You might have heard last year about a school district in Rhode Island that took the drastic step of firing the whole faculty at a school.
The school, Central Falls High, was a disaster. For instance, only 7 percent of its 11th-graders reached the level of proficiency in math.
Yet the union representing the teachers showed little willingness to do what it would take to turn things around.
That prompted the mass firing, which even President Barack Obama thought was a reasonable approach, given the school’s horrible performance.
But the dismissals didn’t stick. There was a “labor agreement” under which the teachers were allowed to return to their jobs.
Unfortunately, things appear to be getting no better at the school. They might even be getting worse.
“The progress that the city’s school board … had hoped for seems increasingly, and alarmingly, elusive,” The Associated Press reported.
The AP added, “More than a dozen teachers — and sometimes over 20 — of the roughly 90-person staff were absent on an average day this fall, including six on long-term leave … .”
The absentee rate among teachers is so bad that hundreds of grades from last fall are being withheld. Administrators felt that “teacher attendance was too spotty to accurately measure student performance,” the AP reported. (Isn’t it normally poor student attendance, rather than poor teacher attendance, that is the problem?)
This is one more example of the negative effects on students of an entrenched education bureaucracy.