{"id":1801,"date":"2009-03-06T09:50:27","date_gmt":"2009-03-06T14:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1801"},"modified":"2017-03-02T19:49:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T00:49:10","slug":"dr-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1801","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Evil?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I try to avoid bumping into teachers these days for fear someone will report them to the Red Plan gestapo. I&#8217;ve heard recently that a lot of them have taken to calling Duluth&#8217;s superintendent &#8220;Dr. Evil.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If that&#8217;s true things have certainly changed since the Business North story I linked to in the previous post when Frank Wanner said this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the 15 years prior to Dixon&#8217;s arrival, teachers had no voice in decision making, Wanner said. Many teachers still resent the decision of Julio Almanza, Dixon&#8217;s predecessor, to shorten the high school day to six periods. Wanner said that change, which reduced teachers&#8217; preparation time during the school day, hurt morale, robbed student learning opportunity and generated costly contract disputes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Its traditional for departing superintendents to be kicked in the tush on the way out of a school district. I liked Julio even though after seven years I&#8217;ll admit that Julio had probably reached the end of his shelf life. A few years ago it was reported that the average big city school superintendent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cgcs.org\/pdfs\/2003IndicatorFinal.pdf\">lasted less than three years <\/a>on the job although more scholarly studies add <a href=\"http:\/\/cnx.org\/content\/m14507\/latest\/\">a lot more nuance <\/a>to the issue of their longevity.<\/p>\n<p>Frank was quibbling about a difficult decision which saved some portion of what we used to call the seven period day. Under Dr. Dixon we&#8217;ve lost that remnant and a helluva lot more. Almanza looks like a saint in comparison and he never populated his administration with <em>yes men <\/em>or ducked the hard truths. Julio never lied to me either. I can&#8217;t say the same of his successor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I try to avoid bumping into teachers these days for fear someone will report them to the Red Plan gestapo. I&#8217;ve heard recently that&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20809,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions\/20809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}