http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/02/oh-lorain-ceos-purge-announcement.html
Peter Greene wrote a brilliant essay about Ohio’s response to the economic collapse of Lorain, which wa to put a czar in charge of the public schools, with unlimited power to do as he wished without any oversight. That czar—David Hardy—has limited education experience, having gotten his start in TFA.
The teaching staff doesn’t like Mr. Hardy. They voted no-confidence in him.
He doesn’t like them either. He brought in another TFA guy and told the teachers in the high school that they had to reapply for their jobs.
In short, the staff is being purged.
if he fires everyone, do you think that TFA would staff the whole school? The whole district?
Wow, real disruption! TFA teachers know more than anyone else.
The big problem in Lorain seems to be democracy and experienced teachers.
Here is an excerpt:
And
“We know that their lives and days are extremely busy, so we wanted to make sure it is something that allows them to showcase the wonderful things they already do and have conversations with the leadership team about being a part of this transformation,” he said. “Or maybe there are folks who decide they would like to be somewhere else in the district, then we would invite folks who are external to be a part of that selection process.
“But not until we have exhausted all of our opportunities to really talk to our teachers, to understand our teachers who are in this high school and ask them to be a part of what is necessary to move to the next level. At that point, our school leadership team will make decisions on who they would like to see be a part of Lorain High going into the 2019-2020 school year.”
It’s an astonishing parade of baloney, and it makes me angry for the teachers of Lorain just to read through this. Though it appears that there may be nobody madder than School Board President Mark Ballard, who argues in a letter sent Friday that Hardy should have to reapply for his own job. Nor did Ballard mince words when talking to the paper.
“Grades got worse, morale got worse, enrollment got worse,” Ballard said the district since Hardy took over 18 months ago. “… I think there’s probably about 60,000 people in the city of Lorain and he’s probably No. 60,001 that deserve that job based on how he’s been doing it.”
“What I think is he’s just going to go through his games,” Ballard said. “And the people who’s not buying into his program and dancing to his music, whether they’re right or wrong or whether they’re good at their jobs or not, he just wants them out of there so he can have additional puppets to do what he wants them to do.”
The state takeover of Lorain schools is turning into a clusterfarphegnugen of epic proportions. The idea of giving a CEO all the powers of a superintendent and a school board is a dumb idea. Giving that position to someone who lacks the experience and skills to even sort of manage it makes things exponentially worse. For Reformsters who think the corporate takeover CEO model has potential, Lorain is shaping up to be a model for how bad an idea that is, a sort of disproof of concept. We’ll keep following this tale as we wait to see just how bad things can get.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The idea of giving a CEO all the powers of a superintendent and a school board is a dumb idea.
YES. And that idea is a perfect example of why nobody should endorse “disruptive innovation” nonsense from the Clayton Christensen Institute and variants of that idea propagated by know-it-all corporate bullies and champions of “entrepenureship.”
What is Lorain folks drinking?
Um, the vast majority of Lorain folks didn’t ask for any of this. So if that’s a Jonestown reference, it’s not very good.
As far as this Lorain teacher goes, I’m drinking a lot more these days.
“As far as this Lorain teacher goes, I’m drinking a lot more these days.”
Hope it helps. The chronic stress alone may not be particularly good for the digestive system, but I am not sure there is a healthy way to deal with it. At least it sounds like everyone but the idiots running the show are pissed off. Now how to harness the outrage is the next question. Has the idea of a town strike come up?
This is a republican legislative act to destroy collective bargaining and cripple a city who has been democratic for years. Politicians who legislate this way should be subject to the same tyranny.
Why settle for Teach For America?
I say, let’s Broaden the search (and no, the capitalization is not a mistake)
“TFA”
Teach for Aliens
Teach for All
Teaching salience
Never small
Teach for Jupiter
Teach for Mars
Even stupider:
Teach for Stars
Teach for Asteroids
Teach for Space
New disasteroids
Every place
We need Teach For the Galaxy! Elon Musk should put Wendy Kopp in a Tesla car and fire her on a rocket out into deep space…
…Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, and Charles Koch are in a Tesla, flying through the solar system on a Musk-a-craft. Gates has placed himself behind the wheel, Koch is riding shotgun, and Kopp is the back seat driver. The spacecraft ruptures, and it seems like all three are doomed. There is only one seat in the escape pod. Who survives?
America.
Ha ha ha.
You have such a creative imagination and way with words.
Have you written any books?
You should.
One of the things I love about this site is how creative the people are. It’s an endless source of material for poems and songs.
Thank you! I write books — on paper, with fountain pens, just for the fun of it. And you’re right, Poet, this is the richest site on the web.
Yeah, go STF: Space Teaching Force.
We also need a Common test, to pit our Best brainiacs against the Best of the Best of the Best in the Milky Way, Sir
The Common Galaxy Test”
We need a common test
For country and for glory
That lets us match our best
With those of A. Centauri
We’re looking for the Best of the Best of the Test, Sir!
The Best of the Best of the Test
The Best of Best of Test
Is what were searching for
Forget about the rest
They’re something to deplore!
Huh, I didn’t think about this before, but now it’s clear what we need to solve all problems in education: create the best ever test. Simple, isn’t it?! Once we found it, we can give it to the kids over and over starting at age 3. Since it’s best ever, there is no reason to change it from grade to grade or from subject to subject.
Besides being the best test ever, which is a good feeling in itself, making us all proud of our country, as kids take it over and over, their performance will surely improve, and hence 100% of our youth will be college ready. This best ever test can also be used for college entry, replacing ACT, SAT and friends.
Now, I of course propose the introduction of the best ever test gradually. In the first experimental phase, the 50 million kids should take it only once at the end of each school year. But once they and their teachers warmed up to it, it can be given several times a year, say, right before and after each holiday. A round, nice number would be, say, 10 times a year.
I love it when poetry, science, and education can work together, hand in hand, in an interdisciplinary fashion to produce such innovative approaches and solutions to 21st-century problems as we move forward to the next century and beyond. Friends, I feel, Space and Time are finally at our disposal.
I was also talking about you, Máté, when I referred to all the creative people here.
I love to read your imaginative suggestions.
The Best of the Best, of the Test, Sir!
The rallying cry of the Deformers.
“told the teachers in the high school that they had to reapply for their jobs”
The reformer psychopath playbook. Goals:
-keep the teachers cowering
-the beatings will continue until morale improves
…until morale improves or teachers simply can’t take any more and leave, opening the door to computers, computers, computers
The above is even more apt than I thought, given David Hardy’s reference to Space
It’s a conversation …to ensure we have a Small [the Final Frontier] to understand what challenges we’re facing and move forward.”
Based on the dumb things many of the TFA alums say and do, I actually think you actually have to be a nitwit to join TFA.
A “space” not a “small”
Self correct was also designed by nitwits.
I wonder if it is an accident that so many people in TFA and at software forms are Ivy League grads. Some of the stupidest people on the planet seem to be.
When are communities going to learn that putting “reformers” in charge of schools invites chaos and disharmony. These people seek to undermine the public schools. Corporate pawns have no miracles or magic up their sleeves. “Reformers” are simply a front for lobbyists that seek to extract value from your local community and send their ill gotten gains to corporate headquarters outside the community. Buying into the lie of “reform” is a disinvestment in a valuable public asset, public education. Trust the locals, not the carpetbaggers.
So sad for the single mom teacher trying to get by, the new teacher with much to figure out, the older teacher ready to retire but she is not so tech savvy, the minority teacher, the outspoken teacher…oh yeah…I forgot…TFA does not give a shxx about these people…
http://www.chroniclet.com/Local-News/2019/02/27/School-board-declares-emergency-citing-lack-of-progress-with-Hardy.html
“It’s an astonishing parade of baloney, and it makes me angry for the teachers of Lorain just to read through this. ”
On the other hand, Peter’s anger transforms mine into laughter. He is funny and cuts through the “baloney”.
The pathetic part is that there is nothing astonishing about it at all, at least not for those of us who have spent any time around these types, who are incessantly trying to impress everyone with how smart they are.
I once had the unfortunate “pleasure” of working with a Harvard MBA on a instrumentation project. The MBA who was supposed to be in charge of sales would sit in on the meetings with the rest of us, the engineers and scientists developing the instrument.
The MBA had absolutely no clue about what we were doing and would go on an on with total BS, drawing stupid, totally speculative sales projections on the board, and my boss, the head of R&D would just sit there and roll his eyes.
These types love to hear themselves talk.
The MBA lasted less than two months before they were fired, by the way.
“The MBA had absolutely no clue ”
Excuse me, Poet, but leadership is not about clue, it’s about vision and authority and strategy, it is about showing us, lowlife so-called “experts”, where the light and path is.
“Leadership” is about di-vision?
Yes, that seems pretty accurate.
And when it comes to baloney, it’s also about multiplication.
Is that what baloney means: multiplication? I now understand why baloney just never ends once it got started: a newborn baloney reaches maturity within minutes and gives birth to at least two new baby baloneys which then grow quickly and self-multiply on schedule. You gotta love natural processes.
If I am not mistaken, the increase of baloney is modeled by the Fibbaloney sequence.
Poet, with the Fibbaloney sequence as our basic mathematical tool, we have reached the sky-high and sea-depth required to declare our field of study as a new rigorous science: Baloneyology. Baloneyology profs will soon be in the highest demand (and highest paid) at universities, and kindergartens will not get certified unless they teach introduction to Baloneyology.
I know, I am going to have a sleepless night thinking about what to put on the cover of our very first Baloneyology textbook.
But you’re the mathematician, so probably know far more about it than I do.
As a matter of fact, Poet, I do know quite a lot about the Fibbaloney sequence. So much so, that I am not sure we’ll be able to keep the book on Baloneyology under twenty pounds.
doubtless you already knew this, but there is an interesting thing I discovered last night when playing with the Fibbaloney sequence.
If you take the ratio of subsequent terms in the sequence , the answer gets ever closer to a quantity whose value is about 42 (“The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”). Of course, the actual ratio is irrational, like everything else associated with school “reform”.
In the reformer literature (pee-er reviewed of course), this is commonly referred to as the Coleman Ratio, which shows up in all sorts of places in reform: eg, the Coleman Wrecktangle and the Gates Death Spiral.
Fascinating.
“If you take the ratio of subsequent terms in the sequence , the answer gets ever closer to a quantity whose value is about 42 (“The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”). Of course, the actual ratio is irrational, like everything else associated with school “reform”.
What you are talking about here is the Golden Baloney, and it is the principal connection between the science of Baloneyology and the Art of creating baloney.
Good luck.
“If I am not mistaken, the increase of baloney is modeled by the Fibbaloney sequence.”
This non-scientist/mathematician got a belly laugh out of this one. I am still chuckling as I write this comment. Superb. My engineer husband is going to love this one. 🙂
“My engineer husband is going to love this one.”
It ruins the fun to give an explanation but this is what teachers do on a daily basis (ruin the fun): those who don’t know, the Fibonacci sequence is a rapidly increasing sequence of numbers. The interest in them is tremendous (really), because they occur everywhere in biology and art. For example, they come up when describing how fast a rabbit population increases (darn fast), and the Golden Mean (already used by the Greek architects) is also related to the Fibonacci sequence.
Now apply this knowledge and the image, and you can appreciate the importance of baloneyology and baloneyologists who study it.
Here is a webpage on baloney I accidentally found as I was surfing the net
http://baloneyology.csi.hu/apu/baloneyology.html
“…the Fibonacci sequence is a rapidly increasing sequence of numbers.”
I did know, which is why I got such a kick out of your back and forth with SDP. By the way, although my explanation did not have anywhere near the punch, he did appreciate the humor.