by David Safier
As a teacher and good union man for my 30-plus year tenure, the one thing that always made me wince was when the union went to the mat to save the jobs of teachers who were, in a word, lousy. The union always said it was protecting those teachers so the rest of us kept our rights. I swallowed hard and went on with my teaching.
Now Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is looking at changing the worst trait of teachers' unions: defending the teacher who should not be in the classroom.
Responding to criticism that tenure gives even poor teachers a job for life, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced a plan Thursday to overhaul how teachers are evaluated and dismissed.
It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.
This is not capitulation to the union bashers. To the contrary, it takes away one of their most effective ways to say teachers' unions don't care about our children.
Threading this needle — preserving vital teacher protections while making it possible to get rid of bad teachers — is more difficult than it sounds and will lead to all kinds of problems, but it's a move in the right direction. Protect teacher tenure? Yes. Use it to shield bad teachers? No.
My estimate is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of teachers just don't have what it takes. Another 10-25% are gifted teachers. The rest are on the continuum from more-or-less-adequate to quite good. If we can get rid of some of those bottom 10%-ers, that's great. To raise the rest of the teacher population to higher levels of excellence, we need to attract more gifted people into the profession, not put a boot on the neck of those who are doing their damndest. To do that, we need better wages, better teaching conditions and a greater national respect for the often selfless, always difficult, ever important job teachers do for our children every day they walk into the classroom.