Jobs for life?

One problem with the public school system that certainly influences public perception of the status quo (see above): the difficulty many districts have getting rid of bad teachers.

The need to fire poor teachers is "part of the ongoing debate over education reform and the role tenure plays in the process. Advocates for reform cite a list of egregious examples they say demonstrate why teacher tenure rules need to be overhauled," The Associated Press reported last weekend.

For instance, a Long Island English teacher who has been arrested for drunken driving five times in seven years remains on her district payroll, collecting her full $113,000 salary.

The administrative costs to fire a single teacher in New York City can run as high as $250,000. And dismissals are extremely rare. Of 55,000 New York City teachers, only 10 were fired last year.

Those numbers are not unusual. According to the Washington-based Center for Union Facts just 112 tenured teachers in Los Angeles -- out of 43,000 on the payroll -- faced termination from 1995 to 2005. The group also counted just 47 New Jersey firings -- out of 100,000 teachers -- during a 10-year period.

Much of this is a result of a top-down, autocratic, one-size-fits-all union approach that protects underperformers and refuses to recognize and reward the exceptional. It's also a product of the reality that teacher unions are among the most powerful labor organizations in the country and often enjoy widespread support from sympathetic Democratic lawmakers.

Witness what happened this weekend in Carson City when legislators called into special session had to make a decision between upsetting teacher unions by trimming projected raises for public employees or cutting money for textbooks. Guess which approach most appealed to Nevada's Democratic lawmakers?

The notion that tenure is needed to protect teachers from the arbitrary whims of administrators doesn't hold water. Not only does federal law -- and the laws of many states -- include plenty of protections to ensure employees are not unfairly dismissed, the costs alone of high turnover serve as a disincentive for a school district to routinely move forward with unnecessary firings.

Judging performance is essential to accountability and progress.

"Protecting jobs of adults without regard to how well their students perform almost certainly will lead to greater costs, stagnant academic achievement, and greater dysfunction of our public education system," B. Jason Brooks of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability told the AP.

That's true. Which is why trimming back the thicket of rules and regulations protecting incompetent educators must be part of any real effort to reform public education.