The bruises from my broken nose are fading — two black eyes eventually resulted — but the smarting remains. Especially I’m smarting because we have been unable to move either of the students to places where they can be helped, and get educated.
But I don’t think that colors my view that this example, from JD 2718, demonstrates how much damage unthinking legislatures and administrators can do to a school, to students who attend the school, and our entire education system, quickly, and probably without recourse. Nor is there much hope for recovery:
Superintendent threatens principal for offering teacher tenure
A good teacher, one we need to have in the classroom, was offered tenure as promised.
President Reagan’s Commission on Excellence in Education wrote about a “rising tide of mediocrity” in education. They said that our students’ achievement levels were in trouble, and that it was our own fault. Had a foreign nation done that damage to U.S. education, they wrote, we might consider it an act of war.
And so it is that the war continues on American education, a war conducted by home grown . . . administrators, and state legislators.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
At least teaching at the college level has shielded me from this…for now anyway.
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I’ve thought for some time now, that some teachers deserve hazardous duty pay. I hope the healing goes quickly.
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