In this you’re wrong. While it may be technically true that there’s a means for firing teachers, in practice it’s virtually impossible. The Atlantic ran a big article last month by Joel Klein, head of New york City’s public schools for eight years, who said this:
It is not incompetent administration that makes it hard to fire incompetent teachers. It’s a deliberate goal of the unions to make it hard to fire incompetent teachers.
You’re not getting what I’m saying. Of course the teacher-advocacy organization is going to make it hard to fire their members. Frankly I don’t see that as a problem, any more than I see it as a problem for defense lawyers to make it hard to convict their clients. They’re advocates, not arbiters. The problem is that administration knuckles under. Given that I’m blaming the administration for their incompetence, an administrator’s complaint about his inability to do his job is hardly convincing. “Oh, no, the union won’t agree to fire a child molestor!” Guess what: they don’t HAVE to agree. You’re the boss; fire the child molestor anyway. If you’re so scared of the union that you’re not willing to risk a confrontation over firing a pedophile, you need to find a new job.
That’s fine, ITR Champion. You’re only one person. Other people either don’t know about tech, or don’t care about tech, and most would side with the techies. I’ll admit, learning to do what machines can already do would be useful, in a post-apocalyptic Earth. It sounds to me like you’re counting on some really big shit hitting a really big fan, and the world being brought near the brink of destruction. Me? I don’t think it will happen, or that if it does, some very smart people will get the problems locked down quickly, with minimal damage to humanity and the planet. And don’t bring up the Great Recession as an example of shit hitting the fan. In the grand scheme of things, that was really just a tiny fart. You seem like a survivalist wackjob.
Except, again, the unions fight tooth and nail over any firing. And the unions have the ability to raise money to influence elections, which ought to be illegal.
And frankly, unions backing PEDOPHILE teachers is unacceptable.
Comparing unions to trial lawyers (wow, what a backhanded insult, really) is kind of the problem. The Unions SHOULD be about improving education. If one of their members is part of the problem, they should either straighten him out or get rid of him with little prompting from administration.
“Well, he paid his dues. So what if he fondled that kid?”
And you wonder why guys like Walker and Christy get elected?
On this, you’re right. So should corporations be banned from political contributions, correct? Hello? Is anyone there?
Did the opponents in the states outside of New York run on a “protect the pedophiles in NYC school” platform? If not, and those guys really DID win because of pedophiles in NYC schools, then you will have to explain how this recreational outrage story in a different state determined those elections.
Mind you, I don’t doubt that there is a connection. I know how these recreational outrage stories are cherry picked, misrepresented, and milked by the right wing pundits to keep their followers in a constant state of mindless outrage so they’ll go vote against their own interests.
I’d personally have no problem with that, but the Teacher’s unions are a special case. With a corporation, if I don’t like the politics it supports, I have the option of not buying their products.
They work for US, we don’t work for them. If they are buying influence on our dime, yeah, I think we need to be worried about that.
And if the result is to absolve themselves from any accountability or standard in the job they do, that we are paying for, then we should be downright angry.
If the Teacher Unions were out there policing their own, which is what a good union should do, I’d have no problem with them. They should want only good teachers. They shouldn’t want pedophile teachers or teachers with substance abuse problems or teachers who don’t give a flip.
I grew up in a union household. Unions should mean, “our people are the best, if you hire one of us, you get someone who knows what he is doing.” It should not mean, “Heck, he paid his dues, and you’re stuck with him no matter how much of a fugnut he is.”
I think there are a lot of BS outrage issues the GOP uses. Abortion and Gay marriage are the top two on my list, and you won’t hear me toeing the right wing line on them.
This isn’t one of them, though. People should be angry about this, especially parents. Yes, the pedophile teacher collecting $97,000 a year for 14 years to do no work because the unions have made him impossible to fire is an extraordinary case. But it should upset people because deep down, they know that if this guy is the high water mark, below him are teachers who are really just incompetant, but heck, if you can’t fire this guy, you just have to take it with the mundane burnout teacher who stopped caring a long time ago and is just marking time to his pension.
Should they fight any firing? Sure. Should the administration fire a pedophile? Absolutely. When the union fights a firing, they’re doing their job. When administration fails to fire a pedophile, they’re failing to do their job.
They are, for the most part, but they shouldn’t be: they should be about advancing the interests of their members. If you want NEA to be more like a state medical board, advancing the profession instead of advocating for its members, then give them more power, not less.
You think that comparing unions to trial lawyers is a backhanded insult? Serious question: why do you hate America (and, more specifically, the sixth amendment)?
No, when a union fights to keep a pedophile priest on the job, they are harming the children, either by exposing them to this creep or by wasting resources to keep him in a rubber room.
It is not a union’s job to fight every firing. They should evaluate it on a case by case basis, and pick who actually deserves to be fought for. I have no problem with the union backing a teacher who is being fired or demoted because they have a personality conflict with an egomanical principal. I have a HUGE problem with protecting criminal and incompetant teachers who the system would be better off without.
They haven’t shown themselves to be responsible with the power they’ve been given, that isn’t a case for giving them more.
Hey, I don’t deny they serve a function, but so does a cockroach. I’ll still splat one if I find it in my kitchen.
I guess I have a real problem with someone who tries to get a mass murderer off on a technicality, knowing he did it.
I can’t find a story that doesn’t link back to the New York Post article (eye roll), so at best I’d call this “pedophile in a rubber room” a story about which I have unanswered questions.
But accepting it at face value, it’s the king of thing you can “be mad” about (fat lot of good it will do you), but its use is to foment blanket outrage over public education and teachers’ unions. This guy is the welfare mom in her Cadillac, Willie Horton, and the little girl who climbed into Bush’s lap and said “pweeze keep me safe fwom the tewwowists, Mistaw Buff.” It’s not necessarily representative of widespread issues, but it’s not supposed to lead to discussing rare problems and specific solutions. It’s a pick up your pitchfork story.
If only the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had the foresight to see what college sophomores in 200 years would “have a real problem with.”
Guy, are you trying to imply I’m a college sophmore? Like my supposed youth would somehow invalidate my concerns.
For the record, I’m 49, a veteran, I’ve been working since I was 16, and yeah, I have a real problem with sharing my streets with dangerous sociopaths who are out there because we seem unable to deal with them.
Frankly, if you wanted to go back to 1787 justice, most criminals were hanged when they were caught. Not just the murderers, they hanged horse theives and rapists as well. The whole notion of locking the sociopaths up with other sociopaths, providing them with a weight room to bulk up, giving them law libraries so they can clog up the courts with petty lawsuits, and then letting them out because we ran out of money to keep them locked up… that’s a relatively recent thing.
So we should only talk about numbers when discussing the issue, and not the problems that underly those bad numbers, is this what you are saying?
Are you trying to claim this story isn’t true? Or do you just hope it is.
Let’s take it on face value. What possible good does it do ANYONE to pay this man for 14 years at $100,000 a year when no one in his right mind would ever let him back in a classroom with children again?
And if the unions have made it so difficult to fire this guy, imagine all the other teachers who are just useless but not dangerous.
The sad thing is Roland Pierre’s story is NOT an acception.
and then you have this…
Recovering: The only “reputable” news org outside of those Koch Brother blogs is the NY Post. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by calling the NY Post a sensationalist rag.
Officials would not explain what happened since, but sources said the criminal charges were apparently dismissed, and a DOE disciplinary case was “dropped on a technicality.”
There is a presumption of innocent until proven guilty, and both the Post, the DA and the DOE had trouble proving the guilty part.
I think the important point which is being glossed over is “…seven years since beating criminal and disciplinary charges” (emphasis mine).
As LHOD said, the problem isn’t with the union’s advocacy, it is with the administration’s inability to build a case. In this instance, the charges were not proven to the satisfaction of the finder-of-fact. Under our system, that makes the accused “not guilty” (although possibly still not innocent).
This moronic excuse
is nothing more than a disgusting abandonment of responsibility by whoever is included in the “many”. Failure to document and inability to sustain evidence of mis-, mal-, or non-feasance on the part of an employee is at least mis-, mal-, or non-feasance on the part of the administrator. Whining “Oh poor me, I just don’t have the ti-i-i-i-me, otherwise you betcha, I’d have fired all those assholes, so don’t blame me, blame whoever stood up for them!!” is pathetic and demonstrates who really deserves to be fired.
I think you are making the mistake of confusing criminal guilt with prudent employment practices.
No one thinks this guy should ever be put back into a classroom. Not even the union wants to climb up that hill. So, yeah, they couldn’t put him in jail (where he belongs) probably because the girl in question wouldn’t testify or something.
But the guy sure as hell shouldn’t be collecting a salary.
And if you can’t get rid of something like this, what about the less obvious cases. Like the “English Teacher” who doesn’t know how to structure a sentence?
It’s not your dime any more. Once the teacher is paid, it’s their dime and they can damn well do whatever they want with it.
Well, yeah, kind of.
But the administrator has only so many hours in his day, and his job is not solely “finding the bad teachers and firing them”.
There has to be a balance. Workers should have protection from bad bosses, but the enterprise/operation should have protections from destructive workers, and it should NOT take an Act of God to get rid of a teacher who beats children or molests them.
So if I disapprove of the crappy job they are doing, I can stop paying my taxes?