[quote=eavesdropper]
Captcha, what, precisely, do you mean by “you’ll get people like Ms. DeRegnaucourt”? What leads you to believe that she is unqualified for her position? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely curious.
[/quote]
I do believe that she meets formal requirements. Formally, she was likely qualified to ‘teach’ at her son’s school when the son was 6 and she was a 29 years old high school graduate who missed a lot of school and did not know that negative numbers exist outside of her checking account balance.
Ms. DeRegnaucourt went back to school when she was 29. She is 47 and she has been teaching high level math for 13 years. So, she started teaching high level math 5 years after she was introduced to negative numbers. Unless your talent matches Ramanujan’s you cannot move from finger-counting to teaching math to teenagers with 10 years of math education behind them.
Weren’t you the one who was troubled by the lack of expertise in the decision making process at the highest levels of our government? I find this to be similar – you have people with good intentions and insufficient skills who were told that good intentions and strong will compensate for the lack of expertise.
I don’t question Ms. DeRegnaucourt’s good intentions (I’m not convinced about that either) and her ‘charge the mountain’ attitude (ignorance?), but I don’t think her departure is a huge loss to the system. I think she is the product of that system and generally matches the qualities (poor?) of the system that produced her.
My TSA comment was the result of my disdain for TSA rules and procedures. I don’t think that throwing more money at the problem will fix anything. There was an interesting article in WSJ that was picked up by Slashdot earlier today and some of the comments there are possibly more interesting than the article itself.