The Education Wars

Asshole principals in NYC defy union orders and orders to fill vacancies with overaged or excessed teachers because they want to hire cheapo bimbos instead.

Time to fire these bastards.

With the teachers’ contract up for renewal this fall, Mr. Klein said he would push for a limit on how long teachers could stay in the reserve pool before they could be laid off. But an arbitration board has rejected such a limit.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that the Education Department had not made a great enough effort to place teachers and that Mr. Klein had unfairly maligned them, making it even harder for them to find jobs. And, Mr. Mulgrew said, principals are reluctant to take on their higher salaries.

...

Several principals — who did not want their names published for fear of angering the administration or the teachers’ union — said they were circumventing the restrictions by offering new teachers jobs as long-term substitutes or hiring them as specialized teachers but placing them in regular classrooms. Some said they planned to eliminate open positions from their budgets rather than take on teachers they considered undesirable, and others said they were holding out in the hope that Mr. Klein would lift the restrictions.

I wouldn't want my name published either if I were defying orders. "Poor performing" schools is just another political excuse to get rid of more experienced teachers in favor of the bimbos.

This incident should illustrate to all the world what is going on in school districts throughout the country.

The Education Wars

With despots like Joel I. Klein running NYC schools, it is little wonder teachers have no input at all.

They don't have any real input at all, regardless of school district.
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Yep, termination meetings are interesting, but I am surprised anybody would be surprised these are taped. Hell, my sham arbitration hearing was taped; however, I was not allowed to tape the "investigatory hearing." What a goddamned joke. If these people didn't have anything to hide, they wouldn't mind being taped.

What IS unusual is that a media person was allowed in. Usually these meetings are closed to the public. That's why there is so much abuse and false termination of teachers--there is no accountability.

You hear an awful lot about how hard it is to terminate a tenured teacher and how much it costs. You only get the horror stories from the perspective of the anti-tenure crowd. What is often neglected is the issue of why a school system would choose to take a route to terminate in spite of the costs. The David Pakter case is a prime exhibit. I dropped in on David's 3020a hearing yesterday. You could write a book.

The reason they do is because they have unlimited funds to dispose of a teacher, just as they did with me. Never mind they knew in my case they had no case and knew they were caught when they realized I wasn't faking any illness at all, and hiring the lawyers and arbitrator would cost tens of thousands of dollars; it was taxpayer money, there is no bottom line to worry about, unlike business, so why NOT get rid of a "troublesome" teacher?