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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (158562)

8/5/2013 12:56:15 AM

From: Paul V.

Respond to of 224858

Currently, all teachers are elligible for tenure after five years on the job, which makes it difficult for school adminstrators to hire, fire, and reward performance.

Under the new plan, top performers will be offered four year contracts, while others will be on one or two year contracts.

longnshort, the only reason that an incompetent teacher or employee in the private sector can't be fired is because of an incompetent administrator or board of education who does not have the b_lls, to terminate an employee.

As a union organizer I had two cases where the administration, and/or the Board of education protected a child molester of students because the Board and administrator did not want the adverse publicity within the community. The Board and administration gave the tenured teacher a positive letter of recommendation to retire if he turned in his resignation. My response, give the teacher due process, fire him and get him out of the profession. The teacher took the recommendation, resigned, and went to another state.

Another teacher, a shop tenure teacher was cleaning out "oil drums," with lighted rags within the shop enclosure. The administration finally gave him a hearing and terminated the teacher for being insubordinate, a lower legal standard than incompetency.

There is no excuse for having an incompetent administrator within a district, one that should know how to terminate non-tenure or tenure teachers. I know, and I taught the process of terminating less than satisfactory teachers and other administrators in both the schools of education and business at the university level. Additionally, I always preferred a bargaining contract. It provided the do's and don'ts. Again the lack of administrators or Board's of Education who bargained weak "management rights clauses," or exclusion clause were asking for trouble. I have been amazed at the lack of knowledge of management in the public and private sectors when it comes to the area of "labor and managerial relations." I teaching at the university level I used a large amount of class time in role playing and using case studies to make a point and give students labor relation experiences.

First, you only hire the best and the brightest and pay them accordingly. Second, you never place an in-effective teacher on tenure. Three or five years probation with administrative evaluations will give the administration, if the administration is doing their job, sufficient time to know the qualities of teachers performance.

The reason that tenure came into existence in the first place was to prevent or get rid of the implementation of a patronage system to hire, or maintain one of the communities political allies, family members, etc. or to reduce their more costly experienced staff. I can speak from experience because as a principal I had some pressure from some board members to terminate some very effective experienced teachers who were earning a reasonably good salary, and replace them with some less skilled potential teachers who would earn less salary and had a distant relationship to someone in the community. This example is more true in the smaller districts.