The Management Underbelly

Some people will make much of this as a failing in education, but these two nabods were not in education, though that's what their paycheck says. They were in management. I have observed that when you hire a teacher you are going to get one of two kinds of people: those who will have their markers pried from their cold, dead fingers, and those who discover that teaching is work and immediately start scheming to escape the classroom by getting into management. Don't by surprised when these frustrated 1%ers turnout to be bullies, liars, and hypocrites

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A school official’s unbelievably racist texts - Salon.com:

...There is so much that’s contemptible about the exchanges between Como and Donato – the simmering, near constant anger they display, the grotesque, dehumanizing way they view pretty much anybody who isn’t a white man (to their credit, though, I didn’t notice any gay slurs in the lot) and the jaw-dropping amount of arrogance and privilege it takes to speak that hatefully, that freely. But what stinks most is the betrayal it represents, the lie that their jobs were. The disgust they had for their own kids. “They were friendly to our faces,” Zhaqweyza Armstrong, a 16 year-old Coatesville High junior, told the Inquirer Monday, “and then they talked about us behind our backs.”

Right on cue to back me up, Salon posts another essay on teaching:

...Administrators! And now to uncork my particular wrath for the administrators! First, there are far too many of them. Far, far too many. A lot too many. A toiletful too many. Put ‘em out to pasture. Paying for early retirement has got to be cheaper than paying for their mistakes. As they say about the government in general: If you hate the problem, wait ’til you see our solution!

Second, they are all, in my experience, more or less the same interchangeable, vaporous nonentity. Drifting through the halls with a walkie-talkie, unburdened by care or shame, hurrying off to some monumentally inconsequential three-hour off-site meeting, with nothing but a pot of coffee and two brain cells between them, where a plan will be hatched with no purpose, no effect and no follow-through. Leadership begins at the top — simple as that. Schools drift in the fog as a direct result of the log-rolling incompetence of our erstwhile captains and their first mates.

You can tell by the blasé, sour, glassy-eyed look on their faces that they’re simply marking time. I can think of but rare instances to which they added any positive value. To the contrary, they appear at times to be deliberately undermining our best efforts. A suggestion: Maybe at a faculty meeting one of them could vaguely suggest that it’s possible that some of us are perhaps doing an adequate job? A little encouragement? A compliment? And by the way, a five dollar Scratcher at the annual “Faculty Appreciation Day,” or whatever it is, doesn’t mean anything. I don’t want to spend any more time cogitatin’ upon those molecules. It all goes without saying...