Valerie Strauss: Why Obama, Duncan should have kept quiet about Rhode Island teachers

Lo and behold, several months after every teacher at a low-performing Rhode Island high school was fired so the school could get a fresh start, and after Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised the firings as an act of “courage,” and after President Obama declared that the firings showed a “sense of accountability,” well, after all of that, the teachers have been rehired.

In the end, officials in the Central Falls School District decided that firing everybody at Central Falls High School wasn’t the best way to reform the school and lift student achievement. After months of tough negotiations, they reached an agreement with the teachers union over the weekend.

“We’ve had 3 1/2 months of misery and mounting distrust,” said veteran counselor George McLaughlin, whose wife also works at the school and also was in line to lose her job. “We’ve only lived on hope.... We may say at the end of this that there is a god after all.”

High school senior Valerie Florez, who is set to graduate June 11, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that rehiring the teachers was a good idea.