Code Red

About

WyBlog, the best thing about New Jersey since the invention of the 24 hour diner.

Chris Wysocki
Caldwell, NJ

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan

Chris Wysocki | Create Your Badge

My Other Blog

Me, at Right Wing News

Follow @WyBlog

Twitter Feed

Tweets by @WyBlog

Thousands of Deadly Islamic Terror Attacks Since 9/11

Badges

Link to me

Feedjit

Search WyBlog

The Party of "No"

Fair Use Notice

"This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, social issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes."

Hey! I've moved to He's Pretty Fly For A Jersey Guy.

Please update your bookmarks. Thanks!

Thursday, 07 May 2009

Teachers unions, "rubber rooms", and tenure

My last post reminded me of some other stuff I'd seen lately. Opposition to school choice, vouchers, and in particular the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is just another day at the office for the teachers unions. They don't give one whit about the students (children don't pay union dues). Their stock response to every educational problem is "more money". How much more? Just "more". More, more, they're still not satisfied!

And for what? So they can protect bad teachers from being fired? For the past 7 years Los Angeles has paid a teacher to do nothing. He's still on the payroll as his union continues to argue against his firing.

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits.

His job is to do nothing. . . .

A special education teacher, he was removed from Grant High School in Van Nuys and assigned to a district office in 2002 after the school board voted to fire him for allegedly harassing teenage students and colleagues. In the meantime, the district has spent more than $2 million on him in salary and legal costs.

Unbelievable! Two million dollars would pay for a lot of Opportunity Scholarships. But the teachers union isn't interested in helping kids with that money; they're quite content to have it wasted in defense of a bad teacher. There is no other profession in the world where this kind of travesty is allowed to prevail.

And it's not just LA. New York City has more than 700 teachers on the do-nothing squad.

For seven hours a day, five days a week, hundreds of Department of Education employees - who've been accused of wrongdoing ranging from buying a plant for a school against the principal's wishes to inappropriately touching a student - do absolutely no work.

In an investigation inside the nine reassignment centers called "rubber rooms" where these employees are sent, The Post has learned that the number of salaried teachers sitting idly waiting for their cases to be heard has exploded to 757 this year - more than twice the number just two years ago - at a cost of about $40 million a year, based on the median teacher salary.

The city pays millions more for substitute teachers and employees to replace them and to lease rubber-room space.

Meanwhile, the 757 - paid from $42,500 to $93,400 a year - bring in lounge chairs to recline, talk on their cellphones and watch movies on portable DVD players, according to interviews with more than 50 employees.

Your tax dollars at work. And my friends wonder why I always vote "NO" on school budgets. I'm sure crap like this goes on all over the country. The unions will spare no expense to protect the worst of the worst teachers but 5 cents for a kid to move to a better school is "diverting essential resources from the public schools". How is millions squandered on protecting the jobs of imbeciles and criminals not "diverting essential resources from the public schools"?

This cartoon sums up tenure way better than anything else I could say:

Or put another way,

Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, hide behind their union.

Posted at 12:30 by Chris Wysocki [] Comments | Perm Link |
Technorati Tags: NJEA tenure | Tweet

blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous: Obama ignores rally to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program	Next: Do muumuus come in black, with a head covering?
Main

WyBlog

We The People