Playing by the rules
I like games with weird and extreme rules. So I’m very interested in this: Central Falls to fire every High School teacher
Under threat of losing their jobs if they didn’t go along with extra work for not a lot of extra pay, the Central Falls Teachers’ Union refused Friday morning to accept a reform plan for one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.
The superintendent didn’t blink either.
After learning of the union’s position, School Supt. Frances Gallo notified the state that she was switching to an alternative she was hoping to avoid: firing the entire staff at Central Falls High School. In total, about 100 teachers, administrators and assistants will lose their jobs.
Gallo blamed the union’s “callous disregard” for the situation, saying union leaders “knew full well what would happen” if they rejected the six conditions Gallo said were crucial to improving the school. The conditions are adding 25 minutes to the school day, providing tutoring on a rotating schedule before and after school, eating lunch with students once a week, submitting to more rigorous evaluations, attending weekly after-school planning sessions with other teachers and participating in two weeks of training in the summer.
Now, I want to be clear here. This is a terrible situation. There are all kinds of real, human problems with what is going on here (the school is in terrible shape, the students improved from 3 percent proficient to 7 percent proficient in math, but come on that’s still single digits). I don’t want to minimize those.
But the unions are playing a game right? They’re playing a game that they’ve made up the rules for. One of the rules is “We will walk off the job if we don’t agree with what you want us to do.” The superintendent is basically saying “Don’t bother walking off, you’re all fired.”
One of the things that I’m learning as a parent is when you give your child a choice, you better make sure that you are okay with either of the choices the child chooses! You’ve set the rules of the choice, don’t be surprised when the child picks one of the obviously available, obviously OK rules. In this case, the union made the rules. The superintendent is calling them on it.
I want to see what happens next!