It’s kind of shocking how awful teachers unions are and how self-defeating they tend to be. Consider one story about Rhode Island teachers who bit off more than they could chew when they refused to work an extra half hour a day: The entire union was canned from their $70,000 per year jobs for balking at the extra duty.
That success story is the exception, however: Most school districts have to jump through ridiculous hoops to get rid of poorly performing teachers. Last year, the New Yorker had an excellent write up of New York City’s “rubber rooms.” What, pray tell, is a rubber room?
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all.
It’s a good thing the union is there to protect these awful teachers and drain the school systems! Don’t worry, New York City isn’t alone; Los Angeles has its own share of trouble getting rid of terrible teachers:
But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
It really is kind of stunning just how much money, time, and manpower is wasted on eliminating teachers who can’t do the job anymore – or never could in the first place.
