Monday, October 10, 2005

Weintraub on teacher job security

Today's California Insider, the blog of Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub, has a long description of how well Arnold gets along with nurses. It is a puff piece.
Then, Weintraub has this to say about job security for teachers.
Teachers and job security
Here is a Bee story on Prop. 74 taking up the issue most often used against the measure: that it would make it harder to recruit good teachers. I'm not a huge fan of 74 because I think it only tinkers around the edges when we need much more radical reform. But like the teacher featured in the story's lead, I doubt this rap is accurate. It's been my experience that talented people don't shy away from a job out of fear that they will be unjustly fired. They just assume they'll do fine. In fact, the opposite might even be true. Teachers with great potential might be repelled from the field if they think colleagues who aren't pulling their weight are overly protected by our current laws. Teachers who go to work in private schools and most public charter schools have little or no job guarantees, no matter how long they have worked there. And these schools don't seem to have much problem recruiting.
What do others think of this?

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