An 18 hour D.C. Council hearing last Friday that featured over 100 petitioners proved that tensions are still high in the District of Columbia Public School System over the recent mass firing of teachers at the start of the month. A few weeks into the school year, 226 teachers and 122 support staff were fired throughout the District.
The angry testimonials, which often denounced the firings along racial and class lines, indicate the anger in Washington over Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s decision, but they also point to a more serious concern for District residents: Rhee’s opaque decision-making that has disrupted the school year for thousands of students.
Rhee justified the firings with a $43.9 million budget shortfall in the school system. The Washington Teachers’ Union alleges that the firings were an excuse to get rid of older teachers. Nine hundred and thirty four teachers, almost 25 percent of approximately 4,000 employed in the school district, were hired in the spring and summer of this year.
With such a large incoming pool, it’s hard to understand why Rhee fired 226 teachers suddenly in October, instead of simply hiring fewer new teachers over the summer. Days after the 2008-2009 school year ended, approximately 250 teachers were fired for failing to improve after being given a six month probation period, or for not obtaining their necessary licensing. Rhee should have waited for the school year to end before making cuts, as she did in the past.
There is no excuse for waiting until midway through the semester to enact these cuts, even if they were necessary. A job loss may be a rough setback for a professional, but having a teacher and role model yanked out of the classroom unexpectedly can be devastating. The ensuing class mergings and schedule changes have also disrupted teaching and learning.
“Students lose their focus; teachers have to go back to the beginning with the new students,” Dr. Janet Peachey, a teacher at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, wrote in an e-mail.
The cuts affected those in school, from the elementary to high school levels. Approximately 200 upperclassmen from McKinley High School organized a march to DCPS headquarters to show their outrage. Whatever the reason behind the firings––political or financial––Rhee must be held accountable, so that never again do students pointlessly suffer from such large-scale disruption.
