Firing Teachers
States Need New Tenure Reforms
By Daniel Muniz

One glaring crisis in our public school system is the inability to fire incompetent teachers. Most educators are hardworking and dedicated but it is the few bad apples that are a total embarrassment to our education system. It is time for states to cut through the red tape and make it easier to get rid of them.

The root of the problem is the way that unions and their political supporters have rigged the statutes and bureaucracy for nearly all the states in the country. The unions don’t care how awful or incompetent a teacher is or even if they have been convicted of serious criminal offenses as long as the jobs are protected. This effort has made it ridiculously expensive and tortuous to remove someone who shouldn’t be in the classroom.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that confronts too many governmental agencies because employees realize that they can never lose their jobs regardless of how terrible they are. And for some people, this creates a perverted sense of invincibility because know that they can reckless and irresponsible and get away with it.
 

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Now how bad is it?

There are teachers who are still on the payroll even though they are sitting inside a jail cell after being convicted of a very serious felony. In fact, school districts have to hold disciplinary hearings inside of a prison because the educator is incarcerated and cannot leave the prison grounds.

You would think that a teacher who is locked up would have the decency to turn in his or her resignation but that just doesn’t happen because of how messed up our public school system is. These miscreant educators know full well that they will still collect a paycheck no matter what has happened to them so they fully intend to milk their school for every dime they can. It is absolutely disgusting but it is also perfectly legal.

And the process to terminate a tenured teacher’s contract is outrageously expensive. In New York City it costs a quarter of a million dollars to fire an educator even if he or she is behind bars.

According to an Associated Press news account, out of 55,000 teachers in New York City, only ten were fired at the close of the 2006-2007 school year. At $250,000 a pop, it gets expensive real fast which is why only the absolute worst are canned. That leaves a lot of people who aren’t cut out for teaching in the classroom with our children.

In the same news story, Los Angeles was doing slightly better in firing an average of 11 teachers a year out of 43,000.

Most cities are not as bad as New York City or Los Angeles but it is still very difficult and expensive to get remove these bad educators.

The first step to reform our public school system is to convince a big segment of the public that our governmental agencies have to be run like a business. The purpose of our government is to provide quality services instead guaranteeing lifetime employment. The only way to get the best services possible is to hire and keep the best people which means getting rid of the dead weight. That is a hard-nose business decision but don’t our children deserve qualified teachers instead of the slackers and the incompetent?

But more to the point, in the private sector there is a huge list of egregious infractions that will immediately get you fired. Private companies don’t tolerate bad behavior especially when it involves something illegal or dangerous. However, it doesn’t work that way with governmental employees. And that is what has made some of our public sector agencies so inefficient and unwieldy to operate.

Unfortunately, the general public has to buy into this viewpoint because the unions in a number of states wield enormous influence and political power in state legislatures. A spineless politician is not about to take on a union’s political machine unless he or she has widespread public support on this issue.

One law that every state should have is the automatic revocation of a teaching certification when an educator is convicted of any kind of sex crime. But such a statute should also include any conviction that involves incarceration. There is absolutely no sensible reason why an educator should be collecting a paycheck while he or she is sitting behind bars. This removal should be automatic and of no cost to the school district instead of the lengthy expensive process to hold disciplinary hearings to fire a teacher who is in prison; so no more of this paid leave.

However, the hardest reform to enact is giving the school districts the ability to fire the slackers and the incompetent as well as the people who provide a bad image or is a terrible role model to the their students because of poor judgment and bad decision making. Not everybody is cut out to be a teacher and the ones who don’t fit the right mold for it need to be booted out instead having a long drawn out process. That is the way the business world works and our education system should be no different.

Of course the unions are not going to sit back and watch the strength of their prestige and clout slowly erode away. As they have done before and as they are doing right now, they will vigorously fight such reforms. That is where the public has to prod our politicians and ask them what is more important; protecting jobs or having the best qualified teachers in the classroom. Too many elected officials have opted for the former but it is time for the public to push for the latter. Our kids are worth it.

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