A liberal parent activist in Chicago, in an article on The Huffington Post, bashes Gov. Walker and defends teachers unions, yet REALLY bashes the insane system that protects lousy teachers (doesn't she understand that it's the unions who fight to maintain such laws?!):

it is maddeningly unclear why principals cannot easily remove the poorest-performing teachers from their schools, a fact I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Eight years ago, when our group of mommy reformers first set foot in Nettelhorst, our neighborhood's underperforming and underutilized public elementary school, some teachers walked the hallways muttering obscenities, and one even had a restraining order against her for hitting students. I'm not saying these folks didn't love their craft, or that maybe, once upon a time, they were even decent educators, but by any reasonable standard, they didn't belong in any classroom, my kid's or anybody else's. We knew who shouldn't be there, the principal knew it, the students sure knew it, and so did all the other teachers. The stoic union investigators dispatched from central office even seemed to know it, too.

We didn't have time to sit around waiting for a Kafkaesque lumbering bureaucracy to self-correct. Our principal gave the curriculum team carte blanche to review curriculum and financial plans, weigh-in on hiring decisions, and most importantly, access to document teaching styles. Funny thing happened: with all those pesky parents roaming the halls and peeking into classrooms, within two years of our reform movement, almost every single ineffective teacher left Nettelhorst, voluntarily.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take too many disgruntled teachers to contaminate a staff. When the most negative forces left, the school's extremely toxic teaching climate improved dramatically. Test scores tripled across every demographic. My kids, who started at Nettelhorst in preschool, are now in fourth and sixth grade, and I'd put their education — one without any gifted program, selective enrollment or tracking system — on par with any private school in the country. Our teachers are that good.

While we can all cheer the parental pressures that helped to transform my little neighborhood school, and celebrate the extraordinary, award-winning teaching that's happening on the corner of Melrose and Broadway, the question still remains: In what backwards universe could adults allow this deplorable situation to fester? What about all those public school kids who don't have hyper-involved parents advocating for them, day in and day out?

In nearly every profession, job performance is reviewed annually, and individual excellence is recognized and rewarded. In Chicago, however, most teachers receive lifetime tenure after working just four years with "satisfactory" performance, a rubber-stamp rating that's given out like PEZ. Imagine running a business with tenured employees who only need to demonstrate "competence." Imagine a system that makes it nearly impossible to remove individuals who fall short of expectations. What would your workplace climate feel like? And, what kind of product would you produce?

Let's be clear: I love, love, l-o-v-e teachers.

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If Gov. Walker Thinks Wisconsin's Illinois, Dream On

Jacqueline Edelberg
www.huffingtonpost.com/jacqueline-edelberg/if-gov-walker-thinks-illi_b_834814.html