Dusty,
Hello, conservatives have been screaming about union teachers and tenure for decades.

For every bad teacher, there are terrible administrators who would stick it to teachers even more w/o the union to protect them. Yes, there are terrible teachers, but it's the centralized bureaucratic system that I think really sucks. It's all a political shell game now, where the shitty teachers are gathered together in shitty schools, and the good teachers are farmed out to the schools with vocal parents and political clout.

The reality is for me, anyway, that it's the people at the tippy top of these systems who get richer and the ones at the bottom (like the teachers themselves) who get relatively little. For publicity's sake, though, the fat cats would like you to be angry at the little guy so you don't notice who's really to blame.

That said, yeah, these "rubber rooms" are nuts. I once saw a teacher push a 2nd grader (who happened to be retarded AND a hemophiliac) to the floor in the principal's office, and she got suspended for 3 days. Not fired, because they were afraid she'd sue. It's so absurd/sad/horrifying it's almost funny for me to type it, but she was an awful, awful teacher and everyone knew it. However, this was a ghetto school and they would have had great difficulty dealing with any kind of trouble from the district office. They already had enough problems.

-This from a woman who just posted a conjoined twin country music video. Go figure.

Last edited by icangetyouatoe (2013-07-02 03:11:24)

I just want to be able to fire the bad apples using the standard methods of bad performance reviews or violation of the rules.  The good ones will rise like cream and we just shit can the others.

Emmeran wrote:

phreddy wrote:

I just want to be able to fire the bad apples using the standard methods of bad performance reviews or violation of the rules.  The good ones will rise like cream and we just shit can the others.

I generally agree but on the other hand I've known far too many parents; fairness and justice is not necessarily a guideline for them...

Pretty much for any boss you work for.  You just learn to deal with it or you're down the road.

phreddy wrote:

I just want to be able to fire the bad apples using the standard methods of bad performance reviews or violation of the rules.  The good ones will rise like cream and we just shit can the others.

Good luck. You try to even discuss the possibility of using student performance to even publish teacher-by-teacher comparisons and the pitchforks and torches come out down at the union hall.

Disclosure: My wife is a teacher at a charter school. They pay 25% less than the county, don't get any financial support, don't have a single teacher's aide in the whole K-8 school and work the teachers a minimum of 8 hours a day, but at least she doesn't have to work with time killers or just-enough-to-get-by teachers. They just fired the bottom 10% of the teachers, school-wide, and had 20 applications for every slot within 3 days.