I agree with Diane Wiley. Good teachers, (the one's who are effective and advocate for the students) need some protection from management. It is possible to fire the bad teachers under the current rules. The management doesn't need to take away seniority and tenure rights of all teachers in order to fire teachers who ought to be fired.
Currently, a teacher may hold a position as long as that position exists, unless terminated for cause. Jennings is proposing to change that, and is asking the teachers' union to "play ball." The trade off: some highly compensated management jobs controlled by the union in return for stripping away the seniority and tenure rights of all rank-and-file teachers. If that happens, the teachers will have no rights that management must respect, and the teachers union will become a company union, not an advocacy organization for teachers. (In my opinion the teachers union is already suffering from an infection of company unionism, but is basically a teachers' advocacy organization, not a company union.) The basic problem is that the district is doing a lousy job of educating a majority of the students. The district has been pushing students out of the schools with an attendance policy that did not deliver on the promise of improving student performance. Many of the parents who are dissatisfied with the education their children are getting are pulling them out of the Minneapolis schools. According to the NAACP, students participating in the "choice is yours program" (students living in the city attending suburban schools) are getting a better education. More and more, Minneapolis parents are trying to get their children into suburban schools or private schools, moving to the suburbs, or home-schooling. I believe that the public schools can be fixed. However, Jennings proposals to fix the schools, if adopted, will only make matters worse. -Doug Mann, King Field Author of "Flight from Equality: School reform in the US since 1983" In a message dated 1/20/2004 3:02:09 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > My initial reaction to this proposal is that I worry that teachers who are > "controversial" or very student oriented or have any number of other > possibly positive attributes might be "gotten rid of" too easily by bad > principals...[snip] I know > that there are lousy teachers out there who are protected by their contracts > and seniority -- although I also know that if they are truly lousy, there > are ways to get rid of them -- but I also worry about the good teachers who > wouldn't be protected under this new plan. diane wiley tangletown > REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
