Guest MINDSETTER™ Richard August: Teaching Is Not An Entitlement
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
RI State Senator Jim Sheehan has been taking education leadership to task for firing policies. But who is he protecting?
The senator complains that Commissioner Gist is violating state law by warning school superintendents that she would take “severe action against any district” that lays off teachers by “using seniority, job fairs or bumping”.
What Sen. Sheehan implies—after first genuflecting at seniority, the holy grail of the labor movement—is that, after a brief probationary period usually of three years, a teaching job in Rhode Island is an entitlement. Even in the face of declining enrollment, teachers must be laid of under the last in, first out process. Moreover, they must be rehired in reverse order with the most senior teacher first.
In many school districts the union contract limits the number of certificated staff who can be laid off notwithstanding a decrease in enrollment. In the private sector, of course, when demand for your employer’s product or service declines you can be let go. This is known as being “an employee at will” which is a concept foreign to public employees.
Before General Electric Corporation became politically correct and its CEO one of President Obama’s favorite executives, Jack Welch ran the company. Welch's policy was that all employees were evaluated once a year. Those in the bottom 10% were given a year to improve and a program to do so. If they didn’t, they were fired. Welch said this pruning was good for the employees and the organization.
If you get to know a few teachers socially they will admit there are mediocre, lazy and incompetent colleagues, some of whom show up intoxicated, in their school system. Quite often that admission will be followed up with the assertion that it’s “an administration problem; they have three years to weed them out.” However, next to seniority, tenure is the most sacred union idol.
The Los Angeles consolidated public school district (in which my daughter once taught) employs 30,000 tenured teachers. Each year less than two dozen teachers are fired in LA. If you believe the other 29,976 teachers are all enthusiastic, energetic, well-informed in the subject they teach and glad to be in the classroom, I have a bridge to Jamestown that I can sell you.
There are about 700 teachers in the New York City school system that report to “holding pens” every day, sometimes for years, while awaiting “due process” for everything from insubordination to sexual misconduct in the classroom. It costs taxpayers an estimated $30 million to $65 million per year for these “rubber rooms”.
In Patterson, NJ it took four years and $127,000 in legal fees to fire a teacher who regularly hit students plus $111,000 for substitute teachers to fill in while he sat at home collecting full pay and benefits.
In his book “Arguing with Idiots” Glenn Beck observes, “But aside from being unable to get rid of the worst teachers, unions also prevent the best teachers from being rewarded. Salaries [and layoffs, I would add] aren’t based on merit [or on attracting those with proficiency in subjects like mathematics or computer science] but on longevity. Good and bad teachers are paid the same…”
Once again, Sen. Sheehan failed to disclose that he is a teacher in Warwick and therefore stands to directly benefit from the position he takes on the issue of teacher layoffs. As such, Sen. Sheehan is simply using his elected office as a pulpit from which to lobby on his labor union’s behalf.
When the North Kingstown School Committee was debating whether to outsource its building custodians Sen. Sheehan was sitting in the middle of the NEA/RI brass who were protesting this proposal.
A few years ago I asked him whether he thought it was ethical for him to vote on a bill that would directly affect teachers. Sheehan replied that the state ethics commission had advised him that he could do so provided the bill he was voting on affected all teachers –not just him personally.
Given the senator’s assurance from the ethics commission, it isn’t a stretch to guess that, in addition to holding the reform-minded commissioner’s feet to the fire, he will be voting in favor of binding arbitration for teachers. It’s too bad that recusal is a voluntary act in Rhode Island.
