"S. A. Gorden - The Duce of Pentacles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gorden S A)

he became the school informer. Always careful to avoid being caught tattling,
he would turn in a student and covertly watch their anguish as they were
brought to the office. He became skilled at setting up his friends and
enemies.
The more he learned about his chosen profession the more he loved it.
The only group that could wield as much power as he could were the teachers,
and they were on the defensive. It had started years ago when some bright
authors with an axe to grind started to pick and choose educational
statistics. Who cares if most of the world envies our education system, you
can always make it look bad. Sure we graduate a much higher percentage of
students than the rest of the world and still are only a couple of percentage
points off the best scores but you can always point out that there are a half
a dozen countries that rank higher in those few percentage points. If the
ratio of failing students goes down in one area, you can point out that raw
numbers of failing students are going up and just neglect to point out the
student population increased as well. Besides, there is always a survey done
somewhere that points out a problem. By the end of the Reagan administration,
the myth of massive numbers of bad teachers and bad teaching had become an
accepted fact. The politics of destruction dictated that the people put in
charge of education had to be chosen by how much they wanted to destroy the
current system. The current mythology had even penetrated the educational
system itself. It was an accepted axiom of all education administrators that a
bad student is always the teacher's fault, even if the student is a Charlie
Manson or a Ted Bundy.
When Jefferson was taking his graduate courses to become an
administrator, he discovered a study buried in the literature that showed huge
increases in student performance. Out of curiosity, he looked further and
found the study had been done over and over again showing the same results. At
first, he didn't understand why the studies had been buried. When he finally
realized why, he became even more proud of his chosen profession.
 The studies showed that the smaller the class size the better the
students did, no fancy teaching scheme, no miracle system, just more teachers.
Over the last few decades, the money and power in the schools had shifted
dramatically to the administration of the system. Smaller class sizes would
mean more teachers. More teachers would mean less power to the principals,
superintendents, school boards, etc. Better to attack the teachers' unions and
try to privatize education then to let the reins of power go. Privatization
had never worked and never would, but the breaking apart of the current public
education system would mean even more power to those controlling the flow of
money, the administrators. By the time Jefferson got his first job as a
principal, his pride in the deviousness of his job knew no bounds.
The day was going great. He sat in on a review of the new history
teacher with the high school principal. By the end of the review he knew that
his principal, Joe Kawalski, would try to pressure her into bed before she got
her tenure. That excited him because he would then be able to blackmail her
into bed himself. The sex didn't excite him as much as forcing her and seeing
Joe's face when he let him find out about it.
Right now he was going through his one-hour preparation for the monthly
school board meeting. His school board was in many ways a standard small town
board. A retired teacher and one smart mother-he enjoyed thinking of her in