The Washington D.C. school system has not enjoyed the best of reputations over the years. The local school board hired Michelle Rhee to turn the system around. Rhee holds a teaching credential, but taught just 3 years before abandoning the classroom for a more corporate setting. Her opinion of how well she did seems to be more than a bit inflated. Her claims cannot be verified (Google it, find out for yourself), and the D.C. board didn’t and doesn’t seem to care. Perhaps it just doesn’t matter in the case of the D.C. school system.

There are more than a few administrators who couldn’t handle the stress of the classroom. All whom I have spoken with are pretty up front with the reasons they chose administration over teaching. Each job demands a certain personality. This isn’t to say that one is better than the other. On the contrary, those who leave the classroom to become principals and various kinds of superintendents are wise to do so. Teachers who aren’t suited for the admin roll are wise to admit that as well. The jobs are very different, and not at all necessarily connected in any real and meaningful way.

Managing a school system is a complex endeavor. Small school districts are just as complex as big ones. They are all multi-faceted entities. Without a sure and steady hand at the district level, things could spiral out of control very quickly, likely resulting in a trip to court, with smiling lawyers all around.

The issue that seems to be the sand in the gears is when the admin types summarily decide that they know more about teaching in a classroom than classroom teachers. Put aside that they either left the classroom due to burn out or common good sense, or that they were never in one to begin with (a la Arne Duncan), and that premise seems totally unfounded. There is stronger language to use of course, but to what point?

Michelle Rhee seems to take pleasure in the ability to fire teachers. She recently let 245 or so in the D.C. district go. Fired, actually. This is not to say that some of them just absolutely didn’t belong in a classroom. Some of them probably were pretty sad as teachers. What isn’t noted is the criteria used in firing them. This is where teacher evaluations get into some pretty rough territory.

The Eduskeptic does think that teachers need to be evaluated. Over a career that spanned 36 years, the evaluations that I received were few and far in between. None of them was rigorous, and there was, as far as I can tell, nothing in the evaluations that did much more than allow the principal and the Eduskeptic talk about how the lessons went, and how well they were, or maybe weren’t, done.

It would have been obscene for anything like this to be used in deciding either merit pay, or retention in the teacher ranks.

If the available information about Rhee’s 3 years in the classroom is anywhere near the truth, she may well have had to fire herself, were she in charge back then.

Body counts do nothing to further the betterment of teachers, administrators, or children. Rhee’s, and the D.C. school board’s, apparent sense of divine right to make history by firing as many teachers as they can in the name of making things better is just plain misplaced.

What would be good is to know the criteria they used. The D.C. teachers union is surely looking into that, and it will be good to know what they come up with, as that criteria is bound to be an issue when the first lawsuit is filed.