Weingarten on "Talk of the Nation" yesterday

[Recursion]

Transcript and audio link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130675529

Ms. WEINGARTEN: Actually, you know, again I don't think, and I'm proud that we did the Washington contract, the Washington contract went up by 80 to 20 percent. A lot of it was also because there was a 20 percent in the, in, you know, negotiated in a very, very tough economic time.

What the Washington contract did was it actually clarified everybody's roles. You would not have known by the rhetoric around the Washington contract that the chancellor actually had a lot of those powers beforehand, and in fact, the last chancellor, Cliff Janey, had actually fired a whole bunch more teachers than Michelle Rhee ever fired.

But it was done in a way where people understood why they were being fired, and there was an attempt to help people beforehand and ultimately do what the union has called for, which is everybody's not cut out to be a teacher.

And so we try to help people do the best they can be the best they can be, and if we can't, then there's a way humanely to separate people out from the profession.

But what the current chancellor or the soon-to-be-departing chancellor did was she made firing, rather than teacher development, the most important piece of the human capital equation.

(Emphasis mine)

Also some interesting stuff about peer review.