A Shameful Performance

 

         A Shameful Performance

Once upon a time, there was a school district whose upper-level administrators (read that as the “County Office”) had somehow convinced themselves that the best choices for high school principals were athletic coaches, especially former head football coaches.

        I taught in such a school and soon learned as an outsider, beginning a second career at age 47, that this was a fallacy. First off, the average Phys Ed instructor (head FB coaches primary pool) knows as much about classroom instructional delivery and pedagogy as Liberace knew about rugby. And yet they continued over several decades appointing these persons to supervisory positions which required classroom evaluation of others performing a function which they, themselves, were largely incapable of doing. Fortunately, over time that myth was scotched, and principals were far more likely to have been successful classroom instructors prior to supervisory selection.

        There is a lot to be said for the idea that someone who supervises and, even more specifically, evaluates an individual should know what that job entails. When I began teaching, the principal and two vice principals. all former coaches, had never been classroom instructors. Oddly enough, none of them ever came into my classroom as an evaluator, but I got my first several annual evaluations from one of them.

        I started with this because, apparently the same ludicrous concept has taken root in Alabama, which state has sent to the US Senate a man with zero military experience but 40 years of football coaching of athletes afraid to even question him.  I’m speaking, of course, of Tommy Tuberville, who is single handedly defying both his own Party’s  leaders and the Democratic leadership by refusing to accede to more than (so far) 200 senior military officer  promotions. 

        His objection has nothing to do with their actual fitness for promotion as determined by their superiors’ evaluations and observations, but is based rather on the senator’s personal opinion re: an internal Pentagon policy related to the reproductive rights of service personnel. Tuberville has been holding these proposed military promotion nominations hostage in the Senate as part of a protest of Pentagon reproductive health policies announced earlier this year that provide additional support to service members and dependents who must travel out of state to receive an abortion.

        The individuals whose advancements are being stalled are simply collateral damage in Tuberville’s  personal vendetta against anything or anyone not white, straight, and adamantly pro-life. Lest anyone think I’m exaggerating, here is the Senator on White nationalism: “My opinion of a White nationalist, if someone wants to call them White nationalist, to me is an American.”

Now as an exercise in logic: If White nationalism is racist (and it is) then, by definition, White nationalists are racists. Period. Tuberville apparently also objects to the military’s stance against White nationalism, because it’s simply fine with him. His “boss,” Senator Mitch McConnell, disagrees, having called white nationalism “unacceptable.” Asked by CNN if he was concerned by Tuberville’s refusal to denounce it, McConnell replied, “White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in the whole country.”

        So yes, Alabama, we know you are ranked forty-first among the states in education and sending Tommy Tuberville to the US Senate goes a long way toward explaining why.