Texas high-school principal fires award-winning, nationally famous journalism teacher to rein in critical student newspaper reporting

Based on the content of his tweets he seems to think the job of “principal” is the same as “head coach who runs a school in his spare time”

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What he really aspires to be is the celebrity head coach who runs a school in his spare time.

I’d also guess he runs the school’s social media accounts, considering how he gets tagged in nearly every post they make…

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So who are the people in the unattributed photograph? I doubt either one is the teacher or the principal.

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Only being critical of thinking is allowed there

When I was in junior high in the early ‘80s in Maryland, me and a few friends made some flyers for what we called the Radical Students Union (RSU). We put flyers in every teachers’ mailbox, extolling the virtues of RSU and with pithy, non-threatening phrases such as, “We know where you live!” Because we are all good students, no one ever suspected it was us and in hindsight I have no idea why we thought this was funny. Understandably, some teachers were alarmed but nothing ever came of it. If we did this now I can only begin to imagine the shitstorm that would follow.

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And the principal thought that teaching this important lesson to his students was worth becoming universally hated.

Damn. That’s some dedication.

(I prefer to believe this is true. The alternative is too depressing.)

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A tale from a more civilized age…

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People! Please! Dr. Burdett Respects the students and their ideas! (Sez so, right here on the tin.)

Some friends of mine in HS did that and the administration posted a reward for information about who wrote it.

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Of course, Texas is hardly the only place where this happens. John Carroll HS in Maryland has a strikingly similar story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3nG3yuo9w&t=39s

So who are the people in the unattributed photograph? I doubt either one is the teacher or the principal.

From the article:

Staff members of Prosper High School’s Eagle Nation Online. From left, staff writer Haley Stack, and associate editor Neha Madhira. After Prosper’s new principal censored three articles in the 2017-2018 school year, the Eagle’s adviser’s contract wasn’t renewed.
Courtesy of Neha Madhira<<

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I just got a follow-back from the journalism teacher, BTW. I think she deserves a few thousand supportive Twitter followers.

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Poor kids in this age. More and more they go to school to be the targest of armed misfits while being denied the respect of having intelligence and daring to use it. Just for the hell of it, lets guess the principals voting record.

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Ah, but the rot was setting in even then. I’m (from a high school standpoint) Class of '82, and while it had yet to become a buzzword, my high school was already “zero tolerance” even then, to the point of being a closed campus; students were not allowed to leave the campus for anything but emergencies or traveling to one of the other campuses. No, you couldn’t even go out for lunch.

As I see it, it was a classic example of the Boomers* cracking down on the very perks they enjoyed.

* In my own view, anyone too young to vote in 1980 doesn’t qualify as a Boomer, regardless of what the pundits might say.

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I’m am getting fed up with these well-dressed peckerwood mouth breathers.

1st thought: “Dallas. Unsurprising.” The same quality of intellect was at work in arresting a student who attempted to pay for lunch with a two dollar bill (Gosh! It just had to be counterfeit!).

The up side: Lori Oglesbee-Petter will have no shortage of job offers. John Burdett’s career just stalled for his bringing negative national attention to the DFW primary school system.

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He must be scrubbing his Twitter. I looked at his page all the way back to mid-Feb. and it’s just him 99.9% of the time. All gold stars and moonbeams. There is literally NO harsh or contentious subject matter anywhere.

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Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but that sounds like you’re describing us in Denton, Class of '96 and '97. Our literary magazine was Seeking the Muse, and the zine was Seeking Abuse. We did get a little cross-ways with our principal, but nothing too serious. He leaned on me very gently to stop passing the zine out on campus, we got to feel subversive, everybody won.

That was a very cool time to grow up in Denton.

So you anonymously turn in the vice-principal and, perhaps, the chair of the school board.

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Mr. Burdett will hopefully find himself out of a job fairly soon…this asshole doesn’t belong anywhere near a school where he can influence kiids. I’d love to see this teacher win a nice big lawsuit for unjust termination.

Texas and critical thinking? Guess not…