Seattle Ousts Superintendent After Program Audit by State: Well I have to say that I'm glad they got her out of office cause it definitely sounds like she was siphoning funds into her own pocket! Seriously, 300,000 dollars are missing for services that the district never received? Doesn't think make people want to do an audit of her personal finances just to see if she happened to get something like thirty ten thousand dollar checks over her three years in office? More than 1.5 million dollars spent on questionable services? They only gave one example of these questionable services. Are relaxing weekends at the spa or private getaways with some lover part of these questionable expenses. Based on this article it sounds like the school district decided to get rid of her based on the fact the school district wasn't getting everything it was paying for. I think she should be personally investigated. in addition to all of this they are still giving her a severance package of a 1/4 of a million dollars and benefits on top of that. "Thanks for doing a really terrible job for us, but we are still going to give you a giant severance package. Good luck in life and good luck in ripping the next school district off that you work for!" How is it that it isn't in these people's contracts that if they are fired for conduct like this that they won't get any benefits whatsoever? It's a gross misallocation of state and district funds. She shouldn't receive a dime for the money she stole/wasted during her time in office.
Tying Class Sizes to Teachers Skills: Now doesn't this just seem like a wonderful idea in theory? Give the better teachers more students, and subsequently more pay, and the worse teachers fewer students and less pay. First of all, you better make sure that however you are evaluating these teachers, and from what it sounds like they would be evaluating them on whether or not their students do well enough on tests, is going to be an accurate way of measuring teacher effectiveness. I can easily see a situation happening in which teachers teach to the test even more so than they already do in an effort to get a few more students and a few more bucks added to their salary. What does this say about teachers who teach mostly electives classes? How are you going to judge them and even then what are you going to do about their class sizes? I'd be willing to guess that a lot of those classes they have are totally determined by the number of students who sign up for them. That is how it was done at my high school. Of course, this comes into question that Bill Gates is bringing this up, and wasn't he one of the biggest sharks of the computer industry next to Paul Allen? I'm not sure if his advice is the kind I would be seeking in terms of figuring out how I would want to pay teachers.
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