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Make Me Superintendent of Prince George's County Public Schools

If my experience alone doesn't impress you, then I present to you my Eleven Point Plan to transform the nation's 18th largest education system into the finest in the land. (That's right. My plan goes to eleven.)
Dan Ross
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Rabbinical Student

Rabbinical Student
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To the Prince George's County Board of Education:

Now that your superintendent Dr. William Hite has elected to take the head job up in my hometown, it is with grand ambition and humble clarity that I announce my candidacy to lead your fair school district. I feel that my two years as a Teach For America corps member at your very own Benjamin Stoddert Middle School make me eminently qualified to tackle this challenge. But if my experience alone doesn't impress you, then I present to you my Eleven Point Plan to transform the nation's 18th largest education system into the finest in the land. (That's right. My plan goes to eleven.)

The Eleven Point Plan for Prince George's County Public Schools
  1. I will serve pizza for lunch. Every day. No exceptions. Our kids will eat more pizza than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Why pizza, you ask? Because just last year Meat Lover's pizza was officially classified as a vegetable by an act of Congress, meaning that by law their food will be delicious and nutritious. (Michelle Obama will now light herself on fire.)

  • I'll avenge PGCPS's loss of Dr. Hite by stealing the Philadelphia School Reform Commission's plan to break up the School District of Philadelphia into "achievement networks." Except we won't call them "achievement networks." That's lame. We'll call them "excellence enclaves," because they'll do an excellent job of segregating our students into haves and have-nots.

  • I will invite private entities to manage these "excellence enclaves" by handing out Contracts to Renew Academic Promise (CRAPs). CRAPs will come in different flavors for different organizations. Religious groups will get holy CRAPs. Trucking agencies will receive a load of CRAPs. But special preference will be given to for-profit corporations, who are known to have very efficient CRAPs. On a related note, I will direct the district's pension fund to invest in private prison companies, who can expect a massive influx in volumes from the dumping of our most unprofitable students. Actually, better idea: I'll hand a CRAP right over to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)! Their share price has grown 50% over the past year, so they must be doing something right. They deserve an enormous CRAP.

  • I will fire all of the district's custodians and hire poor kids to clean up their own schools. You know that's their destiny anyways. Of course, all of their future jobs will be occupied by their future poor children, but that won't matter because we'll have plenty of available positions on the janitorial staff of Newt Gingrich's Moon Base.

  • I will stimulate small business growth by offering vouchers for families to send their children to qualifying private and religious schools. Non-public schools without enough computers, teachers, and space to accommodate their current students will need considerable capital in order to expand their enrollment. And public schools also experiencing shortages of computers, teachers, and space will obviously benefit from losing those funds.

  • I will eliminate all restrictions on class sizes and let students regulate themselves. Numerous studies have shown that class size has no impact on academic achievement. Classes will grow until they are too big to fail.

  • I will rank order our students from 1 to 125,000 based on their academic achievement. Students' families will be given the opportunity to choose their schools based on their rank. The bottom 10% of students will be fired. (And I will collect a huge dividend from the CCA.)

  • I will outlaw the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), which make our children's minds too hot for adults to handle. We need to think critically about teaching critical thinking: what if our kids start to have ideas and values that are different from our own? What if they stop valuing Snooki and JWoww?

  • I will change the district motto from "Children First" to "Teachers Suck." I don't just believe in union busting -- I believe in union bullying. I'll set an example for our kids by bullying their teachers even better than those kids in New York bullied that bus monitor. After all, those who can, bully; those who can't, suck.

  • I will reinstitute school prayer. Effective immediately upon my taking office, students won't just pray for a few minutes every morning; they will pray every five minutes for the entire day. Our children need to be reminded constantly that they live in a Christian nation and that our Founding Fathers were guided by biblical principles. In addition, if students say that they have nothing to pray about, I will make them pray that I don't go all Old Testament on their butts.

  • I will declare that the values of the mathematical constants π and e will be a number that we can all understand, 3. As a consequence, Euler's Formula, e^iπ + 1 = 0, will no longer be the most beautiful equation in all of mathematics. It will be replaced by Orwell's Formula, 2 + 2 = 5.

    • And that's my Eleven Point Plan. Now when do I start the job?

    Oh, you've decided to go a different direction? That's fine. I guess I'll just find another district to take my CRAP.

    The Eleven Point Plan outlined above does not reflect the views of the author. It does however apparently reflect the views, at various times, of 368 members of Congress, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the Boston Consulting Group, Newt Gingrich, Jan Brewer, Bobby Jindal, the Texas Republican Party, the Texas State Board of Education, the Indiana General Assembly, Mitt Romney and many others. I guess I could get behind the school prayer thing. God help us all.

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