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In an Educational Bureaucracy, It Is Hard to Weed Out Incompetence

By Ed Bagley

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 28Aug2008 Word count: 794 Viewed: 281 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Copyright © 2008 Ed Bagley

My level of being appalled rose dramatically the other day, fortunately, my blood pressure remained the same. The cause of this happening was an editorial in USA Today (7-17-08) titled the "Teacher Protection Racket".

Seems that the chancellor of New York City's school system—Joel Klein—has been busy trying to weed out incompetent teachers so the students will have more effective teachers. After a year's effort, Chancellor Klein has managed to rid the system of exactly 8 teachers among the city's 55,000 teachers. Trust me when I say that it was not an easy task. Here is why:

Each firing required an average of 25 days of hearings and 150 hours of principal time, and each firing cost the school system $225,000, or a total of $1.8 million to fire 8 teachers.

If you have ever wondered why clearly incompetent teachers are allowed to continue to teach in schools, you have just learned 3 of the reasons why. There is really little incentive to get rid of them.

Chancellor Klein has the audacity to believe that outstanding teachers are the single most important factor in turning around struggling schools. Teacher unions vehemently disagree with his assessment.

It is the unions that take an oath to defend to the death incompetent, lazy and bored teachers. Years of inept contract bargaining at the district level matched by years of effective union lobbying has produced a system where all of the power lies with the accused teacher.

In effect, protecting inept union members has become far more important than properly educating our children. So much for unions and their positive effect on our educational system. In may be an exaggeration, but we are also seeing pedophile teachers popping up like weeds in the schoolyard.

Just exactly how much protection do incompetent, illegal or out-of-control teachers need? I am so glad you asked. The answer is not nearly as much as they are getting from the unions that represent and protect them.

Are we to assume, for example, that just because pedophile teachers are horny, we are obliged to satisfy their needs in a school setting with our innocent children? I was not aware that we were educating our teachers to teach our children how to have sex with them. Incompetent teachers do not add much to the equation either.

The bottom line is that our children are not getting adequately educated by incompetent, illegal or out-of-control teachers, much less properly educated to make their way in the world.

Why is it, Merrimon Cuninggim has asked, that "the teaching profession is the only profession that has no definition for malpractice?" Merrimom Cuninggim, a minister and educator who brought a fine sense of ethics to his work, asks an excellent question.

There is one huge reason why those who would perpetuate and defend teachers in public education would actively work to destroy teachers in private education. That reason is that teacher unions will not tolerate any system that would rate or reward teachers so incompetent teachers could be more easily identified and purged from the system.

The union idea is that if there is never any accountability or responsibility for teacher actions, it then becomes more difficult to hold them to standards, or discipline them for not meeting professional standards. In other words, all teachers are equal in the eyes of the union, that is, they are all wonderful, worth defending to the death, and beyond any criticism worth mentioning.

All of this is compounded by a study that showed that teacher performance evaluations can be meaningless. In Chicago, only 3 of every 1,000 teachers get an unsatisfactory rating, and about 90% of teachers get top ratings. Do I need to even point out that Chicago is one of nation's most troubled urban districts?

And if all of this is not enough to crush our educational system under its own bureaucratic weight, there is always the card in the deck that trumps all others—the victim card. Yes, victimization is everywhere.

For incompetent, illegal or lazy teachers, to all of the support groups in the educational system that support and defend them, every teacher, everywhere that is under any hint of scrutiny seems to be a victim of some kind. No teacher is apparently responsible or accountable for anything. Welcome to the public education system in America.

Why should any teacher in America be responsible or accountable or held to a standard of performance? Some would have us believe that all educational problems, as well as virtually every event know to man—from 9-11 to global warming to pregnant girls to weak financial markets to incompetent teachers—can be easily blamed on someone else.

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