Along the same lines, Klein made another good call here:

On the eve of the new academic year, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein abruptly scrapped plans to impose a hiring freeze that would have forced principals to fill any last vacancies with unassigned teachers already in the system.

Mr. Klein said yesterday that it was more important for principals to choose their own staff than it was for the city to place potentially undesirable veteran teachers who must stay on the payroll even if no school offers them a position.

The decision to lift the freeze, just hours before it was to begin, was aimed at bolstering Mr. Klein’s position in a labor dispute over 44 unassigned assistant principals. To circumvent provisions in their contract that would force the assistant principals on principals who do not want them, Mr. Klein said he would created unneeded jobs for them, wasting as much as $5.2 million.

His stance on teachers once again allowed Mr. Klein to portray himself as a champion of autonomy and authority for principals.

City education officials said they believed most of the unassigned teachers would find jobs in the system. But Mr. Klein’s move raised at least a possibility that the city could be forced to pay the salaries of as many as 1,500 unassigned teachers, at a cost of nearly $100 million.

The hard reality is that an alarmingly high percentage of teachers are completely ineffective -- for more on this, see the first two slides of the presentation at http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Classsize&teacherpay.pdf. However, it's virtually impossible to remove even the most inept teacher, as both slide 3 and the infamous "How to Fire an Inept Teacher" chart (http://cgood.org/assets/attachments/firing_chart.pdf#search=%22how%20to%20fire%20an%20inept%20teacher%22) show. Thus, Klein is forced to choose a bad option -- but it's less bad than the alternative.

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September 2, 2006