Politics and Education

In a time of political chaos and a declining economy, mass layoffs and budget cuts have become the norm for American society.  With each cut, businesses and families are drastically affected.  But when it comes to education, no one seems to truly understand the ramifications of budget cutting...

I worked in Prince George's County public school system last school year.  I witnessed firsthand how tragic lack of funds can cripple a school.  A social studies class with 55 students in it at one time... a nation that doesn't know its history will be lost in the future.  More depressing is that two teachers from the social studies department were cut by the end of the year.

Now you may be asking, how does politics fit in with education?  Well, when teachers have to be cut, it isn't the black and white process you may think it is.  Teachers with tenure of course have precedence over rookie teachers.  But what happens when there are only tenured teachers to be fired?

Well the logical thing would be to look for teachers who are "unsatisfactory" and let those teachers go.  However, that was not the case at Bowie High School.  This is where the politics come in to play.  An unsatisfactory teacher, who is tenured, has to be declared as so two times in order to be fired.  In this case, two teachers were up for elimination; both had been working for the system the same amount of years; one who had been satisfactory for the duration of his career, and the other had received an unsatisfactory that year.  Now again, most would think a no brainer of who to let go.  However, the teacher that had shown consistent satisfaction, had even been chosen to be a mentor two years in a row, was selected to be terminated. 

Why do you ask?  So that the unsatisfactory teacher could work another year, be determined as unsatisfactory and then fired, with the hopes that the satisfactory teacher could find somewhere else in the county to teach.  The same county that was letting go over 1,000 teachers. 

Now I am not a parent, but I would be very disturbed to find out that a teacher deemed unsatisfactory would be chosen to teach over a teacher who was in good standing.  More importantly, if this is occuring over the county, state and nation, is it any wonder why students test scores are declining and children are less prepared for college? 

Who is responsible for making these decisions?  The principals?  The High School Consortium?  The Superintendent?  All these important personnel, who are getting paid well over $100,000 a year, are making poor decisions that affect our nation's children and our nation's future.  So much for the motto of "Children First".