Bob Kerr: The teacher, the dentist, and the numbers

OK, can we at least admit that things have gotten strange and twisted when members of the Howard Beale Society give a standing ovation to a woman for putting people out of work?

What next — a bus tour of underperforming schools at which Society members could get out to yell “Send out the teachers!”

There is damage being done here. In this eagerness to support the wholesale firing of veteran teachers, people are not thinking about what comes next. Will good teachers want to go near schools that have been set up as free-fire zones for zealous reformers? And will teachers who are willing to take jobs in schools that are being forced to fit into federal guidelines have any understanding of the community they’re in or the particular needs of its students?

I am reminded of an old and frightening comment from an old and frightening war:

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

Those words were attributed to an Army major after the destruction of a Vietnamese town to keep it out of enemy hands. It seemed madness at the time, a deadly rejection of reason and common sense. Who would have thought that such thinking would be applied decades later to an urban high school?

One of the strange things among many strange things that have occurred in the swift and dizzying effort to turn Central Falls High School into a national test case was the appearance of students two weeks ago from something called Young Voices. They demonstrated in support of Supt. Frances Gallo’s plan to fire the teachers at the high school. The trouble is, none of the students was from the high school. They appeared badly used in an increasingly distant and disconnected campaign to dump a heaping load of collective failure entirely on the teachers.

I would guess that members of the Howard Beale Society who gathered in Newport on Saturday share a similarly distant grasp of Central Falls reality, but that didn’t stop them from giving Gallo a standing ovation when she appeared. Actually, I’m being a bit loose with the name of the group. It’s officially the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition, but its members seem to reflect that howling spirit of discontent so brilliantly embodied in the character Howard Beale in the movie “Network.”

It is the season. Go for the teachers. It’s so much easier than getting bogged down in all those complex social and cultural issues that are actually at the heart of the problem.

One of the best comments I have seen on the whole tangled debate over school reform comes from John Taylor, a retired South Carolina school superintendent. Taylor wrote a parody called “No Dentist Left Behind” in which a dentist is informed of new guidelines that will rate dentists by the number of cavities their patients have at the ages of 10, 14 and 18.

The dentist argues that the guidelines are unfair because he works in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes who aren’t brought to see him until there is a problem. Many of his colleagues, he points out, work in upper-middle class neighborhoods where parents take preventive measures.

“My best patients are as good as anyone’s, my work is as good as anyone’s,” the dentist argues. “But my average cavity count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most.”

It doesn’t matter, he is told. Cavities are the bottom line.

And you can’t argue with the bottom line.