Despite The Times’ efforts to get onto The Post’s turf, Washington’s paper has turned in some must-reads this week.
The profile of Washington Teachers’ Union head George Parker was great, especially the parts about his ties to the music world. But the part about how used to raised voices he is sure was depressing.
Meanwhile, Michelle Rhee is pulling the trigger on “Plan B” because of the contract impasse in Washington. With a lot of folks you’d figure they were bluffing when they said they’d do this but she doesn’t bluff. Parker is right that we can’t fire our way out of this problem, but, that doesn’t mean there is not a significant population of adults in the D.C. schools that shouldn’t be there.
Finally, per this WaPo front-pager about gains for under-served students under the No Child law*, it’s politically out-of-step to say anything nice about the law, but someone please remind me again why No Child Left Behind is so bad? The problem with the debate last night was not that Gwen Ifill was biased against Sarah Palin, I could see no evidence of that. Rather, it seemed to me she was biased against asking tough follow-up questions. ThisWaPo story might have been an interesting one to throw during the NCLB panderfest portion of the debate. Instead, re education, Mickey Kaus is exactly right, I was having flashbacks to Iowa, too…
*By the way, when people say that but for one kid they would have made “adequate yearly progress” what that actually means is that but for one kid they would have made it under the law’s second chance system. So it means but for one kid they missed the bar that is a second chance bar for the schools that already missed the real bar. But they never just come out and say that…