More pink slips

“Fire more teachers” is not a rally cry you would expect to hear from an education major. But that is exactly what I am lobbying for. In New York City, there is a disturbing trend developing: More than 1,400 teachers are receiving full salaries and benefits while not teaching.

According to The New Republic, because of program cuts, school closings or voluntary transfers, the teachers act as substitutes. But “when they don’t have temporary assignments, they spend their days in school offices, cafeterias and break rooms. And they are not required to seek full-time positions.”

In New York, the United Federation of Teachers is second only to the American Association of Retired Persons when it comes to powerful public groups. As a consequence, the federation has the ability to force New York’s school districts not to fire their teachers.

Once teachers have tenure, which they usually receive after three years at the school, there is little the district can do to convince the union that the teacher is worth firing. This trend is not just in New York, but it spans the entire country and affects every school district in the United States.

As a future educator, this infuriates me. When I enter the education profession, I am going to be viewed as equal to my peers, some of whom are paid to simply sit and waste time. My prospective profession, and the profession of other education students at IU, is being muddied by the fact that school districts are unable to do their job.

School districts are responsible for providing students with the best possible educators. Allowing teachers who do not fulfill their job duties to keep their jobs is selling short the taxpayers and their children. I understand the importance of the American Federation of Teachers, in that teachers should be protected from unreasonable termination. Protecting underperforming and underqualified teachers, however, hurts the entire education system.

There is a ray of hope, however, in Michelle Rhee.

Rhee is Chancellor of Education of Washington, D.C., running its public schools, and she is undertaking a revolutionary new approach to teaching, according to an article in Newsweek. She wants to pay teachers on a merit-based system, not a tenured one. This merit system allows for teachers to make about $100,000 – about $50,000 more than the average teacher’s salary. Additionally, the fact teachers are going to be consistently tested and reviewed motivates them to stay sharp.  

This approach has, of course, received uproar from both tenured teachers and the teachers’ union. I understand that these people are afraid to lose their jobs, but the education of our youth should be a teacher’s top priority. As educators, we have entered a field that puts prominence on getting young kids to succeed. We are not in it for the money, although the proposed merit system would help salaries; rather, we are in it because we believe that we can make a difference in our nation’s youth.

Somewhere along the way, the education system forgot that.