[quote=bearishgurl]
I can’t understand where the complaints in the article re: union rules keeping “bad teachers” in the lowest performing schools are coming from when a good portion of the teachers in those schools don’t even have tenure yet! These newbies have to start somewhere. As soon as they are able to successfully bid on a slightly better-performing school assignment, some will transfer out. Some will stay on longer to obtain student-loan forgiveness on their remaining balance before attempting to move on.
[/quote]

BG, you do a great job at describing the status quo and the challenges they face, but many people feel the status quo isn’t working.

Think about this particular paragraph where you write the newbies have to start somewhere. That indeed is true, but why would you assign your newbies to one of the hardest challenges and tasks in your company. Qualcomm isn’t assigning their most difficult and hard to solve engineering problem to a bunch of right out of school new hires. They are going to assign those new hires to teams working on easier tasks. They are going to put their best and brightest on those hard to solve challenges.

That’s why I think the public education system is failing. Rather then the most experienced and brightest working on fixing under performing schools for variety of reasons they let those teachers choose to get away from the problem. You are right there are a few gems that give back to the community and try to make a difference, but there’s not enough. Maybe it’s time that you run a school district like a business rather than based on feeling and emotions. Now I would agree that if you’re gong to go down this path you need to give the teachers a lot more flexibility on getting rid of the disruptive students.