Warehousing Teachers in Rubber Rooms

Stossel with an excellent Op Ed in last week's NY Sun, highlighting some of the issues that he raised in his 20/20 piece, Stupid in America:

Joel Klein once won fame as a fighter of monopolies. He worked for the federal government, and his most famous foe was Microsoft. Now he runs a monopoly of his own: the New York City public schools. It's even more arrogant than Microsoft, because its customers have even less choice.

Joel Klein now presides over a calcified monopoly where it's hard to fire anyone for anything.

One New York teacher decided that one of his 16-year-old students was hot. So he sat down at a computer and sent a sexual e-mail to Cutee101.

"He admits this," said Klein. "We had the email."

"You can't fire him?"

"It's almost impossible."

It's almost impossible because of the rules in the New York schools' 200-page contract with their teachers. There are so many rules that principals rarely even try to jump through all the hoops to fire a bad teacher. It took six years of expensive litigation before the teacher who wrote Cutee101 was fired. During those six years, he received more than $300,000 in salary.

"Up, down, around, we've paid him," said the chancellor. "He hasn't taught, but we've had to pay him, because that is what is required under the contract."

Hundreds of teachers the city calls incompetent, racist, or dangerous have been paid millions.

And what do they do while they get paid? They sit in rubber rooms.

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Warehousing Teachers in Rubber Rooms

BY JOHN STOSSEL - JFS Productions Inc.
February 16, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27753

Bosses, have I got an idea for you: Don't pay your best employees more, don't ease out your least productive workers, and for crying out loud, never fire anyone, not even for the most blatant misconduct on the job.

It works for the public schools, doesn't it?

Actually, it doesn't, but since they're government monopolies, they don't care. They never go out of business. They just keep doing what they're doing, year after year, churning out class after class of students handicapped by a poor education.

Don't get me wrong - not all public school teachers are bad. Many are talented and passionate, even heroic. Many turn down better paying jobs because they want to help kids learn. But working hard for public-school students has to be its own reward, because a lazy teacher is paid just as much as a good one - more if he has seniority...