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Sunday, February 06, 2000 Page: 7
Editor:
The devil wears many masks. No one is so dangerous as the mask of virtue.
Hazleton Area School Superintendent Geraldine Shepperson pitches a list of
changes to the teacher hiring policy “so there’s no ability of anyone to
question the integrity of the process.”
The School District hiring policy has no integrity. The process is a fraud,
a complete sham. Dr. Shepperson admits the policy is essentially based on the
loony ideas brainstormed by an oligarchy of failures at the kitchen table of
Gloria Pesock. Bad ideas are to an institution what cancerous growths are to
the human body. Among knowledgeable professionals, “Gloria’s kitchen table
project” is a synonym for the kinds of bad ideas sucking the life force from
our schools.
If these institutional vampires were private people, it might be rude to
attack their dumb ideas, but board members are public officials whose wrong
decisions affect the welfare of tens of thousands of innocent children. Their
ignorance is reshaping our schools into an institution of the ignorant, run by
the ignorant for the ignorant.
The good news is in the persons of several intelligent, educated people
with high moral integrity elected to this “new” School Board. The bad news
is that they do not add up to a majority. Some people fail because of bad
luck. Most people fail because they have bad ideas. This School Board is a
freak show of human failures; their bankrupt ideas cannot solve complex school
problems.
People who understand nothing about everything suffer from the illusion
they can do anything. The ignorant, among us, does not have the restraints of
humility usually available to people capable of understanding the complexity
of the teacher hiring issue. While elected officials take the brunt of public
punishment for going over the line, the highly paid bureaucrats who led them
over are not only immune from punishment but are honored. Professional
responsibility goes beyond telling lay people what they want to hear. The
board must be told what it needs to hear.
It is hard to believe Dr. Shepperson’s IQ is so low and her pool of
professional knowledge so shallow that she actually believes the idiotic
notions she supports. Is it a lapse of moral integrity or a cynical political
ploy to curry the vote of certain board members whose egomania is matched only
by their stupidity?
The most important thing you can do as a leader is not what you do. It’s
who you are. A genuine leader could tip the scale for the good, but such
qualities are not apparent in the person of Geraldine Shepperson. Her too
often demonstrated style of leading by kowtowing to the dictates of the
communities’ most notorious political lowlifes disgraces her office. It only
makes Geraldine Shepperson the queen of the toadies.
The School Board must be able to honestly answer two questions: Is the
current hiring fairer than the previous “friends and family” policy? Does
current hiring policy make it possible to hire the “best qualified” teacher?
The answer to both these questions is a resounding no. The hiring policy is
all process. It has zero substance.
“Life is unfair.” That is a fundamental truth of human existence. Local
boards were created to make the schools part of the community. When schools
were small, nepotism made everyone part of an extended family, everybody was
somebody. Teacher knew you, your children and the children of your children.
Because teachers were connected to the political power structure, these
front-line professionals had a meaningful say in how our schools were run.
More than anything else, those who have failed in their life’s goals
despise successful people, but their kind cannot use the local political
process to get their vengeful claws onto the successful professionals. So
teachers become their scapegoats, the children of the community become their
victims, and taxpayers pay the price for their mouth-foaming envy.
The brightest and the best professionals have the ability to see beyond a
camouflage of empty words like “the integrity of the process.” Teachers, who
have given up years of their lives to learn at great expense the skills of
their profession, know phony baloney when they see it. Professionals who ran
the many months long gauntlet called student teaching, during which they were
observed and evaluated by experts in many fields of education, understand that
a twenty-minute mock lesson in which they are forced to kowtow to a jury of
yahoos is a perverted practical joke.
Programs developed by colleges of education to produce professional
teachers and the state standards called certification may not be perfect, but
they sure beat the kitchen table solutions of Gloria and her gang of
jokesters. It’s ironic that those school officials making the most noise about
hiring the best teachers made the first lurch at the emergency certificate
solution. Real professionals do not need emergency certificates. Real
professionals have real choices. Tragically, for the welfare of our children,
the best are unlikely to chose the Hazleton Area School District. No teachers
worth their salt can prostitute themselves to such a hiring process without
compromising their professional integrity.
The political solutions of the past may not have been perfect, but before
we judge those solutions we must have a real understanding of where we have
come. The new policy only shifts hiring from elected officials who are
answerable to the people to a covert cult of bureaucrats who are answerable to
no one. In Hazleton, the real evaluations that result in hiring of teachers is
done by a secret inquisition of self-serving toadies whose names, motivations
and professional qualifications we do not know. This bureaucratic clique, with
its growing notoriety for getting special privileges as rewards for its blind
loyalty to their cult leader, may as well be wearing the black pointed hoods
of the Inquisition.
Despite its bragging, its grand schemes, its vows of political chastity and
its gigantic cost to the taxpayers, the Shepperson administration may go down
in history as the dark ages of public education in the Hazleton Area.
Joseph Woitko
Beaver Meadows