Last week was a bad one for the “Education Should Be a Business” crowd.
First, a Success Academy charter school teacher was caught on film harshly criticizing and publicly humiliating a first grader. She literally tore the girl’s classwork into pieces and flung them aside!
Success Academy, of course, is claiming that the incident was an exception, both for this teacher and the network in general. However, there’s plenty of testimony that it isn’t. “If you’ve made them cry, you’ve succeeded in getting your point across,” is how one former assistant principal characterized the Success Academy culture; and she also noted that, “embarrassing or belittling children for work seen as slipshod was a regular occurrence, and in some cases encouraged by network leaders.”
Success Academy is a not-for-profit organization that many have accused of operating way too much like a for-profit one, with enormous salaries for top execs, and too many ties to the for-profit sector.
Then there’s Simon Newman, the president of Mount Saint Mary’s College in Maryland. He’s a former financial executive and current psychopath who appears to have gotten his job despite having zero educational experience. Here’s the advice he gave about underperforming freshman at a closed faculty meeting:
“This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies. But you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”
After this was leaked and published in the student paper, he then fired the tenured faculty member overseeing that paper. (Later reinstated.)
I hope and expect Newman’s days at MSMC are numbered—I mean who other than Mommie Dearest would send their kid to a school run by this guy?–but I’m guessing he’ll leave with a fine severance package and a satisfying sense of victimization.
A Bad Week for the “Business of Education”Post + Comments (60)