rebuttal?

[crs]

I'm looking for an informed, even-handed rebuttal of this paragraph: There are countless dedicated public school teachers in our nation. Guggenheim made a doc in 1999 focusing on them. But educators and the teachers themselves acknowledge that schools have teachers who are not merely incompetent, but even refuse to teach. Protected by the tenure

Comments

[gmpe]

Don't have facts to refute. In my experience, these failing teachers exist. I have also seen MANY incredible teachers not have their contracts renewed past three year so that they don't get tenure. The tenure system in public education is broken, and the teachers union as a political body is awful. (I know that the collective bargaining power is actually useful here, because as a society we really love to screw over teachers on pay, working conditions, etc. But there HAS to be a better way.)

[ocschwar]

Dude. New York City. Rubber rooms. Not pretty.

[nathanw]

My impression of the "rubber room" situation is that that had more to do with a failure on the part of the administration to bother to run the process in the system, not that it was clearly difficult to get bad people gone.

[ocschwar]

Time is money. "Bothering" to run the process means devoting the money. If the rubber room is cheaper, then that's the way to go.

[ocschwar]

Here's a flowchart of the process to fire a teacher in NYC:
http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf

Yes, it's from Reason magazine, but it looks like the got the facts correct.

[desireearmfeldt]

No data (though I'm in education), except that yes, there's a tenure system, and this reads like hyperbole. Consider that there are some Tenants From Hell that landlords would love to evict -- but that doesn't mean all or most tenants suck. Same with teachers; presumably a few of them suck, because a few of anything you care to name will suck. (I have no anecdotes supporting "refuse to teach" -- the examples of less-than-stellar teaching I'm familiar with are nowhere near that bad, and mostly not due to teachers not wanting to do their jobs.)

But it is a fact that the tenure system is a Big Issue Under Debate these days.

[lemurtanis]

Have emailed my mother, who spent 19 years in the FL public school system before becoming a professor of special education.

[srakkt]

what is most interesting to me thus far are the vitriolic reactions to this piece from either point of view, without much content and only spite for tone.

I guess it's an emotionally charged matter.

[crs]

Yeah, you should see my facebook feed, too. Or maybe you're referring to that...

At least one person I was hoping would be able to say "oh yeah, that's a standard charge brought by the anti-union forces, here's the blah blah union's webpage with the skinny on why that's wrong" came up with "omg you hate unions!" as their response.

[srakkt]

Yeah, that's mostly what I was talking about. Sorry you've found yourself in the middle of that.

[jered]

I think there's the unfortunate problem that I can't think of any good press around unions in recent memory. The top stories I can think of are 1) Boston FD not allowing licensed mechanics to service their trucks, leading to deaths, 2) Boston PD suing to allow fraudulent timecards, and 3) Maine workers lobbying for a law against "smart meters" because it would put a bunch of telephone sanitizers, er, meter readers out of a job.

I understand the historical importance of unions, but I've yet to see a story in the past 5 years that hasn't just been an example of them fostering greed, corruption, and the ongoing lack of competitiveness of US business...