(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Check it out on this video. The unions are going ape- no one consulted them! They are going to sue! (HT Whitney Tilson)
First Michelle Rhee lets RIFs teachers without regards to tenure, and now her former protege strikes a blow against the indefensible practice in Rhode Island.
You go girls! Any men out there brave enough to follow suit?
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Democrats for Education Reform’s picked up on the story – http://www.dfer.org/2009/10/reform_tidal_wa.php – but I’m not ready to declare the arrival of the messiah just yet.
The Chinese have an expression – the mountains are high and Peking is far – meaning that Deborah Gist proposing isn’t quite the same thing as local education administration disposing.
There seems to be an assumption that the problem is finding the right mandarin to run education and the right mandarin, for instance Michelle Rhee, might for a time solve the problems of a given district. But she’ll move on and the underlying problem will re-emerge in the form of all the things Rhee, and Gist, fight so hard to remove.
I suppose a temporary solution’s better then none although if it impedes movement towards a permanent solution the temporary solution may not be worth the price.
I have never been guaranteed permanent employment, why should anybody else? You screw up you get fired just like the rest of us. All people are created equal and should be treated as equals; there should be no special privileges for government employees that are not common practice in the private sector. We have government employees that are immune from prosecution and all types of outrageous policies making government employees privileged with rights above those of the general public. This is not equal and a policy of tyrants; they make these laws so they can do as they please knowing they are protected with what I consider to be unconstitutional rights.
[…] With Rhode Island being singled out as having one of the nation’s worst education gaps, with a national leader in teacher personnel policy reform (and protégé of D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee) running the state school system, and with Obama […]