658 NY school principals revolt against Obama's school policies.
Mon Nov 28th 2011, 07:05 PMIt's not just teachers anymore. Now they have been insulting and condescending to principals as well. Do you think anyone is listening yet?
Principals revolt against the testing madness
The principals were required to attend 10 training sessions apparently to listen to something so nonsensical they signed a letter of protest.
As of last night, 658 principals around the state had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.
It is hard to overstate how angry the principals who signed are. Mario Fernandez, principal of Stillwater High School near Saratoga, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking.”
Katie Zahedi, principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook in Dutchess County. said the training session she attended was “two days of total nonsense.”
“I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations,” she said. “It takes your breath away it’s so awful.”
The New York Times article about the principals' revolution links to a video that was shown to the training sessions. It is without doubt the most ignorant, idiotic bit of stuff I have ever seen. We had some pretty stupid things we had to endure during in-service trainings when I was still teaching, but I think it is getting worse.
Here is the video at You Tube made by those who did the training session
The trainers at these sessions, which are paid for by state and federal grants, have explained that they’re figuring out the new evaluation system as they go. To make the point, they’ve been showing a YouTube video with a fictional crew of mechanics who are having the time of their lives building an airplane in midair.
“It was supposed to be funny, but the room went silent,” Ms. Burris said. “These are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about.”
That is how they are spending state and federal money? And they are getting away with it?
Here is more from the New York Times about the angry principals.
Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations
BTW I have the article open, I can see it from various browsers. It is refusing to let me link to it, says the article is not there. You can link from the blog I posted first. Not sure what is going on. Maybe I have not bought a subscription yet?
Sometimes it works for me just as it is with no formatting here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/educatio...
Sometimes it doesn't work that way.