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districts to function as employers do in the private sector by granting local control of educational policies to individual school districts? Too many of us can recall teachers who, for a variety of reasons, should have been removed from the classroom, but were left unscathed until they retired on their own volition. Today’s high stake testing, together with the selectivity of admissions to many post-secondary institutions, make it imperative that schools provide research-based instruction designed to ensure success for all students, teacher seniority notwithstanding. Brown v. Board of the Education exposed the fallacy of the separate but equal doctrine. Similarly, Vergara may cast much needed light on the inequities caused by state tenure statutes. I share with you the ending of my program where Mrs. Speak-Easy, an alleged ineffective teacher, defends her methodology to a distrusting parent. HELICOPTER PARENT: I don’t know, Mrs. Speak-Easy, I am still not convinced that Temperance is getting the same level of instruction as some of her friends and I believe it’s going to put her at a disadvantage down the road. I think perhaps we should all meet with Principal Nester to discuss what I see as a prohibition of effective education. Thank you for your time. Let’s go Temperance.
TEMPERANCE: Hey Mrs. Speak-Easy, just want you to know I like that poster you have up on the wall over there. Not sure who Will Rogers is, but he may have something here. (Temperance, Helicopter Parent, and Mrs. Speak-Easy look up to the poster which reads:) “Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth!” THE END. Pamela A. DeMartino, Esquire, is a public school teacher and has been a member of the Justice Strong Inns of Court since 1998. Inspired by the vaporization of citizens in Orwell’s 1984, she again wrote a program for the April 2016 meeting addressing the “right to be forgotten” as decided by the European court in Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González.
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Patrick Warrington pwwarrington@lawyercover.com I 800-220-3262 I www.lawyercover.com Spring 2016 | 21