WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he favored federal rewards for local school districts that fire underperforming teachers and close failing schools, saying educators needed to be held accountable when they failed to fix chronically troubled classrooms and curb the student dropout rate.
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He singled out Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, where last week the school board voted to dismiss the entire faculty as part of a turnaround plan for the school, which has a 48 percent graduation rate.
At Central Falls High, he said, just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests. Mr. Obama said he supported the school board’s decision to dismiss the faculty and staff members. “Our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right,” he said.
Obama has not held Timmeh Geithner accountable for paying 100 cents to the dollar for the AIG bailout when AIG's counterparties should have gotten 20 cents at best, hasn't held Summers or Bernanke accountable for helping to create the financial mess, hasn't held anybody in his own administration accountable for the morass that has been the Obama health care initiative, didn't hold anybody accountable for the penis bomber almost blowing up a plane over Detroit.
But teachers working in the poorest city in Rhode Island with the highest level of poverty and homelessness - those people he held accountable by making sure his federal education policy whacked them.
And he promised more teacher firings to come.
He has declared war on teachers and schools.
It would be fine if he knew how to solve the problem once he fires the teachers, but as we have seen in the mess that is Chicago where the Obama policy has been put to the test, there is no solution after that.
Randi and the other union leaders better stop this crap about "We have a seat at the table" jive when talking about Obama and ed policy.
We have no seat at the table.
We have a president who has held teachers "accountable" for all of society's ills while giving himself and his administration and their cronies a pass on everything else.
He's not a socialist at all; Obama's a fascist pig. He hires people with shady ethics who are marginal criminals. This anti teacher stance is another nail in the coffin in which this country's democratic traditions will be buried.
ReplyDeleteThe corporations rule this country already.
The man is seriously deluded. Does he truly believe that his actions form the basis for his re-election?
ReplyDeleteHe has further entrenched the financial oligarchs who have destroyed the economy of the nation. Independent voters who voted for him out of displeasure with Bush are abandoning him in droves. The only way he choses to address Black issues is to give Bill Cosby-type scoldings about the pathology of the black family, and he spits in the faces of his political base.
He only deserves one term, but we don't deserve the right-wing backlash that his duplicity and weakness will bring down on us.
It is beyond me how anybody actually paying attention could call Obama a "socialist".
ReplyDeleteI have an uncle who is a Fox News watcher. He's kind of an idiot (although I suppose Fox News watcher and idiot are redundant) and he thinks Obama is a socialist and Palin is a populist ho got a raw deal from the media.
As you can imagine, I don't talk to him too much. It's easier talking to a door.
Michael, you are right that the right wing backlash will be awful. And he surely does give "progressive" a bad name.