Thursday, October 09, 2008
Principles
Although Eduwonkette and Sherman Dorn are treating it like news, the case of Art Siebens was actually cited by Leo Casey of the UFT on Edwize back in August. In brief, Siebens is an AP science teacher in the District of Columbia who recently lost his job. Supporters have created a Web site making the case that he's a great teacher and his dismissal was unfair. While Dorn went on to note the much more negative take on Siebens from local parents and offer a generally sober analysis, Eduwonkette sees the firing as "haunting" and a "debacle," declaring that "By all accounts, Michelle Rhee should be carrying Art Siebens around on her shoulders."
Assuming the positive testimonials are true--and there's no reason to believe otherwise--there are two possibilities here:
1) His firing was unjust and attributable to an incompetent or corrupt process. Either somebody was pursuing a personal vendetta or the evaluation process was so shoddy that it failed to properly take into account his many virtues as a teacher.
2) His firing was just and attributable to factors that have not been made public.
I don't know which is true. But then, neither does anyone else in the edublogosphere. None of us know because the necessary information is being withheld due to privacy provisions inherent to school personnel processes. These are provisions that I assume Casey, Jennings et al endorse. (If not, they should say so.) In this case, "by all accounts" means "according to one side of a two-sided dispute in which the other side is legally prohibited from making its case public." This is like rendering judgment in a trial after only hearing from the defense.
Eduwonkette bills itself as a blog that presents information seen "through the lens of social science." That's an obvious claim to the legitimacy that properly-conducted social science entails. But a crucial principle of social science is matching the strength of claims to the strength and breadth of evidence. And such principles really only matter when they collide with ideology or larger agendas. We may never know if Art Siebens was justly fired--that's the price of confidentiality in h.r. matters--but his case has at least provided some clarity about other things.
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