Teachers' Unions Throw Students Under the Bus

CNS News reports:

In many cities with abysmal school systems, teacher firings are exceedingly rare, due to powerful teachers' unions. In New York City and Chicago, barely 1 in 1,000 teachers loses his job for poor performance.

In Los Angeles, fewer than 2 percent of teachers are denied tenure-and only a quarter of a percent of teachers who received tenure were fired over the course of a decade. Meanwhile, graduation rates are barely above 50 percent.

In contrast, between 1 and 2 percent of lawyers and doctors can expect to lose their license to practice over their lifetime. Unions claim that teachers are not being paid enough, which may be true in some cases. But in America's highest-paid professions, a high salary comes at the cost of lower job security and is based on quality of work. Before we raise the pay of teachers, we must first do away with tenure and seniority protections.

In New York City, protections for teachers are so stringent that the worst teachers are sent to "rubber rooms" while their firings go through years of litigation. In these rubber rooms, teachers receive full pay and benefits while the school system hired substitutes to teach their classes. The hearings to fire these teachers last an average of 502 days and cost $216,588 per teacher. However, fewer than 10 percent of teachers against whom the city brought cases are fired-and many bad teachers do not even make it to the rubber-room stage.

It's for the children.