Wayne Brightly is the perfect example of a “bad teacher”. After failing the certification
Twice, Brightly began to get nervous. These nerves got the best of him and he hired a friend, Rubin Leitner, to take the test for him using a fake ID. Even though Leitner was not the smartest person, with his history of mental problems and being homeless, his test scores improved enough to get the state officials involved. Once the state officials realized what had happened, they quickly moved Brightly to an administrative job. The frightening part about Brightly’s situation is that it is not as uncommon as people would like to think. Thousands of teachers across the country have repeatedly flunked the basic certification test, but it is too expensive …show more content…
They also found that nearly 1400 teachers had failed the test ten or more times, and one Miami-area teacher failed over forty times. The Sun Times, in Chicago, did a similar investigation in 2001 that showed more than 800 Illinois teacher failed the test in a thirteen year period. The year before this investigation took place, one in seven teachers had certificates that temporarily or indefinitely waived the competence test. However, these are not difficult tests to pass. The tests include basic grammatical questions like picking the correct form of a word for the context of the sentence, and picking the largest value from multiple options such as 1 percent of 1000 dollars versus 10 percent of 200 dollars. Sandra Stotsky, a former senior Massachusetts education official stated, “It’s common knowledge that our teacher tests are extremely minimal and a disgrace to the …show more content…
Crowley states in his essay “Expel These Teachers”, “Yet getting rid of the bad ones means battling teachers unions that ferociously defend the lifetime tenure that many instructors get even at a young age.” Phillip K. Howard, a reformist who currently chairs the bipartisan group Common Good, states, “It is notoriously impossible to get rid of a teacher. I think more people are put on death row than lose their tenure as teachers through the legal process.” There was a five year period in the 1990s where only sixty-two of the 220,000 tenure teacher were dismissed, and Time magazine reported a seven-year period where inly forty-four of 100,000 tenured Illinois teachers were fired. According to Crowley, “Firing a teacher can take years and cost taxpayers plenty.” One California school district spent 312,000 dollars on legal fees to fire one teacher. It also took three years to get a teacher, who threw books at her students because she claimed that evil spirits had invaded her students’ eyes, to get her license revoked. Mary Jo McGrath, a California education law attorney says, “a professional incompetence case is going to cost you from $200,000 to half a million.” Because of the outrageous cost to fire these teachers, some principals prefer to transfer them to another unsuspecting school. Sol Stern, an education reformer at the Manhattan Institute,
Twice, Brightly began to get nervous. These nerves got the best of him and he hired a friend, Rubin Leitner, to take the test for him using a fake ID. Even though Leitner was not the smartest person, with his history of mental problems and being homeless, his test scores improved enough to get the state officials involved. Once the state officials realized what had happened, they quickly moved Brightly to an administrative job. The frightening part about Brightly’s situation is that it is not as uncommon as people would like to think. Thousands of teachers across the country have repeatedly flunked the basic certification test, but it is too expensive …show more content…
They also found that nearly 1400 teachers had failed the test ten or more times, and one Miami-area teacher failed over forty times. The Sun Times, in Chicago, did a similar investigation in 2001 that showed more than 800 Illinois teacher failed the test in a thirteen year period. The year before this investigation took place, one in seven teachers had certificates that temporarily or indefinitely waived the competence test. However, these are not difficult tests to pass. The tests include basic grammatical questions like picking the correct form of a word for the context of the sentence, and picking the largest value from multiple options such as 1 percent of 1000 dollars versus 10 percent of 200 dollars. Sandra Stotsky, a former senior Massachusetts education official stated, “It’s common knowledge that our teacher tests are extremely minimal and a disgrace to the …show more content…
Crowley states in his essay “Expel These Teachers”, “Yet getting rid of the bad ones means battling teachers unions that ferociously defend the lifetime tenure that many instructors get even at a young age.” Phillip K. Howard, a reformist who currently chairs the bipartisan group Common Good, states, “It is notoriously impossible to get rid of a teacher. I think more people are put on death row than lose their tenure as teachers through the legal process.” There was a five year period in the 1990s where only sixty-two of the 220,000 tenure teacher were dismissed, and Time magazine reported a seven-year period where inly forty-four of 100,000 tenured Illinois teachers were fired. According to Crowley, “Firing a teacher can take years and cost taxpayers plenty.” One California school district spent 312,000 dollars on legal fees to fire one teacher. It also took three years to get a teacher, who threw books at her students because she claimed that evil spirits had invaded her students’ eyes, to get her license revoked. Mary Jo McGrath, a California education law attorney says, “a professional incompetence case is going to cost you from $200,000 to half a million.” Because of the outrageous cost to fire these teachers, some principals prefer to transfer them to another unsuspecting school. Sol Stern, an education reformer at the Manhattan Institute,