Now here come the “reformers”…the Michelle Rhees of the world…a cute and intelligent young Asian woman (i.e., a media darling who can do no wrong short of eating live babies) who did a brief stint in Teach-For-America for a few years and is now going to fix everything for us. Thanks, Ms. Rhee.

The problem, ladies and gentleworms, are these reformers have no interest in teaching as a career. They do it as a lark to feel good about themselves, then move on to more lucrative pastures. Teachers in it for the long haul, however, often don’t have these lucrative pastures. We have a lifetime in education and bettering our students without the fear of cronyism. Without the fear of an insipid affluent do-gooder (millionaire Joel Klein?) busting down the door and kicking us in the head to demonstrate what wonderful human beings they are. The poor kids stuck with us evil-doers.

On top of this, it’s suddenly become unbelievably chic (and convenient) to blame teachers for the ills of our society. Tenure!! That’s what causing all this this!! No, folks. It’s not. Although I grant you, it is so very, very convenient to dump on teachers. It is far harder and far more unpopular, however, to question the environments these kids are being brought up in and products of. The parents, the lack of parental care, the lack of positive parental interaction, etc. Let’s just blame these pesky teachers and their summers off and their tenure instead. Doesn’t it feel good not to tackle the actual, far more complicated problem?

So please, everyone…give your holy outrage a rest?

I know that it must be a really difficult thing for folks in our education system to find a way to matter…..because they largely suck. Teachers cant teach…..superintendents cant lead……the only people actually doing their jobs are the janitors and cafeteria workers.

It sounds like Michelle Rhee is tough and ambitious — and that’s good. I hope she can get the job done. I figure it’ll be tough for her politically, but I hope things will work out.

I agree that there’s way too much touchy-feely stuff in K-12 education. We need to attract good teachers and let them (as well as expect them to) teach students.

At the same time, there seem to crop up now and then these so-called reformers who think they’ve got all these straightforward answers to things and that anyone doesn’t agree 100% is an idiot. I hope Michelle Rhee has the sense to know when other people might actually have good ideas and legitimate issues in their work. Being all hard-charging is great — I really do like to see it — but it’s also important to know how to listen from time to time and to not assume that oneself has all the answer to fixing things.

DC..as in Washington DC…as in the worst of the worst..as in 51 st in EVERYTHING…

the bastion of liberalism and government handouts as a way of life..

what did they do wrong to hire her?

Let it be known before the haters surface….that this is exactly what SC needs…..a good ass-kicking.

Fire the teachers who cant teach a bunch of kids how to read and instead give them A’s and pass them for being able to glue cotton balls onto a piece of paper.

How sad for the BIN’s and WMD’s of the world.