(Regarding the headline that discusses our illustrious Virginia governor and his "education" policies.) Read more here.
Although to be fair, some of his ideas are good. Like repealing the rather meaningless King's Dominion Law, which states that schools cannot begin for the fall until Labor Day. I also agree with him on decreasing the amount of choices of high school diplomas offered, though I would bet good money we have different reasons for wanting to do so. Three other initiatives he is proposing (Literacy, Tuition Tax Credits, and Youth Development) sound great in theory, but I wonder how he plans to initiate them. These are ambitious (and costly) plans. Call me a cynic (please!), but I have my doubts about these programs...
However, what I detest most is his contemptuous idea about eliminating teacher tenure. To quote the latter article, by Emma Brown, McDonnell "shrugged off the suggestion that tenure is necessary to protect academic freedom, saying that it ends up protecting bad teachers." We have heard this argument time and time again from multiple people on both sides of the aisle. This argument will never go away.
But I think Strauss puts it well when she states that there are evaluation systems in place that are effective, in which "bad teachers are removed even though teachers have tenure....teacher tenure... cannot protect an awful teacher, unless administrators fail to take the steps necessary to remove said teacher from the classroom."
While this problem will not be resolved any time soon, I think it is important to pay attention to this last point, which people too often ignore: That one should blame administrators who are not adequately evaluating their employees, rather than blaming the system itself. It is people who are accountable, then, and not organizations (*ahem* corporations *ahem*).
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