So, let’s start with the MSNBC coverage. As usual, they got someone that they felt could be considered an expert of sorts on the issue of across the board firings of teachers in failing schools. I went back to MSNBC today, and searched for the name of their expert on this – Zeph Capo, the government liaison for the Houston Federation of Teachers. (I learned his title from a Houston Press blog. Yes, the link is worth a look as you’ll see!) Either the folks at MSNBC were trying to pull a fast one, or they thought it was highly unlikely that anyone would bother to look up the credentials of Zeph Capo. Whatever their motives, I found it profoundly irresponsible to choose a man who just went through a battle with his own school district to prevent them from making incompetence grounds for dismissing a teacher there.

And that is what this whole situation is about – incompetence. Back to Central Falls High School, and all those teachers and staff that were given their walking papers, what you get when you bother to read the local coverage is a story about greed. The school administration wanted to go another route. They wanted to do a program that would have required a much more pro-active approach to teaching in that school – something that was sorely needed, since under half of the students were graduating. The school district offered the teachers $30 an hour for extra time needed to help the students – bear in mind, this isn’t a good school, in a good neighborhood, with an affluent community supporting its needs. The administration moved to the clean sweep option offered by the Federal government when the teachers demanded $90 an hour for their precious time. Personally, I think it was very kind for the district to offer them a dime for any overtime needed to fix the problems the teachers had created in the first place!

And back to our good friend Zeph Capo, he had a few precious gems to offer about all of this. To paraphrase, since his speech on MSNBC was splattered with “uhs” and “ums” – “It is inappropriate for President to make judgment calls about local school districts…There’s no research to say that these wholesale firings of teachers and staff do anything to improve academic improvement…School districts and school boards can support their teachers, they can support their kids. We can try to get a handle on the testing mania that is taking over our school systems…Teachers and students are more than a test score.”

First of all, it is quite appropriate for the President to make judgment calls of that kind, simply because when we, as a country, slip in the academic rankings worldwide, he takes the heat for it. If the districts won’t fix it, or can’t because they’re hogtied by unions, then the State and Federal governments have to step in. As for no research on wholesale firings, that’s absolutely true for only one reason – until now, it hasn’t been done because the teacher unions have been protecting bad teachers from the axe for years. When you’re looking at under 50% graduation rates in a given school, it’s fair to guess that there aren’t very many teachers in that institution that are managing to actually teach anything. The testing mania is the only game in town to evaluate schools – something we know we need to do because we’re not keeping up in the educational competition worldwide. Students that have problems taking standardized tests have options, but they take time and extra work on the part of the teachers. Oh, I forgot. The teachers’ time is too precious to waste on stupid things like helping students.

But while things are circling the drain in Rhode Island, there’s a ray of hope in Chicago, Illinois. In Englewood, there’s a school where all 107 graduating seniors this year are going on to four-year colleges. At Urban Prep Academy for Young Men, if you buy what the Zeph Capo’s of this world believe about education, they are achieving the impossible. Instead of striving for mediocrity, they are reaching for the stars.

I am the product of Catholic education. In our classrooms, students that did well were also taught to teach. We were encouraged to help our peers when they struggled in class, and were taught the skills to do that. Through that education, I learned that there are two types of teachers – ones that consider teaching a way to make a living, and ones that consider teaching a way of life. The young gentlemen that are privileged to attend Urban Prep Academy for Young Men have the latter. So was I.

Unfortunately, the successful schools don’t get the same amount of press coverage as the failing ones. (I’m guilty of that here.) At the very least, they deserve more so that the administrators of failing schools know where to look for ideas – find solutions to their problems in institutions that are excelling. As for the teachers’ unions, their time is over unless they stop protecting incompetent educators. Not everyone is meant to be teacher – many that are today should leave the profession. Until the unions start encouraging people that really don’t belong in a classroom to move on, they are the enemy to progress in education. While they were busy trying to get better wages and benefits for their members, they forgot why their members were supposed to be there in the first place – to prepare the next generation to take its place in the world. That in itself is failure.