Obama and the RI school firings

 It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem.
  - Malcolm Forbes


One good rule about essays is you should not express an opinoin until you know sufficient details about the event you are talking about. Talking about a situation you don't know much about is a great way to be a fool.

On the other hand, I have achieved fool status often enough to be now uninhibited.

So with respect to the school board in Central Falls,  Rhode Island firing the entire faculty of the high school, I have an uninformed opinion. As I understand it from the entirely inadequate news reports, which answer none of the essential questions about this school, its teachers, the students and, most importantly, the families of the students, the school was failing to educate its students by any measure you care to propose.

The question is, whose fault is that failure? If you fire someone, presumably, you are saying, it's your fault. Or, if you are afraid to use the phrase, it's your fault or you are to blame, then you say, you cannot do this job. And, this is important, we will replace you with someone who can do the job of educating these students in this school, that is, in this setting. If you fire all the teachers and close the school down,

I'm with you. I have no objections to firing everyone, closing the school, if you then have the honesty to say, "Nobody can succeed in educating these students in a public school here."

I lived once in Montgomery County, Maryland. In the southern part of the county, the wealthy suburbs bordering Washington, DC there were two high schools which graduated virtually one hundred percent of their students and over ninety percent went on to college and not just to college but nearly 100 of every 400 in every graduating class went to the Ivy League or equally competitive and selective colleges.

Up county, the story was different, and the story was different in parts of the county where the kids came from families which were struggling economically.  Fifty years ago, the only economically stressed families in Montgomery County were farm families, but now the county has immigrant communities, broken families, communities with drug problems, crime. It's not exactly the desperation of The Wire--you knew I was going to allude to The Wire eventually--but county developed pockets of poverty and things changed.


When the new superintendent of schools arrived,  he looked over this landscape of the haves and the have nots and he announced he was going to improve the failing  schools by transferring the teachers from the successful schools to the failing high schools.

This brilliant solution came from a man who was being paid over three hundred thousand dollars a year to be brilliant.

Of course, after the parents in the successful schools stopped laughing, when they realized he was serious, they simply pointed out to the superintendent the success of those schools had little to do with the teachers.

Those kids came from families of Ivy Leaguers. Those kids had violin lessons, tutors, travel, enrichment camps and most importantly, immense pressure to succeed. Their parents drove them crazy. They drove each other crazy telling themselves if they didn't get into Harvard, their lives were ruined. You could send any teachers into those two schools and those kids would score perfect scores on the SATs and get straight A's and build computers, organize soup kitchens, win equestrian team and polo competitions and nothing would change, except all the teachers you sent from those good schools to the bad ones would quit and look for work across the river in Fairfax County, where they knew how to treat good teachers.

Laying the success of the students at the feet of the teachers was just as absurd as laying the failure of students at the feet of the teachers.  What makes kids succeed (notice I did not say "Learn," is the family structure.

So when President Obama supports the school board in scape goating the teachers at Central Falls High School, he is being just as obtuse as that superintendent. Likely, that school was failing those kids because families had been failing those kids and the community failed those kids and those families and the place where the tests were administered which revealed those failures--inability to read at grade level, inability to do math, resistance to learning--all this happened in the school.

It's like firing all the doctors and nurses at the hospital when you discover patients are dying from drug over doses, gunshot wounds,  AIDs, untreated diabetes and strokes from untreated hypertension. Those failures are happening on your watch, right in front of your eyes and you haven't prevented them. So we fire you.

President Obama is said to be a fan of The Wire.  He must not have watched the fourth season, which is about the schools, about how hopeless the task of teachers in those inner city schools is. He ought to take the time to watch that season. Then he'll apologize to those teachers.

On the other hand, maybe he'll realize he was wrong and not apologize. There is a wonderful bar scene in The Wire where an assistant to the mayor is shaking his head at how disappointing the mayor he helped elect has been. Another political type commiserates: "They always disappoint you. I don't care how great they were, getting elected. They always disappoint."