Greatness
Dear Great Correspondents:
On Thursday, Dorothy and I attended the annual banquet of the DC
Appleseed Foundation. The keynote speaker was Chancellor Michelle Rhee,
who gave a rousing, enthusiastic speech about her plan to improve the
schools that brought a room full of cynical lawyers to their feet to
give her a standing ovation. (I apologize for the “cynical”
adjective in the preceding sentence; I realize it’s an unnecessary
and redundant qualifier.) Rhee led up to her plan with two anecdotes.
The first was about her visiting a classroom taught by a great
teacher, in which the students were involved and interested, and then
a classroom across the hall taught by a poor teacher, in which the
students were rowdy and acting out. The second anecdote was about her
visiting a school where all the students praised one particular
teacher, who spent all his spare time and money on helping his
students. So here’s Michelle Rhee’s plan, from her own speech:
hire only great teachers, and have all the teachers in DC schools be
great.
Wow! Why didn’t anyone ever think of that before? It’s
elegantly simple and, not only that, it’s easy to carry out. In
addition, it would work not only in the schools, but in all companies
and businesses. Hire only great employees, and have only great
employees. Why doesn’t everybody do that, starting tomorrow? In case
it isn’t sufficiently clear, this paragraph is meant to be read in a
voice dripping, absolutely dripping, with sarcasm.
Perhaps I should have written “insufficiently cynical lawyers,”
if they were conned by this. It’s not only not a good plan, it’s
not a plan at all. Since thousands of years before Socrates corrupted
his students, everyone has known that the best education is given by
the best teachers. President James Garfield said, over a hundred years
ago, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a
student on the other.” (The quotation is also variously reported as,
“Take a log cabin in the West, put a wooden bench in it, with Mark
Hopkins on one end and a student on the other, and you have a college,”
and as, “I am not willing that this discussion should close without
mention of the value of a true teacher. Give me a log hut, with only a
simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other, and you may
have all the buildings, apparatus, and libraries without him.” The
long-winded version is probably the most accurate, whittled down by
public repetition to the shortest and most memorable version.) But no
one has ever figured out how to ensure that all teachers are even
average, much less good and much, much less great. Only in the
fictitious town of Lake Woebegon, Minnesota, are all children above
average, and even there it’s doubtful that all the teachers are,
too. After all, by definition most of everything is average or, to put
it less kindly, mediocre. Only a small percentage at either end is
really bad or really great. Teaching is a harder job than most, so
even fewer will be great at it.
Rhee’s implicit assumption that none of the superintendents
before her tried to hire the best teachers they could get is arrogant,
and her belief that she will do that much better than they in
identifying and hiring great teachers displays the pride that goes
before the fall. Months ago, the Government Accountability Office
reported that the DC government had no real plan to improve our
schools. If “hiring great teachers” is the chancellor’s Plan A,
then we still don’t have a plan, unless Rhee has a Plan B she’s
not telling us about.
Changing the subject, be sure to read Nikita Stewart’s revealing
article on the competition for the DC lottery contract, http://tinyurl.com/5v4ak2.
The competition is really between two large national corporations, but
the decision isn’t being made on the basis of the competence or
capabilities of those corporations, but on which of the companies’
local minority business partners has cultivated better political
contacts. The contest is between Fenty’s fraternity brothers and the
old-timers with decades of local sweetheart deals behind them. It’s
a shame one of these groups has to win.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Give DCPS Students with Disabilities a
Chance
Candi Peterson, kepmclp@msn.com
Dr. Phyllis Harris, DC Public Schools Deputy Chancellor of Special
Education, is wrong to transfer many special education school social
workers from their primary school assignments prior to the end of
school year 2008. School social workers in special education play an
important role in helping students as they provide counseling services
to disabled students to enhance interpersonal and social growth, help
students deal with distractions to learning, support the intent of
student’s IEP’s, work as a member of a school team and provide
assistance to parents, teachers, and administrators.
On Friday, May 16, up to thirty school social workers were given
three days’ notice that they will be involuntarily transferred from
their DCPS school assignments to alternate assignments to function as
“educational aides” alongside certified special education teachers
in many self-contained classrooms, where the necessary program
resources and adequate personnel are lacking. These abrupt changes
could impact as many as eighty to ninety DCPS student caseloads, as
school social workers on the average provide services to as many as
three schools. DCPS students with disabilities in these schools will
now have to adjust to changes in their schedules at years end, while
having their counseling services terminated by their primary provider
due to no fault of their own. Certainly these practices do not support
student achievement and are not in keeping with best practices or the
national counseling standards that are set forth by the national
associations of social workers, school psychologists, and school
counselors.
Many times school social workers have been transferred without
regard to the educational best interests of DCPS students. Last year
this time, special education social workers were directed to review
the educational records of non-DCPS students in charter schools. In a
meeting last May, DCPS administrators advised twenty-eight school
social workers to stop providing therapeutic services to students with
disabilities in exchange for performing clerical functions typically
completed by central office staff. Only due to provisions in the
Washington Teachers’ Union contract were school social workers
allowed to continue providing services to their existing caseload of
students.
Our students have enough to be fearful of in their lives. Having
stability and consistency is crucial to students’ emotional and
mental well-being. Unfortunately DCPS students with disabilities bear
the brunt of many poorly planned knee-jerk decisions of this type by
administrators. These staff changes disrupt the learning process for
students and adversely impact students’ ability to trust in others,
mainly the adults in their lives. One might ask how our students can
meet their stated goals and objectives under these circumstances. The
answer is simple: we cannot meet the needs of our students without the
necessary resources and appropriate long-term planning by our
administrators, and collective input from parents, teachers, related
school personnel, and our teachers union while adhering to best
practices.
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Getting Connected for Kids
Beth Jamieson, bjamieson@dckids.org
DC Action for Children, DC ACT, has released its latest
publication: “Getting Connected for Kids: Tips on Finding Data and
Research to Improve Policy and Practice.” This publication provides
a many resources for data collection and research on children’s
issues both nationally and locally. We hope that this information will
be helpful to you. It is available on our web site at: http://www.dckids.org
under The Latest and Publications and Tools.
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Improving Local Coverage
Andrew Lightman, andrew@hillrag.com
The key [to improving local coverage, themail, May 14] is not to
rely on the Post. We at Capitol Community News (The Hill
Rag, DC North, East of the River) have significantly increased our
local politics coverage in the last five years. This year I plan to
cover all the Ward races in detail beginning in July.
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CLASSIFIEDS — EVENTS
Weekly Hazardous and Electronic Waste
Collections to Begin, May 17
Nancee Lorn, nanceelorn@yahoo.com
The District will open its first permanent free, weekly Household
Hazardous Waste (HHW) and electronic recycling (e-cycling) drop-off
site at the Benning Road Trash Transfer Station, 3200 Benning Road,
NE, on Saturday, May 17. In addition to the HHW and e-cycling
collections, the District will also offer the metropolitan area’s
first permanent weekly document shredding service for residents at the
Benning Road Trash Transfer Station beginning Saturday, May 24.
All electronics will be broken down into parts and recycled or
disposed of safely. Computers and hard drives will be wiped clean
three times using US Department of Defense high-level security wiping
procedures. Acceptable household waste items include leftover cleaning
and gardening chemicals; small quantities of gasoline, pesticides, and
poisons; mercury thermometers; paint; solvents; spent batteries of all
kinds; antifreeze; chemistry sets; automotive fluids; and asbestos
tiles. Unacceptable items include ammunition, bulk trash, wooden TV
consoles, propane tanks, microwave ovens, air conditioners, and other
appliances, as well as radioactive or medical wastes.
The Benning Road Trash Transfer Station will be open every
Saturday, excluding holidays, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Weekly
household waste and e-cycling collections will begin this summer at
the Ft. Totten Trash Transfer Station, 4900 Bates Road, NE. For
information about household hazardous waste and e-cycling, visit DPW’s
web site at http://www.dpw.dc.gov,
or call 311.
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Adopting Older Children, May 21
Susan Punnett, susan@kidsave.org
Please Join Kidsave for an intimate discussion of older child
adoption. Adopting Older Children: Dispelling the Myths, Wednesday,
May 21, 6:30 p.m., refreshments; 7:00 p.m., panel discussion. At the
Sumner School Museum, 1201 17th Street, NW.
In Washington, DC, there are two hundred older children in foster
care who want to find permanent loving families. For many, being older
is the main reason they are never adopted. It’s not okay for kids to
grow up without parents. RSVP to Catherine@kidsave.org
or 280-6332
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CLASSIFIEDS — RECOMMENDATIONS
We’re looking for masons who can do cost-effective, creditable
front and rear walkway work on a row house here in town with bricks,
concrete, or flagstone. After that, we’re looking for a good
affordable landscaper who can plant a couple of trees and re-sod a row
house front and backyard (a total of about .3 to .4 acres. E-mail cartagonuevo@gmail.com
or incanato@earthlink.net.
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