Tea Party darling Jim DeMint, a Republican senator from South Carolina, is taking heat for comments he made at a recent appearance: that sexually active single women and openly gay men and women shouldn’t be permitted to teach.
In this CNN blog, a spokesman for the senator says that the senator meant that elected school boards should be allowed to follow their own principles in choosing whom they hire for teaching jobs.
Forgetting for a moment all the political baggage: From a purely pragmatic point of view, would most school boards want to bar or dismiss a good portion of their current teaching force? My hunch is no, regardless of where members stand politically on these issues.
As a colleague of mine said acerbically, DeMint’s idea could be subtitled: “How to create a teacher shortage in two easy steps.”