Posted on 12/21/2005 5:06:44 PM PST by Coleus
If anyone doubts that it's hard to fire an incompetent school teacher in Illinois, now there are statistics to prove it.
Only two teachers a year, on average, get fired for incompetence, according to an investigative series published this week by a Downstate newspaper chain. Five more teachers get fired for misconduct.
That's out of 95,500 tenured educators.
It would be nice to believe all teachers are hard-working, competent and dedicated to children. Most educators fit that description, but not all. As in every profession, teaching has wormy apples too.
The Illinois tenure system was created 64 years ago, ostensibly to protect veteran educators against political reprisal by their bosses. Today, though, tenure seems to protect only mediocrity. Despite changes in law over the years to raise accountability standards, "it remains almost impossible to fire a tenured teacher," reporter Scott Reeder wrote in the investigation for the Small Newspaper Group.
Reeder, who writes for papers in Moline, Rock Island, Kankakee and Ottawa, obtained tenure data by filing about 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Illinois State Board of Education and 876 school districts.
Most districts don't even bother trying to dismiss underperforming teachers, according to the investigation. Only 7 percent of school districts made an attempt to fire a teacher in the last 18 years, and only two-thirds of those districts were successful. It costs on average $100,000 to go through the bureaucratic maze of firing a teacher. If a hearing officer finds a single mistake on any of the dozens of forms required, he's likely to toss the case.
Cash-strapped districts would rather wait for a bad teacher to retire. Some districts secretly arrange to pay a teacher handsomely to leave, Reeder found.
Reeder calculated that changes in state tenure law prompted more than 2.5 million hours
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Hunger is an incredible motivator... ;-)
More proof that the NEA has nothing to do with education and only about teacher's jobs.
Union thuggery. It's a lot like Islam in many ways.
I believe it. Check my tagline.
Some are hungry (under paid), many in my area are over paid.
School Salary Database - The Champion - Teacher Salary Database
http://www.thechampion.org/teacher/cgi-bin/teacher.pl
In other words, the "hearing officer" was covering for the accused. I would say that that's the source of a lot of the trouble, not tenure itself. (Not meaning to defend tenure, just pointing out an important problem.)
"More proof that the NEA has nothing to do with education and only about teacher's jobs."
I think that's why it's a teacher's union and not an educational institution.
No one has the right to expect more than mediocrity, not in any profession, but especially in teachers. The training is not arduous enough, in part because new teachers are left to sink and swim with the same class load as more experienced teachers. Rather than give green teachers the support they need, most administrators just get rid of those who are failing rather than train them.
Tenure is basically a right of due process. Most cases where poor teachers are not removed arise from the failure of administration to do the necessary paperwork.
According to the article, doing the necessary paperwork is so close to impossible that most don't even bother to try.
Your story is plausible, but not completely believable.
You don't know how schools actually operate. BY and large there is practically no OJTand very light supervision in a public school. Ask any teachers and they will agree that most "inservice" training deals mainly with educational fads rather than demonstrations of practical classroom techniques. By and large school administrators prefer to leave teachers alone in classrooms. This works fine if the teacher has great native ability; poorly if he/she does not. In part this is because teachers prize autonomy so much; in part it is because few principals are themselves high skilled instructors and there is no formal method by which strong teachers can "mentor" new/struggling teachers.
Your point, while possibly thoughtful and even meaningful, is completely irrelevant to the discussion of tenure and the onerous paperwork associated with getting rid of teachers who do bad things like impregnating students.
Merry Christmas.
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