Hell no, he won’t go.Until we educators quit protecting people like this, quit expecting unions to protect people like this, and start policing our own ranks, we can hardly expect to be considered professionals.
In a defiant raspberry to the city Department of Education — and taxpayers — disgraced teacher Alan Rosenfeld, 66, won’t retire.
Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay.
Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
It's Great Work, If You Can Get It
From the New York Post:
Disgusting...
ReplyDeleteWhy exactly do teachers need a union? Same question about government workers.
ReplyDeleteNow let's not get crazy. There's nothing wrong with the concept of a union--it's how they've grown and abused their charter that's the problem.
ReplyDeleteOh no, there's something severely wrong with unions although the concept is pretty benign.
ReplyDeleteUnions are local monopolies on labor. As monopolies they inevitably display the behavior of a monopoly: raising prices beyond the value of their offering, descending performance, indifference to the needs/wants of the customer.
The public education system exacerbates the inevitable bad behavior of unions by keeping the true customer - parents - distant from any exercise of the power of the customer. If parents aren't happy with what the school district has on offer their only real choice is to up stakes and move to where they'll find the situation more to their liking. That's a very high threshold, too high for most people, so there's no concern about the customers all voting with their feet.
But even with that I wouldn't ban unions.
Unions are creatures of their environment; when the conditions are proper unions form, when those conditions change to be less favorable to unions they disappear.
Evidence the private sector. Without the passage of a single law that impedes the formation/continued existence of unions the percentage of the American work force in the private sector has gone from 36% in the 1970s to 6% today. Charters will do/are doing the same thing to teacher's unions by virtue of being independent requiring much more in the way of resources to organize per member acquired.
We've probably already passed the high water mark for teacher's union membership figures since, with the ending of the Obama "stimulus" spending the layoff of teachers that should have occurred a couple of years ago is now under weigh. I believe other states will follow Michigan's example an loosen their caps on charter schools and, as the economic advantages of charters become more obvious, will start to encourage the formation of charters at the expense of the district schools. That'll be an environment distinctly, if not deliberately, hostile to unions. Sic transit gloria.
That's BS. The city should simply refuse to sign another contract until he and the six others are off the rolls. I have as much disrespect for the school officials that sign the deal as I do for the union.
ReplyDeleteCall their bluff. Seriously.