This "courageous" action will accomplish nothing productive and may have a negative impact on RI's education in the end. Teachers need to teach and they need to teach well, but there are hundreds of factors that affect a student's education that are entirely out of a teacher's control, and even more so in some of these low economic districts. If the school needed an overhaul, it should not have been with across-the-board eradication of all faculty, removing who knows how many teachers and administrators valiantly battling against everything stacked against them.

Teachers are there to educate, but they are not responsible for social work or parenting (even if many teachers take up that responsibility since no one else will). They certainly are not responsible for the student's own obligations to learning. To hold them accountable for all of those factors into an education is a grave injustice.

I've been in schools (As a student and as an observer) nearly all my life (I began preschool at around 3 yrs old). Nearly every failure, every lack of excellence has been my own doing. I can count on one hand the number of truly poor teachers I have had (I'm from Arizona, 49/50 in the country for education), and only one truly did not belong in front of a classroom (she was bat friggin' brain fried).

A majority of those I knew that were failing were not failing because the teachers were not teaching. They were limited by their own laziness, their own ambitions, their own capacities and personal issues (social and health related). Perhaps better teaching would have enabled them to excel, but their Ds and Fs were not the teacher's doing. It was their extracurricular pressures and their own behavior.

If the government wants teachers to be better, raise the bar for their certifications; don't exterminate entire schools for socioeconimc and parental factors and their student's failings. The guillotine did not purge ineptitude and corruption from France and will not purge a school district.