This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 24, 2010 - In his Nov. 17 opinion piece, "Superman Runs a Con," writer Peter Downs made a claim regarding research I conducted and Director Davis Guggenheim used in his motion picture "Waiting for Superman."
Downs said this of me: "He never asked any school districts how many teachers they fired in any year. All he counted were the number of teachers who appealed their firings to a state appeals board and lost. He doesn't know how often teachers get fired in Illinois or anywhere else and neither does Guggenheim."
I filed thousands of FOIAs with all 876 Illinois school districts to build my databases based on these responses as well as data collected from appeals filed with the state board of education.
But two years ago, Mr. Downs presented a convoluted theory that many tenured teachers facing possible dismissal were choosing to be fired and that neither they nor the unions that representing them were appealing.
This certainly didn't reflect what school board members, teachers and administrators in the 876 school districts I contacted had told me.
But following Mr. Downs assertion, we again contacted all 876 school districts in Illinois and found that the number of appeals and actual firings were essentially the same. We followed by posting the actual emails, letters, FOIA responses and voice messages of superintendents from across Illinois on our website. These postings can be viewed at: http://hiddenviolations.com/foiafile/.
---Scott Reeder