, “What about the children?” You see, when teachers protest that they are being fired for bad student performance, they are inherently saying that it’s not their fault that their students have failed; rather it’s the students’ fault that they failed. And while that may be true in a few instances where children don’t want to learn, the undeniable success of the charter school movement proves that you can teach a child to want to learn. A good teacher can lead a child to have a passion for learning.
There are good teachers out there and there are struggling children out there. The red tape of the public school system is outrageous. Now is the time for major education reform – put the power in the people’s hands and bring more charter schools online immediately.
