Tag: public schools

TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

The alternative is ‘deliberately inflammatory in a very literal sense because they want to see Tennessee burn.’  Which is a bit of a mouthful.

Based on their latest email blast, the Tennessee Democratic Party seems to have a problem understanding what “fascism” is, not to mention “terrorism.”  Apparently, Tennessee Democratic chair Chip Forrester and House Democratic chair Mike Turner seem to think that these terms are appropriate for describing several reform bills currently being considered by the Tennessee legislature.  Presumably they mean HB 2012 and HB 0130; the first is a tenure reform bill that introduces merit into the tenure process and the second is a collective bargaining reform bill that removes the Tennessee Education Association’s privileged status as the only permissible agent for bargaining with school boards.

Or perhaps Forrester and Turner don’t mean those bills, given that neither actually does anything like set up a system for mass murder of inconvenient minorities, create a totalitarian state that controls every aspect of life, and/or start aggressive wars of conquest.  It’s a bit of a puzzler – unless you assume that this is just a cynical ploy to get money, which is a notion that Jim Geraghty is cynically suggesting and I am just as cynically endorsing.

Continue reading TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

Depressing realization of the day, Mikey Kaus edition. #rsrh

After commenting on this depressing article about how hard it is to fire an incompetent teacher in the LA school system (short answer: very, very, very hard. No, harder than that. No, harder than that, too), Mickey sighs:

I know this item reads like it was written in 1984 (when Gary Hart made an issue of firing incompetent teachers in his campaign against Walter Mondale). That’s because the situation in the unionized public schools has not improved markedly in 25 years. Believe me, I wish the neoliberalism of the late ’70s weren’t so relevant.

I have no desire to get into a fight with Mickey Kaus – those never end well – but I would like to suggest that perhaps he should start remembering that last sentence on future Election Days.