The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Schools resort to secret buyouts to get rid of teachers

By Scott Reeder

SPRINGFIELD – It has become so costly and difficult to fire tenured teachers in Illinois that school districts have resorted to secretly paying people to quit.

In fact, school boards have been defying the Illinois open records laws by promising to keep these hush-hush deals confidential.

For example, five years ago, James Galeski received $30,000 to resign from his teaching post in Valmeyer School District.

Folks in this sleepy southern Illinois community still are perplexed over why this tenured, Ph.D. science teacher left his job.

The state’s largest teacher’s union, the Illinois Education Association, has threatened litigation if the school district attempts to release records documenting purported problems with Galeski, attorneys involved with the matter have said. (more…)

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Here are some of the other findings of qonline.com’s investigation on tenure in the state of Illinois:

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#Out of 95,500 tenured teachers in Illinois, an average of only two are fired each year for poor performance.

#An average of only five tenured teachers have been fired each year for issues of misconduct, which can involve physical or sexual abuse of children.

#Although the reforms mandated all teachers be routinely evaluated and more that 2.5 million administrative hours have been devoted to doing this, only 1 out of 930 evaluations of tenured teachers result in an ‘unsatisfactory’ rating.

#In the past decade, 83 percent of Illinois school districts have never rated a tenured teacher as unsatisfactory.

#In the past 18 years, 94 percent of school districts have never attempted to fire anyone with tenure. (also found at same link mentioned above)

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A public school employee told me a while ago about a teacher who was caught red-handed looking at online pornography IN THE CLASSROOM by his own students. What did the administration do? Nothing. Why? Because he was tenured.

Recently in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put up some initiatives to the voters that would had increased the required number of years for a teacher to achieve tenure. Thanks to an aggressive union ad campaign that made teachers into the victim, slow response to these ads by Schwarzenegger, and most importantly extremely low voter turnout, his initiatives were defeated.

What makes stories like this one sad is that shows just how lazy taxpayers are when it comes to doing their own homework to find out why many of our schools under perform and are underfunded. Instead, we prefer to place all the blame on the Federal government leaving teachers unions and local administrators unchecked.