Thursday, February 21, 2013

Rhee-ly good advice

Stop with the self-esteem stuff, tell your kids the hard, harsh, realities of life and they'll be the better for it;

Michelle Rhee has some suggestions for the Washington state school system.
The controversial Students First founder and former chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., said this state should remove seniority as a factor in teacher layoffs and allow families to choose where to send their children to school.
....In D.C., Rhee closed schools and fired teachers she determined to be underperforming. She implemented a system that based teacher evaluations in part on their students’ test scores, and she increased resources for teachers.
Critics call her anti-teacher. They say that while she claims to be advocating for students, she doesn’t care about the people who educate those students. They also say there is no research to back up her policies, which resulted in at least 241 teachers being fired in D.C. during her tenure.
....Rhee said educators coddle their students too much. She used her parenting technique as an example of what should be done instead.
Her daughters play soccer, but not well, she said. They have medals and trophies attesting to their proficiency, so she felt it was her duty to sit them down and tell them they were just bad at playing soccer.
“We spend so much time making children feel good about themselves, we’ve lost the ability to make them feel good,” she said ....
Rhee is married to a former NBA star, so maybe she knows something about how winning teams are built. 

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