Last month 93 Central Falls RI school teachers were fired. It's a great story, Google it yourself. Yes, everyone in the entire school got the axe. Their little ship had sailed a long way off course and nobody cared to respond. Pay cheques were blissfully accepted in a complete contribution vacuum for many years.
Central Falls was a school in the lowest 5% in the district, less than 20% of it's students could read at grade level, math proficiency was 7%, and it's graduation rate is 48%. Apparently a collection of character deficient adults in complete agreement that how they spend their day should have no connection to why they were being paid.
The management point.
When you hire, when you select employees, you must select for character, values, work ethic and maturity because once on your payroll, their education and skills take a very secondary role.
I have to assume all the Central Falls teachers had the requisite education, credentials, experience and deserved to be in their roles. Yet too few of them had enough character to bring any of those hard skills to their job.
Education, experience, brains, don't matter in the least if not supported by a person of integrity or character.
Hard skills are required, but not sufficient. The tipping point in any hire is character. Choose well grasshopper, for you may not be able to fire them all so easily later.
See you for breakfast,
Wolfgang
A. Is teaching a child a shared responsibility? Well, yes and no. It is for poor teachers. Great teachers seem to produce great results in spite of the same constraints.
B. Do parents, poverty, class size, etc. play a role in teacher effectiveness? In schools yes, at a football game, no. At a football game you can put 60,000 students in one cold room, feed them beer, and teach them so effectively they remember everything vividly Monday morning. Maybe the difference is beer and not class size.
C. Before you write me a steamed email, . . . oh heck, go ahead and write.
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