That's what is so outrageous about Obama and Duncan in this matter. They are trying to foist neoliberal ideas on the country.
On a somewhat similar vein, teachers all over the country had better be fucking scared about New York's "rubber rooms," for propaganda like that spewed in the New Yorker article about only incompetent teachers are fired is very effective and very much inaccurate.
Teachers are being shitcanned all over the country and tenure laws and regulations are being subverted as a way to save money on budgets. Yes, there are a few who are whistleblowers and a tiny number who really deserve to be sacked, but the vast majority of teachers have their careers destroyed because of filthy, corrupt, downright evil administrators, those people who are almost impossible to get rid of.
Remember once fired, a teacher can almost never again teach because most states and almost all public school districts require teachers reveal terminations. Since there can be hundreds of applicants for a single public school teaching job, a terminated teacher has virtually no chance of being interviewed, much less hired.
In New York it is even worse. If you are denied tenure after three years, you can have your license revoked, and you don't have to do one goddamned thing to deserve being terminated. You are an "at-will" employee, and administrators can do whatever the hell they want.
Something MUST be done to prevent this widespread abuse of the system, but if nobody knows about it, nothing can be done. Kids' lives and well-being are at stake.
More on this outrage here, including the comments section:
When Joel Klein changed how teacher salaries are paid, it made economical and administrative sense for principals to hire people with low seniority. Not only are new teachers cheaper, but without tenure they're more manipulatable and easier to terminate. What is not being reported is that higher paid veteran teachers who apply for jobs rarely get even a single interview, even when they've been rated Satisfactory their entire career and frequently enough been considered excellent educators. I have spoken to many secretaries who say their principals do not even want to see these applications, just discard them (two for the price of one, and all).
Moreover, there is no way, as Brill claims, that any ATR offered a job can "refuse" to take it. If a principal wants to hire one of these people, that person must take the job or resign. In the past couple of years, the DoE has been avoiding its contractual duty to work towards placing excessed teachers, for they rarely send people out to interview at another school as they had done in the past. Many think their passivity on this issue is a strategic maneuver, for if you want to trim the top salaries off the budget, let the ATR group grow. The PR team can then easily convince the public that it's somehow the teachers' fault they've not been placed.
These bastards found a way to get around the requirement "excessed," experienced, and tenured teachers must be placed in jobs in order to hire cheapo bimbos who will be sacked in three years and never be tenured, must less be vested in retirement. The "U" rating, which can cause a teacher to be fired, is being abused by the Klein clone sociopaths for the sole purpose of preserving the bottom line, regardless of the fact schools are NOT businesses.
The Stephen Brill article is here as well. Brill used to have a magazine devoted to journalism years ago, but it seems to me this lawyer-turned-journalist or whatever doesn't know anything about education and the absolute destruction of public education by these Enron-type clones.
No comments:
Post a Comment