“Teaching really is not a job. I don’t teach; I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.”
… but, obviously, it’s a hell of a long way from Wall Street:
Mr. Dimon said he did not know whether he would have taken the $25 billion that the government lent to JPMorgan during the 2008 financial crisis to bolster its capital if he knew then how troublesome the TARP money would be for the bank.
“The mistake was we let the government and the politicians not differentiate between irresponsible companies and prudent companies, from irresponsible, imprudent, and everybody got lumped together in the same boat,” Mr. Dimon said “Yes, a lot of those companies needed TARP to survive, and yes, a lot did not.”
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I know nothing other than what I have read via the news and what you just wrote about this situation.
With that being said, I think it is fairly obvious that none of us outside of this situation really knows or understands all of the nuances of it.
I’ve been in administration long enough to know that there are times when firings are completely justified, but often because of privacy and litigation issues, the administration can’t divulge to the whole world why the staff member is getting fired. Meanwhile, the staff member certainly has the freedom to tell their version of the story using any tool available to them. I’m not saying that this is the situation here, because I don’t know, I’m just saying this isn’t uncommon.
A couple of thoughts on what I’ve read:
One article that I read states that there are 800 students at the school and 88 teachers (that’s just teachers) are being fired. Being from California, I have to say, that’s an awesome teacher to student ratio.
Secondly, in that small town, with 88 teachers being fired from that school, does anyone believe that they’ll actually find that many quality teachers to hire over the summer? I gotta believe that at least some of those teachers are going to get hired back. I’m not condoning it, but it looks to me like this may be a “legal” ploy to get rid of the teachers that somebody over there doesn’t think are cutting it. The union would not allow them to pick and choose which teachers should go, because seniority rules in our environment, so this state sanctioned method becomes a device that the administration can use keep who they want and get rid of who they don’t. Again, I’m not condoning it, but it is the sort of side effect that comes as a result of the “union mentality”.
The “union mentality” exists because of one-sided, top-down, arbitrary, and sometimes capricious administrative actions that accompany the “management mentality” that blames workers who disagree with administrators looking, in many instances, to score political points at the workers’ expense. Here, it is the direct result of using a narrow set of accountability measures to judge the health of a school community. I’d like to see a lot more of that union mentality.
Actually, I’d like to see a lot less of both mentalities.
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