I am sure that President Obama intended to do good with his rules that, in order to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus funds, require schools to either; be replaced by a charter school, remove the principal and half the staff, or remove the principal and transform the school. Those rules probably work okay, in most cases.
But not all cases, according to The New York Times.
“You can buy a lot of help for children with that money,” said Joyce Irvine, school principal whose most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Principal Joyce Irvine of Wheeler Elementary School in Burlington Vt., lost her job because of those rules. Irvine was, “distraught,” over the decision yet she seems to accept the tough position the district found itself in.
The school district needed to fire her in order to be eligible for the federal money. The district faced the lousy option of receiving either the badly needed federal funds or keeping talented people. Money won – no surprise in this economy.
Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the United States Department of Education, correctly points out that the district was not required to apply for the grants. That was the district’s choice. The New York Times report does not contain any details of options the district or the state may have had to protect top performers and obtain the funds. The district needs funding help.
Big government bureaucracy.
We the People have to do better than this, folks. If we don’t turn our educational system around we are going to grow more government dependency that we will respond to with yet more poorly thought out (due to lack of education) legislation like the above mentioned. The Obama administration certainly did not cause the U.S.’s ongoing drop in education relative to the rest of the world. The Administration inherited that problem – like it inherited all the other problems and perceived problems it has attempted to tackle (and it inherited those problems just as every U.S. president has inherited problems left unsolved).
At some point, the Obama Administration needs to quit making the problems it inherited worse.
