This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 8:32 am and is filed under teacher union. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Responses to It’s hard to fire a teacher, even when they are bad
It’s hard to fire a teacher when he works in a district with incompetent administration and a school board that has obviously no ability to negotiate logic and rational into a contract.
He would have been fired in the private sector if his superiors had logged the complaints and built a case against him. However, there are many incompetent and even criminal people working in the private sector as well, if they work for inefficient management. Anyone who disagrees with this has little experience with or knowledge of the corporate world. I hear as many complaints from friends about dismissing incompetence in the private sector as I do in the public.
Teachers generally have probationary periods of three years; it’s roughly ninety days in most private and corporate sectors. There is no protection for teachers during the first three years as they are “at will” at that point. The fact that that teacher reached a level of tenure shows incredible oversight and incompetence from that administration and district.
The union will offer him a lawyer and argue for his “rights” just like an public defender will. However, I doubt they’ll stage a strike for him. If they do, the district should give the entire staff pink slips at the end of the year (as many districts have done) and start from scratch with a new labor contract.
I agree with you that school officials need to be much more aggressive about removing ineffective teachers in the first three years. I also agree that they ought to fire this guy and invite the union to strike.
The union doesn’t however get off the hook for having school boards dumb enough to agree to these contracts because often the union controls a majority of the school board.
Nevada teachers can get tenure after just one year, so long as they have 3 satisfactory teacher observations done, otherwise tenure is awarded after just 2 years – at least according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Oh yeah, it is also illegal to evaluate teachers in Nevada based on student achievement.
The flip side of this post is that it is very easy to get rid of a highly competent teacher who has skills which businesses value. Just give that whistleblower or critic classes of discipline problems and no administrative support and they leave for greener pastures.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
It’s hard to fire a teacher when he works in a district with incompetent administration and a school board that has obviously no ability to negotiate logic and rational into a contract.
He would have been fired in the private sector if his superiors had logged the complaints and built a case against him. However, there are many incompetent and even criminal people working in the private sector as well, if they work for inefficient management. Anyone who disagrees with this has little experience with or knowledge of the corporate world. I hear as many complaints from friends about dismissing incompetence in the private sector as I do in the public.
Teachers generally have probationary periods of three years; it’s roughly ninety days in most private and corporate sectors. There is no protection for teachers during the first three years as they are “at will” at that point. The fact that that teacher reached a level of tenure shows incredible oversight and incompetence from that administration and district.
The union will offer him a lawyer and argue for his “rights” just like an public defender will. However, I doubt they’ll stage a strike for him. If they do, the district should give the entire staff pink slips at the end of the year (as many districts have done) and start from scratch with a new labor contract.
Michael-
I agree with you that school officials need to be much more aggressive about removing ineffective teachers in the first three years. I also agree that they ought to fire this guy and invite the union to strike.
The union doesn’t however get off the hook for having school boards dumb enough to agree to these contracts because often the union controls a majority of the school board.
Nevada teachers can get tenure after just one year, so long as they have 3 satisfactory teacher observations done, otherwise tenure is awarded after just 2 years – at least according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Oh yeah, it is also illegal to evaluate teachers in Nevada based on student achievement.
The flip side of this post is that it is very easy to get rid of a highly competent teacher who has skills which businesses value. Just give that whistleblower or critic classes of discipline problems and no administrative support and they leave for greener pastures.