Michelle Rhee is smiling.

[Android3.14]

45. Irrelevant

Look, I know education is one of your target topics, but I can tell you have little idea what the teaching experience is like. People might be picking on you, and you might feel a need to derail the discussion.

Still, you need to understand something.

I've been in the classroom trenches with fellow teachers, and just like any other collection of people, there are good ones and bad ones. The profession tends to draw people with good intentions, at least initially. But any idiot knows that good teachers can change, and almost-incompetent teachers can hang around for decades.

Most senior teachers are awesome, but some are not.

The teachers unions, as they are, throw new highly talented and recently trained teachers under the union bus when there is a RIF, while it protects the elder incompetent teachers to the detriment of their students and the profession that called them.

Additionally, teachers unions can also allow administrators to exert covert and overt pressure on other teachers to ignore unacceptable behavior, and label students as proficient who have refused to learn.

I am not talking out of my ass here.