Head of DC schools says only 1 of 266 fired teachers accused of sex with children.

madfloridian

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Thu Jan-28-10 12:33 PM
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Head of DC schools says only 1 of 266 fired teachers accused of sex with children.

Edited on Thu Jan-28-10 12:38 PM by madfloridian

She even goes out of her way to stain the reputation of a few others.

But she does not apologize for harming the reputation of 266 teachers with her careless remarks.

From educator Susan Ohanian's site:

Rhee hedges remarks on laid-off teachers

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said Tuesday that she should have moved faster to quell controversy over comments about laid-off teachers she made to a magazine, and she said only one of the 266 employees the school system dismissed last fall had been accused of sexual misconduct.

In addition, Rhee wrote in a letter to D.C. Council members, six of the laid-off employees had been suspended for using corporal punishment and two for being absent without leave "on multiple occasions." Several others, she wrote, "had egregious time and attendance records."

Rhee declined to apologize for her statement to the national business magazine Fast Company that some of the teachers laid off in October's budget cuts "had sex with children," hit them or were chronically absent without authorization. The comments emerged last week.

..."Rhee's magazine comments stunned the public school community. Parents wanted to know whether their children had been in classrooms with sexual predators or teachers who hit them. D.C. officials wondered whether laws that established teachers and school administrators as "mandatory reporters" of suspected child abuse had been ignored. Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker asked Rhee for an apology, saying she had tarnished the reputation of many teachers.

Here are the comments of Ohanian on the lack of an apology by Rhee:

Ohanian Comment: I post this because Rhee is in the national spotlight, the darling of the corporate politicos who are out to deform public education.

Even though an apology isn't enough to redress the wrong Rhee did, her unwillingness to make such an apology reveals a great character flaw. I don't think anybody should be around children who is incapable of saying, "I made a mistake. I'm sorry."

In Rhee's case that should be "I made a terrible mistake, and I will do everything possible to rectify it."

This article says she's "hedging." Obviously, this is too little and too late. Just as obviously, hedging is not admitting error and apologizing.

A teacher loses her job if she does not report suspected sex abuse.

It sounds like Michelle Rhee just tossed out a careless phrase without thinking about the reputation of teachers. It really goes a long way toward showing the lack of respect that teachers often face today.

Rhee first says teachers fired for economic reasons, then says they had sex with children or hit them.

Last summer Rhee told DC Council that economic necessity was behind the firing of 266 experienced teachers and other school personnel. Now she is telling the media that the fired teachers were miscreants, abusers, and/or child molesters. If they were child molesters or abusers, why have no police reports been filed? If they were not child molesters, why is Rhee lying to the media and slandering the 266 fired DC teachers?

..."Shortly before going on the air, Gray said he was stunned by Rhee's disclosure about sexual assaults, because she mentioned nothing about it in the October hearing on teacher layoffs, or in the course of a one-hour meeting he had with her last week.

"Educators are mandatory reporters of incidents like this," Gray said. "What she needs to do is very quickly corroborate this." If there is proof, it raises another question, he said: "Why was an alleged budget problem used as a basis for dismissing people who, according to her, engaged in abuse and sexual molestation of children?"

There is a very interesting post at the Core Knowledge blog about the Rhee controversy and the Washington Post's Bill Turque.

Who Censored the Washington Post’s Rhee Item?

This is the post I quoted recently, so I find it interesting it was modified.

Tensions flaring over Turquemakeastand?

Late night weirdness at the Washington Post, a paper that boasts arguably the best education coverage of any daily. A hard-hitting blog post by reporter Bill Turque, which took on both DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and his own newspaper’s editorial page, disappeared from the paper’s website for several hours, only to return with some of the more pointed turns of phrase removed.

Turque, who has clashed with Rhee over his tough reporting, has been covering the fallout from the chancellor’s latest controversial statements—a quote in Fast Company defending her dismissal of over 200 teachers last year. “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn’t we take those things into consideration?” she told the magazine. Critics, including the head of the city council, erupted and demanded to know why Rhee didn’t say this at the time and whether law enforcement had been alerted.

Turque pressed Rhee to explain her controversial statement—how many of the 266 fired teachers had abused their positions? — and got nowhere. But on Tuesday, he read Rhee’s answer–in an editorial in his own paper. Six teachers were suspended for corporal punishment, two had been AWOL and only one faced allegations having sex with a student. The editorial cited “information released by the chancellor’s office on Monday.”

...."Sometime around 8pm last time, Turque’s piece vanished from the Post’s website. When it returned a few hours later, the phrase describing the Post’s editorials about Rhee as “protective and, at times, adoring” was gone. Other sections of the piece were similarly watered down.

Here is Turque's explanation which is now in cache.

Apparently according to the Core Knowledge blog this statement is no longer found.

Where this gets complicated is that board’s stance, and the chancellor’s obvious rapport with Jo-Ann, also means that DCPS has a guaranteed soft landing spot for uncomfortable or inconvenient disclosures–kind of a print version of the Larry King Show.

This is in the revised version.

And the current, revised version:

Where this gets complicated is that board’s stance, and the chancellor’s rapport with Jo-Ann, means that DCPS may prefer to talk to her than me.

Amazing. Those who push the corporate education agenda are protected by the corporate media.