Is President Obama channeling Ronald Reagan when it comes to the mass firing of educators in Rhode Island?

A Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire the entire faculty of a poorly performing school, and President Obama’s endorsement of the action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability.

The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school turnaround program kicks into gear.

I am extraordinarily angered by this decision, and stunned by the fact that Obama seems to endorse this scorched earth approach to solving such a complicated problem. These are underpaid teachers struggling to do a good job in a challenging environment, not petulant Teamsters demanding longer coffee breaks!

And just who does the Rhode Island school board think they are going to find to replace these 93 fired teachers? What qualified educator in their right mind would interview for a job in a school that treats its teachers this way?

The Washington Post shares my dismay.

Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security.

Just take a look at the statistics working against these potential replacement teachers.

The statistics are dreadful, according to a CNN report, "Central Falls High School is one of the lowest-performing schools in Rhode Island."
The network adds that the school "operates in a community where the median income is $22,000, according to census statistics."

"Of the school's 800 students, 65 percent are Latino and most of them consider English a second language. Half the student body is failing every subject, with 55 percent meeting requirements in reading and only 7 percent in math."

Can't you just see teachers all over the country fine tuning their resumes for a chance to work at THIS school? These are teachers not fucking magicians! When teachers are facing these kinds of challenges you don't deal with them punitively you offer them support, incentives, guidance.

These are the same tactics used by Ronald Reagan back in 1981, to bust a strike by the air traffic controllers, the repercussions of which we are still feeling even today.

The lessons learned from that debacle should inform President Obama that these decisions should not be taken lightly and that the fallout can last decades.

I also find myself stunned that this president still uses the bullshit measurements provided by George Bush's anti-educational No Child Left Behind Act to determine a school's worth to its community. The NCLB act is one of those most punitive and unfair pieces of legislation to ever make its way through the Senate.

It destroys children's creativity and unfairly punishes schools in lower income or multi-lingual communities. Our President, who grew up in Hawaii of all places, should be hyper sensitive to that reality. But sadly he seems to be focusing on the numbers at the expense of the human cost of this decision. I expected more from this man who I worked so hard to help elect.

Fortunately it appears that cooler heads may prevail.

A Rhode Island school superintendent and union leaders, who have been at odds over a decision to fire every teacher at a struggling high school, signaled Wednesday that a compromise that would preserve jobs and overhaul the school may be possible.

Gallo's statement followed an overture Tuesday from the Central Falls Teachers' Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. The instructors have offered support for a longer school day, as well as more rigorous evaluations and training, among other steps.

That appeared to pave the way for reopening negotiations on the proposed dismissals.

Well that is comforting news, and I certainly hope that the real grownups involved in this situation will do the right thing for these children. And that is NOT to fire a whole school full of teachers!

However I am worried that Obama's rash decision to weigh in on this crisis has damaged his credibility with America's educators. I was working at a school during the 2008 caucuses and election, and I can tell you these people were passionate about politics. I had a number of very animated exchanges with teachers supporting Hillary before the nomination process was complete, and then a few with McCain supporters before the general election. These were the people most likely to show up for a rally, or make phone calls to help their candidate, or donate their time fund raising.

And they have long memories. From this time forward President Obama needs to make sure that any decision which has this response: conservatives (are) hailing it as a watershed moment of school accountability. Is a decision that he avoids like the plague.

Republicans have been trying to destroy the public school system for decades. Remember, an undereducated populace is much more likely to vote for the GOP ticket. It is in the best interests of any Democratic President to do everything in their power to spoil the Republican plans to dumb down our future voters. And job one toward that goal, in my opinion, is to quickly do away with NCLB, and to start giving our nations teachers the tools and the incentives to help create the artists, and inventors, and scientists, and politicians, and dreamers of tomorrow.

Update: I just re-read my post and thought "Damn Gryphen, did you type this post with your fists?"

I guess in a way I kind of did. Sometimes there are just subjects to which I have a huge emotional response. And this is one of them.

I have worked around teachers for about thirty years and have always had a soft spot for the Alaska education system. But five years ago when I started to work directly with teachers in a classroom setting, I began to really learn what it took to be an educator these days.

Number one most of the teachers I met did NOT take the summers off, unless they were married to somebody who made a fairly substantial living. A lot of my teacher friends taught summer school, did tutoring, or worked in other fields completely unrelated to education for the two or so months they were on summer break. (One teacher I knew owned a landscaping company and he spent the summers mowing, weed whacking, and raking with a crew of young college kids. During the winter he would drive his work truck to school which always looked comical with snow covered rakes and shovels sticking out everywhere.)

It is the most common thing in the world to see teachers preparing lesson plans on the weekends or staying late into the evening long after the children have left preparing a project for the next day.

The teacher I worked with never seemed to leave the building, and would sometimes get frustrated that I could not stay after hours with her because I had another job that I had to attend to. Fortunately I was a good worker and never really fell behind. But she was certainly not the exception to the rule by any means.

Teachers in our school often seemed to be raising their families as much in their classrooms as at home, and it was not unusual to see their children helping after school to straighten things up, or cut out alphabet shapes, or sort the toys for cleaning. These teachers did not consider what they did just a job, they considered it a calling and they were as dedicated as any priest or nun.

So when I saw the article which spoke of ninety three teachers losing their jobs, all I could think about was ninety three families losing their income, ninety three sets of children watching their parent lose all that they had sacrificed for, and ninety three broken hearts who believed that this president would fix the problems created by the last president.

Did I have a visceral response to that? You bet your ass I did!

I have had a chance to clear my head and look at it anew. But I am still not happy with the message sent by this White House, and I certainly hope that they show a lot more compassion when they deal with other schools that are struggling to help their children successfully meet the unfair testing criteria demanded by NCLB.