Education professors argue whether 40% or 20% of TFA teachers remain in school past the required two-year period of service, but neither advocates nor enemies of TFA have presented ANY evidence of them improving the academic results of significant numbers of students. Michelle Rhee’s desire to fire hard-working teachers, and replace them with spoiled short-termers, represents interest-group politics rather than common sense.

The only argument they have comes from the outstanding perfomance of kids at KIPP and YES, and these students attend charter schools after their families have made application to schools they know have longer school days; extended school years; mandatory Saturday classes; and loads of homework.

Teach For America performs a public service by placing good students in poor communities, no doubt; and its spinoff charter schools provide a quality education for kids whose ambitious families. But the theory that TFA youngsters, and firing the teachers we have, will make all inner-city students high achievers, well, how stupid do you Ivy Leaguers think the rest of us are?

If we were discussing the medical world and the need to protect the livelihoods of ineffectual doctors or hospital administrators, people would be up in arms because lives are at stake. But when it comes to the education of poor and minority students whose futures are at stake, we’re supposed to sympathize first and foremost with the ineffective “professionals” who are failing them? How is that even defensible?

If protecting the salaries of ineffective single-parent teachers can even be considered a public policy priority, those protections should not be provided at the expense of public school students. Find non-public school funds to support them and get them out of the classrooms where they are a detriment to kids.

Rhee’s attempts to reemphasize student learning as the mission of her district and her efforts to challenge the entrenched special interests that dominate the public education system in DC strike me not as elitist but as courageously progressive. And WTU is lucky to have Parker in charge because he’s giving the union some much needed credibility when it talks about serving the interests of students.

An essential component of Rhee and the rest of the DC/New York focused urban reform movement is the arugment that we need to improve the prospects of our urban youth and if we need to leave a few teachers’ bodies lying on the side of the road in the process– so be it.

In the end, we do need public education to be the road map to the middle class, but if your new map takes teachers out of that middle class in the process, you are going to have a fight on your hands. And, as your new Education Sector report indicates, teachers expect that fight from their unions. The reform movement needs to work with the union or in the end, they may be the ones on the side of the road. Although in Rhee’s case, I am sure she could parlay a postion with Democrats for Education Reform or some other similar “non-conservative” yet elitist group.

I find all of the above to be dismaying, but I don’t doubt that there is a lot of dirt in teachers’ politics, as in all human instutions.

Remember the advice we give in regard to school turnarounds – get some quick victories. If we could just START with getting rid of our most dysfuynctional teachers, as we repudiate Rhee’s and BloomKlein’s approach, then reasonable people in the middle could make constructive compromises.