Surely, this isn't real.
Surely, in this day and age, when good teachers seem rarer than hen's teeth, when the rights of special education students are on the forefront of educational reform, a great special education teacher wouldn't be dismissed for wearing the wrong color hat:
He swept into the desert a decade ago like Patch Adams on a renaissance kick. Next thing this Riverside County community knew, Bach and Beethoven were booming from John Maurer's special education classroom. There were Shakespeare performances, even a "Sonnet of the Day" club, and Maurer's disabled students were taking part right along with the rest of the school. To hear their parents tell it, life will never be easy for Maurer's students--but it sure was better. And then, one day last spring, Maurer wore a hat to school, the wrong kind of hat, and the whole thing fell apart...
Maurer's relationship with school administrators has dissolved into a bitter dispute that seems to have begun with his choice of head wear and continues to separate him from his special education class. The children, meanwhile, may be affected more than anyone. Not only have they been separated from their teacher, but they've been forced to change schools at least three times.
Read the whole story. It's outrageous. You know, I get letters from teachers who don't like standardized tests because they see the tests misapplied by rigid and narrowminded administrators who focus only on the test scores and not on the educational reforms themselves. Seems to me a principal who forbids his star teachers to wear beige hats falls into that category.
Joanne Jacobs discovered this story before I did.