Third in a series
Re “What About Teaching Graybeards (Here) Who Have ‘Checked Out’?”
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Nothing.
That is Scott Zeidman’s answer to the riveting question he previously posed:
What can the School District do about aging, low-energy teachers who have lost interest in their work, still show up in their classrooms every day and bore their students into video games or staring out windows?
Mr. Zeidman, a former School Board member, sadly concludes “there is no way of solving that.”
Two weeks after the landmark Vergara v. California ruling that held teacher tenure is unconstitutional, an interruption of instructors’ virtually guaranteed lifetime employment has sparked a firestorm – from them.
Mr. Zeidman, a businessman and attorney, suggested a contrasting example. “Take an employee who has been with a private company 30 years,” he said. “In the last two years, if he or she is not productive, you can let the person go. You cannot do that with a teacher.
“However long tenure is, whether it is two years as it is in California and a couple other states, five years or 10 years, that will solve one of the problems.
“But another problem is that sometimes teachers ought to go, and they just don’t.
“You see this in sports all the time,” Mr. Zeidman said. “When a coach has been with the same team for a long time and he starts to lose, they fire his butt.”
How can an administrator resolve this conundrum?
“By relaxing the tenure rules, principals, school districts and school boards will have an opportunity to potentially relieve a teacher without having to worry about a $500,000 lawsuit,” Mr. Zeidman said.
(To be continued)
