These Educators Blew The Whistle On DCPS Training Requirements. They Were Fired. Now Their Lawsuit Is Moving Forward
At Forbes.com, I take a look at a suit in DC, where a veteran principal was fired after she blew the whistle on Relay Graduate School of Education.
Relay is not a graduate school in any traditional sense of the word. As Lauren Anderson, chair of the Education Department at Connecticut College, once put it:
It is a charter-style network of independent teacher preparation programs created by the leaders of three prominent charter school chains (Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First), primarily as a means to bypass traditional teacher education.
Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote of Relay:
It has no scholars, no researchers, no faculty other than charter teachers. It is a trade school for teaching tricks of test-taking and how to control black and brown children and teach them to obey orders without questioning.
So when she was required to get some Relay training, Carolyn Jackson-King was unimpressed.
Jackson-King found some of the training useful, but she bristled at an approach to students that she found too controlling, too “militaristic and racist.”.
Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way. They cannot be who they are. Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward.
The methods pushed in the training, she said, “attempted to control Black bodies.”
For the 2019-2020 school year, Jackson-King received a 2.75 out of 4 score on her evaluation, her lowest since DC started its IMPACT evaluation system. On February 27, 2020, Jackson-King was informed by DCPS that because of that low rating, she would not be rehired the next year.