8/24/2012

Democrats in Sacramento killing a bill making it easier to fire public school teachers who are sexual predators



This is a horrible situation where even when a public school teacher gets caught doing unbelievable acts the teacher gets paid to simply quit his job. While on net positive, there are problems with this CNN story, particularly its emphasis on campaign finance.  It almost seems like they did this story because of the campaign finance angle.  But rather than the donations altering how these politicians voted, it might simply be that the unions gave money to those politicians who agreed with them.  Rather than focusing so heavily on how teachers' union donations killed the bill, they should have focused just on the real story: how a majority of Democrats in the state legislature along with public teacher unions supported killing the bill.  How the unions got the legislators to go along is mere speculation (speculation that I think is wrong).  But CNN managed to turn a bad story for teacher unions into a call for what liberals want: campaign finance regulation.

Here is a related discussion about public school teachers in NYC.  From the WSJ:
. . . In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with sexual misconduct. Among the charges substantiated by the city's special commissioner of investigation—that is, found to have sufficient merit that an arbitrator's full examination was justified—in the 2011-12 school year:
• An assistant principal at a Brooklyn high school made explicit sexual remarks to three different girls, including asking one of them if she would perform oral sex on him.
• A teacher in Queens had a sexual relationship with a 13-year old girl and sent her inappropriate messages through email and Facebook.
If this kind of behavior were happening in any adult workplace in America, there would be zero tolerance. Yet our public school children are defenseless.
Here's why. Under current New York law, an accusation is first vetted by an independent investigator. (In New York City, that's the special commissioner of investigation; elsewhere in the state, it can be an independent law firm or the local school superintendent.) Then the case goes before an employment arbitrator. The local teachers union and school district together choose the arbitrators, who in turn are paid up to $1,400 per day. And therein lies the problem.
For many arbitrators, their livelihood depends on pleasing the unions (whether the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, or other local unions). And the unions—believing that they are helping the cause of teachers by being weak on sexual predators—prefer suspensions and fines, and not dismissal, for teachers charged with inappropriate sexual conduct. The effects of this policy are mounting. . . .

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