History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
To improve school performance, fire all the teachers?
- 02-25-2010
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By Laurent Belsie/Christian Science Monitor
When managers want to improve performance of their companies, they sometimes close factories and lay off workers. But they never fire the entire workforce. Everyone knows that's counterproductive. So when the school board in Central Falls, R.I., fired all 88 teachers and staff at its high school, the move had little to do with productivity and everything to do with sending a message to teachers' unions: The status quo of poor-performing schools is unacceptable. The move is part of a national shake-up that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan hopes to engender in public schools. He is forcing states to identify the bottom 5 percent of their schools and take one of four actions with each one: closure; takeover by an independent organization; transformation; or turnaround, which calls for firing all the teachers and rehiring no more than half of them in the fall. (more...)
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