To the New York Observer Nov. 30, 2007

Nov 30, 2007 4:05 PM

To the editor:

No one wants incompetent teachers in our public schools – certainly not the highly qualified faculty who would have to cope with any shortcomings in students’ education resulting from a colleague’s poor instruction (“It’s Time to Give the Boot to Bad Teachers,” Nov. 26). But you are wrong to blame tenure for the city Department of Education’s inability to expedite the disciplinary process.

Tenure simply requires due process, meaning a chance to hear and respond to charges instead of being summarily dismissed with no recourse. This concept is one of the foundations of American democracy. We at the United Federation of Teachers, the labor union representing New York City’s 100,000 public school educators, have long urged the Department of Education to work with us on ways to improve the process. In fact, in our last contract, we squarely addressed the issue of incompetence by creating an independent cadre of experts to work with teachers whose skills are called into question by their principals over a three-to-six month period. The program is designed to help teachers who are floundering and, if it can’t, assists in a humane way with the process of termination.

Implementation of the program (which was praised when it was announced last year) began only a month ago. But instead of giving the program time to work, the DOE sprung this new “teacher performance unit” (led by a criminal prosecutor), a move that dismayed good teachers throughout the system. In an unprecedented move, DOE Chancellor Joel Klein recently sent a conciliatory letter to teachers praising their efforts and expressing regret for the “confusion and concern that the public conversation on this issue has caused and, specifically, our role in it.” He and I also started a “Thank-A-Teacher” campaign this week. Hopefully, these are both signals that the “blame-the-teacher” routine will end and we can get back to working together on what it takes to educate our children.

Randi Weingarten, President
United Federation of Teachers