Ms. Jackie Kalbas:

Please allow me to convey my admiration and thanks as a teacher of 28 years at HCC before my retirement for your well-reasoned case against the grade-inflation scheme foisted on the teachers and students of the school system by superintendent Maryellen Elia.

The entire school board sat by and let Ms. Elia perpetuate this smoke-and-mirrors fraud on the students, the teachers, and the public just as the board did when the superintendent imposed an extra class on teachers.

In fact, Ms. Olson told teachers who came to protest the extra class about which Ms. Elia did not bother to get their input that they were "lazy."

Nor will this board establish a settled student-teacher place in the board agenda so that students and teachers feel welcome to come and give their input on things that affect them and the learning process. In fact, when teachers came to a board meeting uninvited to protest the extra-class imposition by Ms. Elia, Dr. Lamb, then board chair, complained that teachers' applauding their colleagues violated Roberts Rules.

Teachers are not welcome in the board room giving their opinion. The board and administration, all of whom enjoy self-bestowed artificially bloated salaries, want the teachers and students to form the slave population of the school system that produces the tax revenue for the superintendent and her complicit minions on the board to dispense with noblesse oblige, to bloat their contracts, to bestow no-bid contracts on buddies and retired school administrators so as to look grand in the world.

I have asked repeatedly for a place on the board agenda for students and teachers, but the board has remained unmoved. To continue its grand panoply of the fraud of its members' being the royalty of the dispensers of learning, the board requires that the teachers and students remain at a convenient distance and not be acknowledged part of the school system--except to do the work that brings in the bucks for the administration and board to dispense with royal pomp and circumstance.

The board constitutes what I call the potted-plant brigade that Ms. Elia treats like a bunch of servant coolies. She orders. They obey. If one attends board meetings, that person sees no evidence that the board has even minimal influence. Ms. Elia's commands ride along the consent conveyor belt with no murmur from the complicit board.

Board Member Griffin recently learned the price of asking for an item to come off the consent agenda for scrutiny: a no-bid contract for $148,000 to a former administrator buddy of Ms. Elia in the patronage system the board cedes her at the taxpayers' expense.

Ms. Candy Olson and Ms. Carol Kurdell excoriated Ms. Griffin for being "disloyal" to the infallible administration; Dr. Lamb lamented their defection from being "team players."

These three are Ms. Elia's faithful drones as are Ms. Jennifer Falliera and Ms. Doretha Ethridge.

Ms. Olson, Ms. Kurdell, and Dr. Lamb were on the board to rubberstamp the legal crucifixion of Doug Irwin for reporting waste in the building department. He should have gotten a medal, not a lawsuit against him at the taxpayers' expense, for his courage. But the board joined the administration in savaging him. He won in court and got a small settlement for his pain. But the board lawyers--no-bid recipients of their board appointment--got a killing, and the board got its tax-subsidized hegemony in a system that continues on the robber-baron principle executed by the administration and board. Anybody who does not toe the line that the superintendent lays down is an outcast in the administration-board locked-down system.

You are right, ma'am, that the worst result of Ms. Elia's dummying down of grades is that it diminishes students' preparedness for college or the job world because Romper Room standards in high school hobble students for the rest of their lives.

In my twenty-eight years of teaching freshman to students who came from Hillsborough County schools, I saw legions of young people who entered college without ability to structure and develop an essay and to write it literately. I spent half my time not teaching literature, the usual curriculum of freshman English, but in teaching catch-up grammar and punctuation to students who should have had these skills under their belts when they entered my classes.

Ms. Elia, by the way, can't punctuate, and she writes with the rhetorical sophistication of a 7th grader. The board lowered the terminal-degree requirement from a Ph.D. to her master's and ran a "nation-wide" ad for the job when board members already knew they would hire the inside candidate candidate Elia to continue the financial exploitation of the school money contributed by tax payers.

The board members who chose Ms. Elia above many better-qualified candidates --with Ph.Ds from distinguished institutions, experience with raising the performance of minority students, and even histories of educational publication-- soaked the taxpayers for the $35,000 the cover-their-tracks ad cost.

I wonder that parents don't rebel against this disenfranchising of their children by the public schools and why the school board does not interest itself in the ubiquitous problem.

When my son was at Plant--he's now a NASA engineer--he often tutored students in physics to help them pass their courses. I wish there were tutoring services available in problem subjects such as those cited in the Otto article of your letter that outlined the superintendents' dummying-down grade scheme so that students could have entered my college classes prepared to study literature and write about it.

Ms. Elia thrust this Romper Room scheme on teachers without consulting them just as she rammed the extra-class outrage down their throats. My inference says that Ms. Elia did this deed to make grade results look artificially better in a smoke-and-mirrors game of fooling the public about her performance as superintendent. Ms. Elia also wants Governor Crist to think well of her. She is obsessed with her public image.

The higher performance--however produced--will be false, but it will be basis for Ms. Elia's never-ending requests for even more "performance" emoluments to fatten her already bloated pay check at the taxpayers'--and in this case the students'--expense and for her false image of promoting excellence in education that she glosses over with whatever falsehoods that effort requires.

Well done, Ms. Kalbas: you have served education well with your analysis of the situation. Martin Luther did no better job when he posted the 95 theses on the cathedral at Wittenburg.

lee drury de cesare
c: Steve Otto; all board members;Governor Crist

leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com: The Lowdown on the Schools