First, in Rhode Island, a kid made a hat that was decorated with an American flag and little green army men. The hat was banned because the toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.
Second, crossing the continent to Vancouver, a school principal had a kid's photo cut out (as in they took scissors and cut out the photo) from the copies of the yearbook because the principal took issue with the write-up that the kid had run with his photo. As Calvin's Mom put it, the principal "reacted with all the class and savoir-faire of a pre-teen Mean Girl riding her very first rag, adhesive-side up."
When they hire someone as a school administrator, do they either lobotomize them or do they scramble their brains like a pithed frog?
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Many school admins are ex-PE teachers, most often with the bare minimum of years teaching (only 3 in OR). They tend to be disciplinarians, not managers. Or to be less kind, bullies and jocks, not nerds.
This is not to say there aren't some good ones out there, nor that PE types are necessarily going to be shitty principals, but the good ones don't show up in the news.
Okay, this is the story of a real-life school administrator. She was a teacher in a rural high school, and utterly incompetent at teaching, but she was the right race to meet various court-ordered affirmative action requirements (note -- she was *not* black, she was white, in a mostly-black school district). The district encouraged her to go back to school and get certification as a high school counselor and she did, and they promoted her to being a counselor.
As a counselor she proved to be equally incompetent, causing dozens of students to miss important college application deadlines. So the district encouraged her to go back to school and get certification as a high school administrator, and she did. So they promoted her to being vice principal of the high school.
As vice principal she was mostly responsible for school discipline, and the school district was pleased to note that suspensions went down significantly at the high school once she became vice principal. Finally a job she was good at, they thought! So when the principal retired, they did the obvious thing: They promoted her to be the new principal.
So a couple of years passed, and her reputation started sinking in: She was crazy, and the school was utterly out of control, with students assaulting teachers and getting into fights. Turns out the reduction in number of suspensions was because she didn't bother disciplining kids, period. So, test scores plunging, and the few white parents in the district as well as the wealthier black parents pulling their kids out of school once they hit high school and sending them to a private school they'd started on a shoestring just to get them away from that mess. The final straw: A special ed kid brought a knife to school and threatened to kill someone who'd "narc'ed" on him. Rather than expel him and call the police, as called for by state law, she simply suspended him for a few more days then let him back in school.
That was the end of it -- almost. See, if she'd been fired, there would be a stink and a lawsuit. But she'd put in 18 years in the district, and with only two more years would have retirement benefits -- meager ones, but retirement benefits. So they gave her a choice: They could fire her right then and there. Or she could voluntarily accept a "promotion" to "special consultant" for the remainder of the school year and for the next school year, and then voluntarily retire. She accepted the "promotion".
And that, my friends, is the story of a school administrator. Not the story of *all* school administrators. But the story of enough of them (the above is actually a composite of two administrators) to explain a lot of things.
- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
What does this yahoo do with "fired the shot heard round the world"?
Clearly, Deadstick, they don't teach about the Revolutionary War at that school. Rather, they teach about the Revolutionary Disagreement, which was resolved via the 8-step Conflict Resolution process as taught in the Social Skills class, and there was tea and cookies afterwards. Duh.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
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