Betsy's Page - If you missed John Stossels' special (Teacher's unions)

If you missed John Stossel's special last month about how public schools are shortchanging our children, you missed this sadly quite believable story about how hard it is for schools to fire tenured teachers. The union contracts are so strong that a teacher can do practically anything, even write emails soliciting sex from students and not get fired.
Joel Klein now presides over a calcified monopoly where it's hard to fire anyone for anything.

One New York teacher decided that one of his 16-year-old students was hot. So he sat down at a computer and sent a sexual e-mail to Cutee101.

"He admits this," said Klein. "We had the e-mail."

"You can't fire him?"

"It's almost impossible."

It's almost impossible because of the rules in the New York schools' 200-page contract with their teachers. There are so many rules that principals rarely even try to jump through all the hoops to fire a bad teacher. It took six years of expensive litigation before the teacher who wrote Cutee101 was fired. During those six years, he received more than $300,000 in salary.

"Up, down, around, we've paid him," said the chancellor. "He hasn't taught, but we've had to pay him, because that is what is required under the contract."

Hundreds of teachers the city calls incompetent, racist, or dangerous have been paid millions.

And what do they do while they get paid? They sit in rubber rooms.

They're not really made of rubber, of course. They are big, empty rooms where they store the teachers they are afraid to let near the kids. The teachers go there and sit, hang around, read magazines, and waste time. The city pays $20 million a year to house teachers in rubber rooms.
People ask what the differences are between a charter and a regular public school. Well, one of the big differences is that charters can be freed up from following certain regulations. At my school, teachers don't have tenure. In fact, I gave up tenure and took a pay cut to go work there. But it is a wonderful thing to work with colleagues who are all as dedicated to educating students as I am. Sadly, there have been some teachers that the principal has had to let go. But, we all are glad to walk down the halls and know that there isn't any "deadwood" teacher drawing a salary in any of those rooms. I couldn't say the same thing when I worked in a regular public school, even though, in North Carolina, teachers unions are not the political force that they are in some other states. But it still would take years and egregious infractions for a principal to fire a tenured teacher. Simple incompetence or a complete inability to teach was not considered a serious enough problem to warrant firing.

posted by Betsy 6:51 AM