Anote of gratitude is due Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for ordering the immediate firing of Matthew Kim after a tortuous seven-year saga. This wasn’t the first time that Yaffe tried to inject common sense into the absurdly difficult and expensive task of ridding classrooms of teachers who don’t belong there. His previous decision to allow the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire Kim, issued in July, was ignored by the panel that has authority over contested teacher dismissals.
The Kim fiasco is a reminder of just how many thousands of dollars and costly lawyers and innumerable court appearances are currently required to fire incompetent or otherwise troublesome teachers. And, adding insult to injury, Kim has been paid his full salary and benefits since 2003 while doing no work for the district.
So we find it a heartening coincidence that on the same day Yaffe ordered Kim’s firing, the president of the American Federation of Teachers called for new procedures making it easier to remove bad teachers. Randi Weingarten, who has been one of the more progressive teachers union leaders, said the AFT would develop a proposal, with the project overseen by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the federal government’s “pay czar” on executive compensation.
2 thoughts on “On Firing Bad Teachers”
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I’m glad the AFT is developing a proposal to make new procedures to remove bad teachers. The current process is leading to more charter schools and inadverdently throws all teachers into the bucket of teacher failure bringing our schools down. By easing up the procedures, emphasis goes to supporting the large number of excellent teachers and providing adequate resources for public schools.
The AFT should move quickly on this; otherwise we’ll be in a race for the bottom not the top.
The LA Times article takes a simple case of a teacher fired for inappropriate touching of three students, and goes beyond any semblance of the facts of the case to generalize to “bad” teachers, removing tenure etc.
The facts and defense in the above case is that, suffering from CP, the touching was inadvertent because he was unable to fully control his movements.
There is nothing in this case that fits any fact situation involving bad teachers that is the topic of the typical discussion.
The key point I’m trying to make here is that the LA Times opinion piece is typical of the arguments that surround almost any topic discussed, including improvement of education. There is no sense that one needs to gather facts, pro and con, targeted to the topic and enter into the very difficult task of trying to understand the complexities of the facts, the issues, and the systemic processes on the way to making good decisions.
I simply cannot see any way needed educational improvements can be made by opinion and policy makers who, time and again, demonstrate their own lack of basic thinking skills, and a public who are persuaded by these vacuous arguments