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