Should Teacher Ratings be Public?

RUSH: Amy in Pittsburgh, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: Very good. Thanks.

CALLER: Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I’m a little nervous, but, you know, you were talking earlier about Obama going and doing these backyard rallies or whatever you want to call it, campaigning, I guess. You know the other day he told his constituents in the Democratic Party they needed to buck up.

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: I thought it was interesting because two weeks ago Sarah Palin, when she was talking about Karl Rove and the establishment’s temper tantrum over the Christine O’Donnell win, she said they needed to buck up. And interesting choice of words that he would choose the same words as her, but it might just be coincidental, I don’t know. You often say she’s living inside his head. The other point I wanted to make about that, though, you know, she’s telling the establishment they need to get on board, they need to buck up, follow the will of the people. And he’s out there looking down his nose at the people saying, ‘Yeah, you don’t like what I’m doing, but buck up, obey, go with it,’ and I just thought it was such an interesting choice of words but interesting moreover on how they’re using it and who they’re talking to.

RUSH: Well, yeah, because Obama and Bite Me said the same thing. Actually, what Joe Bite Me said, it was interesting, you haven’t heard this. You know Bite Me is a walking gaffe. He actually said buck off and they had to change it to buck up. And then Obama came out and totally unrelated Obama said buck up. And Palin had done it, too. Now, Palin was talking to the elites when she said it. Obama was talking to the non-elites when he said it. But there’s no question that Palin is in their heads. It was the Reverend Jackson that said if he heard footsteps from behind him while he was in a dark alley and he turned around and saw a white guy he’d be revealed. That’s right. It was the Reverend Jackson who did make that statement.

Here’s Sarah in northern Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. I was calling, I got a call from my sister who is a teacher in Michigan last night and she had an e-mail from her local teacher union chapter calling for activists to go on an NEA subsidized buck trip for the rally this weekend in Washington, DC, called One Nation Working Together or something. And they said on September 29th they learned that they were getting an NEA grant to help offset the cost of the bus. So they’re getting two people —

RUSH: Wait a second. Wait a second here. I want to make sure I’m following you. Obama supporters and the teachers unions are having a rally September 29th in Washington.

CALLER: No, this weekend, One Nation Working Together march on Washington, October 2nd.

RUSH: This weekend, October 2nd.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Okay, this weekend. That’s right ’cause today’s the 29th.

CALLER: They’re going to sponsor two members paying up to one half of the transportation cost and $20 per meal and said they’re being subsidized off of the costs by the NEA.

RUSH: Right. So that’s what I wanted to make clear.

CALLER: But she and her other teacher friend came down to Washington for the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally. They paid, you know, their airfare and their time away from school prep, and so she is beside herself that her union dues are going to subsidize sending activists down to this rally.

RUSH: Not only that, it sounds like federal dollars are being used to subsidize this, too. See, this is my point. I wanted to make sure I understood this. So the teachers want to have this big rally — what’s it for? Support Obama or something, the Democrats?

CALLER: It’s One Nation Working Together. It’s a recommitment to change rally.

RUSH: Okay, that’s Obama.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: You know. Human and civil rights leaders, labor leaders are going to help put America back to work, pull America back together, help to reorder our national priorities so that —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — investments in people —

RUSH: Oh, that’s right.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Okay. So it’s the stop whining rally, but the point is they’re having to gin it up because people are not motivated on their own to go.

CALLER: They’re paid to go.

RUSH: Right, they’re being paid to go, the rent-a-mob. They’re being subsidized, paid to go, union dues, what have you, are being paid to go, they’re being asked to go, and there’s nothing spontaneous or genuine about it. That’s your point, right?

CALLER: Yeah, and it’s the Michigan education whatever, statewide president’s caucus is organizing the trip in hopes that we can ensure Michigan and the Michigan education association —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — to have a presence at the march. And so I guess that’s why the NEA is offering grants for this.

RUSH: They’re in trouble.

CALLER: But my sister, you know, on a teacher’s salary that was a lot for her and her friend to come down to Restoring Honor because they felt passionate about it and they wanted to make a difference. Yet you have to pay union dues in Michigan if you’re a teacher.

RUSH: Wait a minute. I have a pet peeve about the phrase, ‘make a difference.’ Did you say that your sister, the teacher, said she wanted to make a difference?

RUSH: That’s why she spent money — and, you know, in Michigan they start school early. She and her friends —

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: — came down in the middle of prepping for school.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: You know, on the 28th.

RUSH: But your sister the teacher —

CALLER: Huh-uh.

RUSH: — said she wanted to go to this thing because she wanted to make a difference.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Is that right? What did you say to her when she told you that she wanted to go to this thing on somebody else’s dime ’cause she can’t afford it herself to make a difference, what did you —

CALLER: No, no. No, she went to Glenn Beck rally to make a difference.

RUSH: Oh, she went to the Glenn Beck rally to make a difference — Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay.

CALLER: Her union dues were being used to subsidize something that she was totally against.

RUSH: Oh, okay. I misunderstood you. I got it. I got it. Well, I still have a bugaboo with the ‘make a difference’ business but I’ll save it for another caller.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Anyway, your point is well taken. All this stuff happening on our side is genuine, and it’s bubbling up effervescently from the grassroots. And the other side are having to gin it up themselves, create. It’s like Obama is having to go out to all these places and urge his supporters to buck up and stop whining and all this ’cause they are depressed, they are unenthused.

CALLER: And my sister’s point is all the union dues that she pays and this is where her money is going to.

RUSH: That’s only half the story. The other part of her union dues goes to Democrat candidates and so forth. At any rate, I appreciate the call. Thanks. Speaking of teachers, here’s a story from the AP. It’s in a Boston newspaper, but it’s a story out of South Gate, California, AP, by Christina Hoag. Now, listen to this. ‘The Los Angeles Times should remove teacher performance ratings from its website after the apparent suicide of a teacher despondent over his score, the union representing Los Angeles school teachers said. United Teachers Los Angeles also has asked school administrators to join with them in the request to the newspaper, which published the ratings last month, union president AJ Duffy said.

‘The body of 39-year-old Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, was found Sunday at the foot of a remote forest bridge in what appears to be a suicide. The motive for Ruelas taking his own life is far from clear. But union officials said he had been upset since the Times published his district ranking as a ‘less effective’ teacher based on his students’ standardized English and math test scores. Ruelas scored ‘average’ in getting his students up to acceptable levels in English, but ‘less effective’ in math, and ‘less effective’ overall. The school itself ranked as ‘least effective’ in raising test scores, and only five of Miramonte’s 35 teachers were ranked as high as average.’

So the union has asked the Los Angeles Time to stop publishing teacher rankings because publishing teacher rankings is causing teachers to commit suicide. Now, stop and think about this for a second. Stop and think. I gotta take a break here, but I want you to stop and think about this because right here it says the motive for Ruelas taking his own life is far from clear. For those of you in Rio Linda it means nobody has any idea why he did it, but that didn’t stop the union from saying that he might have done it because he had been upset ever since the LA Times published his rankings as a less-than-effective teacher. But nobody knows. Now, my point is this. Why can’t we publish the effectiveness of teachers? Athletes have their work scored every moment. Their work is on television. These people get ripped to shreds each and every day if they’re baseball or basketball players, every week if they’re football players. There are any number of people, CEOs, Big Oil executives, Big Pharmaceutical executives, BP executive, any number of people who not only have their work ripped to shreds, they get called up to testify before august Senate and congressional committees.

There are numerous lines of work. People in the media, whether or not people watch their shows, it’s published all the time, the ratings. All kinds of peoples, lawyers, win a case; lose a case, big-time news about it. There are all kinds of people whose work is publicly commented on, publicly remarked upon, publicly known. And now all of a sudden the teachers union, without any knowledge, without any direct knowledge, says we gotta stop publishing how effective or ineffective the teachers are, it’s causing the teachers to kill themselves. Why is it that of all these jobs in the world we’re not allowed to know how teachers are doing, especially in this case when the motive is ‘far from clear.’ See, the answer to the question is very obvious to me. If you look at the public education system in this country you know full well it’s failing, on balance. There are some good teachers, there’s no question, but on balance it’s in trouble. And the more money we spend the worse it gets.

We can’t now have teacher ratings; we can’t test the teachers; we can’t rate them; we can’t test them to see how well they’re doing. The people in charge of teaching kids, we’re not supposed to learn how good they are at it. There’s no mechanism where we can find out how good they are, and if we do find out how they’re good and some of them are not good at it and all of a sudden they kill themselves and so we’ve gotta shelter everybody from that knowledge? I think it’s a bunch of cowards. You know, it works both ways. If you start publishing the results of how good people do their jobs there is some motivation to do it well, is there not?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, these teacher evaluations in the Los Angeles Times were published way back during the first week of August. This is the last week of September. It sure took that teacher a long time to get around to killing himself. Folks, you know, I live in Literalville. This is one of the biggest problems people have with me. Everybody else lives in politically correct world. I live in Literalville. Okay, so we have a story in the LA Times. Teacher commits suicide, period. The union guy said the reason is far from clear, meaning, we don’t have the slightest idea why, but we want the LA Times to stop publishing teacher rankings because undoubtedly it led to his suicide. Well, if it did, it took a long time for the guy to get around to it because the LA Times published the rankings the first week in August, and the guy wipes himself out in the last week of September, so it took a while to build, did it not? (interruption) What’s wrong with this, Snerdley? No, I don’t know. I’m challenging the whole notion. He committed suicide, nobody knows why, the union says it’s far from clear, ‘but…’ So anything after but is meaningless. After you admit nobody knows, then when you profess to know, you don’t know.

Okay, so I’m just saying I live in Literalville. The guy takes his life in late September, last week of September, but the rankings are published the first week in August. It took him a long time to get around to it. That’s all I’m saying. Now also, if bad published rankings sparked suicides then somebody had better build some nets outside the windows at the CNN building and the MSNBC building because there’s going to be a rash of suicides. The ratings every day are published for CNN and MSNBC and Fox, they’re published every day, Nielsen publishes them and I see them every day, and they’re bad. I mean they’re horrible out there. CNN and MSNBC, it’s embarrassing. It’s not a surprise to them. They’re almost honored by how small the ratings are. They tell themselves we have the right people watching, right, like the White House. But you better start building some nets or have the firemen on 24-hour watch, if bad rankings lead to suicides out there.