Leader Accountability in the Works

The American Federation of Playground Monitors is reportedly using its members’ trademark conflict resolution skills to come up with a compromise that makes America’s public school teachers feel less singled out and picked on by all the pushers of teacher accountability through high stakes testing.

Explained Don Holland, stay-at-home dad and president of the Playground and Hallway Monitors local 2217, “If you think about it, life in general is a school. It even has a name—The School of Hard Knocks.

“So just to be fair to the teachers in the regular kind of public schools, we’re proposing that we start high stakes testing the students in the public School of Hard Knocks to see how their teachers are performing.

“The teachers of course in this case are the various leaders in charge of this giant overcrowded classroom called America and the students are all of us Americans minus our leaders, or I should say teachers. Let’s just call them leachers for lack of a better name.

“With the help of some old hands in the well established business of no-nonsense school standards adoption and with generous funding from the for-profit high stakes testing industry, we’re pretty sure that within a semester’s time, if not a quarter’s, a nationwide standardized test can be developed that will shine a bright light on how well all of us and our classmates are learning our lessons in this School of Hard Knocks called America.

“To be fair to regular public school teachers and their schools we’ll of course need to put some teeth in the consequences for poor performance.

“Obviously we can’t shutter the entire country if, for example, we find that Americans are not learning the simple lesson that how they vote no longer has any bearing whatsoever on how the wealthy run the country. Or if in large numbers we’re all still failing to grasp even the most basic ways our leachers are failing us.

“But we could and should take over the governance of any state that can’t raise its test scores above a certain threshold.

“And we can also key our leachers’ pay to how well Americans do on the test.”

Said Jim Rollins, president of the American Association of School Accreditors, “Our experience with the current public school reform crusade tells us that the nation’s leaders slash teachers, or leachers if you will, would very likely begin teaching to any standardized test we came up with on the basic facts of American life.

“But that may not be the worst thing in the world. In some ways I actually like the idea of basing our leachers’ pay on how well Americans are mastering basic concepts like the simple truth that Lady Justice in America has miraculously been cured of her blindness or that the reform craze in the regular public schools has nothing to do with anything but serving corporate interests and individual egos.

“I’m actually, in fact, beginning to love the idea of our nation’s leachers holding on to their jobs only by teaching Americans that their leachers in this School of Hard Knocks are not only subjecting them to unnecessary hard knocks but are also getting in the way of Americans ever learning any lessons from these completely unnecessary hard knocks.

“Certainly the so-called classroom could get a little unruly if such concepts become common knowledge, but contrary to popular anti-unionist belief, nobody ever said teaching’s supposed to be a picnic.”

Said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have to say, as much as I’m against high stakes standardized for-profit testing, I kind of like this idea the yard duty folks have come up with.

“And in fact, I don’t think it goes far enough. While we’re at it, let’s start high stakes testing the nation’s Sunday schools. For decades now the teachers there have been doing a seriously lousy job of passing on to their students even the most basic of Christian principles.

“And oh my god, schools of journalism and college economics departments and military academies have been turning out some truly unbelievable dumbshits, pardon my French.

“And my union loyalties notwithstanding, I’m all in favor of summarily mailing pink slips to whoever it is teaching the Beltway refresher courses in civics to the class clowns running this country.”