New Bedford is no better, and now it's directly related to the schools

New Bedford has been in deep trouble for a couple of years. I'll let you guess why. Suffice it to say there are people with some kind of power and an agenda to completely change the face of this city. Change it to a face like theirs. There are businesses leaving and being bought out, companies are changing hands and people are being removed from their long time jobs because they're not the type of people this new regime wants here. I don't believe most of the people who live here even understand that it's happening. 

But they can see what's happening to teachers. New Bedford High School needs to move up from a level 4 school or the state is going to come in and take over. So the new Superintendent has chosen what they call a "turnaround plan" to fix the situation. This requires firing 50% of the staff in order to get a chunk of money. But apparently according to reports from teachers she fired 100% of the teachers just before Christmas telling them they would need to re-apply for their jobs. Most people still think this means she's going to hire back 50% of the teachers. Why should she? She doesn't have to. They just believe that she will. Or better yet that she'll only get rid of 29% because she could count last year's firings as part of the 50%. But she still already fired 100%. This is not something that is going to happen in the future. It already happened. There's no more talking or negotiating. It's a done deal. 

What if those jobs reset to starting teacher salaries? Are teachers who had earned much more going to apply for those jobs, or are they going to move on to some other school system where they can be paid something close to what they were getting? Won't that just drive all the experienced teachers elsewhere? Isn't that what they probably wanted in the first place? They'd get brand new inexperienced teachers with a much smaller budget for salaries that they can brag about later to the types who just want government to "cut spending" no matter what the cost. If the kids don't learn, if the teacher turnaround becomes a constant problem who cares? Spending is down. Besides their type of people send their kids to private school anyway. That will also leave good students who had good teachers, with newbs who can't possibly help them get ready for college the way the experienced teachers who were chased out of town would have. Does no one see this future except me? I think everyone is so stunned by the heavy handed measures that have already been discussed that they haven't followed these thoughts through to the endgame. No more free public education = an illiterate slave class. 

What doesn't help is that local talk radio and the local newspaper are firmly on the side of the new regime. I wonder how that happened? Maybe that's how the new regime came to power in the first place. Maybe this is the destruction of an entire community. Maybe Hitler's rolling around in his grave because he wishes he'd thought of it. Make them turn on each other. Make life so undesirable that they just leave. The sad thing is the number of minorities in the community who still don't get it. They don't know what's happening so they're not only not doing anything about it. Some of them are going along with it. Divide and conquer. Isn't it obvious?