I can tell you what they said: He’s a genius, it’s a-okay for him to sit on the board of VHS while steering JCPS business its way, it’s fine for him to miss every single graduation in the district for a family vacation (with Natalie Stiglitz, not his actual family), it’s fine for him to ignore every teacher in the district.

But I never got on the career ladder – the one that leads farther and farther from the classroom and upward and onward in pay and perks. There are many people who enter teaching with the intention of touching down a couple of years in the classroom, then moving on to department head, dean, principal, and then to Central Office, where you never have to see kids at all.

Once you get there, the vision of education becomes skewed and self-serving. Education becomes a third-world country to be used and exploited, its students statistics.

In such a world-view, taking money and pleasure is easy. You feel you’re in a business, not in a service. Textbook companies, test suppliers, grant makers, education professors become the people you deal with. They become the ‘real world.’

Teachers – real ones, good ones, lost ones, deserving ones, potentially great ones, ones with a few great ideas – seldom figure in this world. And of course, it is teachers – and students themselves – who know more and could help more. But the circle-jerk of educrats listens only to itself.

When I was teaching, I helped develop a program for kids who wanted to go into teaching. Central Office stepped in. The University of Rochester stepped in. The Ford Foundation stepped in. A local labor organization stepped in. Our group got flown to Houston twice. We stayed at nice hotels, ate great meals on an expense account. It was fun.

But it didn’t accomplish much. When I came back, I finally said to my department head, a woman I really respected, that I felt like a ho, and I wouldn’t do it any more . She really couldn’t understand. She went on junkets all the time, and felt entitled.

Berman lives in that world. I’m sure the complaints he hears now fall on deaf ears, the way complaints about the bankers who screwed the country fall on their deaf ears.

It ain’t Kentucky this time, folks. It’s corporate culture.

Anyway, how about just simply starting a letter-writing campaign to our _elected_ school board and ask them this simple question: “Why do you folks insist on continually hiring arrogant, corrupt individuals for the position of Superintendent?”

Berman misses a lot more days than those Louisville kids who are counted against AYP (Average Yearly Progress) in the asinine NCLB scorecard. And the kids might really be ill or too tired and hungry most of the time (while Shellie shuttles around Cape Town, etc., in gleeful bliss on the public dole). Wonder if he has shared stories with Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Been to Argentina lately, Shellie?