Posted on by arotherham

Good For Thee?

Where are the Winerip dittoheads?  Nothing but silence when his column today talks approvingly about kicking a  student out of a school (skimming!) and falsely classifying staff (fraud!)? If he wrote about a charter school doing the same wouldn’t it be further evidence of pervasive mendacity and lead to a day long festival of tweets from the usual suspects?

6 Replies to “Good For Thee?”

  2. Not sure why you’re suggesting that a middle school is an appropriate place for a 17-year-old with a criminal record. Neither that particular child nor other children are served well by that situation. It’s one thing to kick out a child for lagging behind or for having a learning disability that a mainstream public school could reasonably be expected to service; it’s quite another to retain a student who is approximately 5 years overage and obviously quite troubled.

    There’s also no fraud involved if the guidance counselor is a LCSW or similar. The article doesn’t make it clear, but one shouldn’t assume that such a reassignment is in bad faith. And working hard to keep a productive, valued staffer is in everyone’s best interest: the staffer, the students, the families, the rest of the staff.

  3. Sweet typing from Alex.

    It is a sign that Andy can’t debate when he resorts to name calling.
    We saw the same with Michelle Johnson’s reference to the “enemies” of her brand of school reform.

    I wonder if Andy, who recently wrote about what school to send his kid to, would like 17 year old convicted murderers in school with his 12 year old.
    Or if Alex would.

  4. This goes along with the failure of Andrew and the professional education reform movement and their failure to acknowledge and deal with the disruptive students who destroy their classmates educational chances with their behaviour.
    ” I did it, by swallowing a bee,” says Saint Michelle when describing her falsified miracles.

    For some reason, Andrew and Michelle think the teacher unions what kids in school who will tell the teacher to fuck off.

    I wonder what Andy would do in 7 years, when his kid is 12, if kids in the class are telling the teacher to fuck off.

  5. correction:
    “For some reason, Andrew and Michelle think the teacher unions want kids kept in their classrooms who will tell the teacher to fuck off.”

  6. Andy,

    What is most ironic is that Winerip spends a lot of time praising a structure that is both the least noticed but perhaps most radical innovation of Joel Klein, i.e., the shift from top-down management to principal autonomy in which principals choose the support organization from which they receive services.

    Those organizations must compete for schools; and schools can and do fire those organizations that do not perform for them. Naturally enough, those support organizations that have highly effective and energetic administrators/bureaucrats are most in demand, as Winerip demonstrates. (It should be said that how this works in reality is complicated, it is not perfect, and it is full of slippage, e.g., the DOE talks a good game on principal autonomy but doesn’t always practice what it theorizes.)

    Of course, given that we are dealing with Winerip, he couldn’t bring himself to admit that there is a lot to like about what is at heart a market-based reform brought to fruition by Joel and that holds bureaucrats accountable. One thing to say about this guy-he is not sporadic in his bias.

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