Removing Bad Teachers

Boy, does this have the teachers unions fired up. In New York City, the Bloomberg administration is beginning its drive to remove lousy teachers. The whole premise of this is complete BS because if a teacher is bad…why can’t you just fire them? Oh, wait that’s right…the teachers unions…the most powerful unions in America.

So now in New York City, the government is being forced to hire teams of lawyers and consultants to help principals build cases against teachers. Do you hear this folks? Lawyers? Cases? They say the plan will cost $1 million a year. Yeah, right.

Schools Chancellor Joe Klein says that “the disciplinary system for tenured teachers is so time-consuming and burdensome that what is already a stressful task becomes so onerous that relatively few principals are willing to tackle it. As a result, in a typical year only about one-hundredth of 1 percent of tenured teachers are removed for ineffective performance.”

And why is the situation so terrible? Again, because of the United Federation of Teachers. They call the lawyers a “teacher gotcha unit” and they find it “disgusting” that the Education Department would issue such a memo. Here’s the mentality of these unions, folks: “We’ve always been concerned that the first thing that would happen after somebody put out progress reports would be principals would go after teachers.…Basically, it’s signaling to principals that rather than working to support teachers, the school system is going to give you a way to try to get rid of teachers.”

Now would be a good time to remind you of a study that came out of Harvard University about 10 or so years ago. The task was to come up with the best quick fix for our education problems in this country. The solution? Reduce the powers of the teacher’s unions. Thus far…nothing has been done. Teacher’s unions, by the way, make over 95% of all campaign contributions to Democrats.