Most Teachers are Selfish, Surprised?*

If you are a public school teacher, you basically have to kill another person to be terminated.

John Stossel, in his latest book, provided a flowchart illustrating the process of firing an incompetent teacher.

Stossel has an example:

Once, [Joel] Klein [(Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education)] reports, the school system discovered that a teacher was sending sexual e-mails to a 16-year-old student. "This was the most unbelievable case to me," he says, "because the e-mail was there, he admitted to it. It was so thoroughly offensive." Even with the teacher's confession, it took six years of expensive litigation before the school could fire him. He didn't teach during those six years, but he still got paid—more than $350,000 total.

Is it any wonder that our children are clueless when they graduate from high school?

Take a look at this stat-

But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

It's not the money we spend per student. It's all about the monopoly that the teacher's union has in education. Obviously, school choice would force the schools to be more competitive. The teacher's unions care nothing about the kids that they teach, only the pensions and the benefits that they believe their members should receive.

The New York Post has an editorial today about the situation.

*Not all teachers are selfish, just the leadership that represents them. I understand that it's the union's job to look out for their members, but it is all at the expense of our future generation. Unforgivable...

And, of course, I need to give props to my good friend Judy, a principal at a local inner city school. Her long hours often preclude her from meeting me out for an occasional drink.