More than 55,000 teachers in New York City have tenure, which makes it extremely difficult to remove them from their positions.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is learning that the hard way.
A couple of years ago, he embarked on an aggressive attempt to remove from the classroom tenured teachers who are obviously incompetent. Eight full-time attorneys were hired, joining with retired principals and administrators to root out bad teachers. They have an annual budget of $1 million for the job.
And what has been the result two years later? A total of three teachers, from the 55,000 who have tenure, have been fired for incompetence. That is only about 0.0054 percent.
Why the snail's pace? Teachers union rules and other bureaucracy mean a hearing for a teacher can drag on for months -- and may not even begin until literally years after principals document any incompetence.
"The process makes it virtually impossible to remove a teacher within a reasonable amount of time," schools Chancellor Joel Klein told The New York Times. "Nobody thinks that the number of cases is reflective of the teachers who should be removed."
Sadly, that is what happens when union bureaucracy, rather than the education of children, becomes the priority in schools.
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