NY Post Starts The Attacks On Teacher Tenure In New York In Earnest

I'm not going to link to the story because it deserves as few hits as possible.

But here's the gist - the Post has a prominent story attacking teacher tenure today that complains about the following:

State law requires that an independent hearing officer decide whether a tenured teacher is guilty of charges and, if so, set the punishment.

Each termination case, including witness testimony, cross-examination and arguments, can drag on for months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of 133 educators taken to trial since 2013, the city Department of Education has gotten just 50, or 37.6 percent, fired, it said. In 77 cases, hearing officers found the employees guilty of poor performance or wrongdoing, but imposed lesser penalties. Six cases were dismissed.

The Post wants a system where there is no due process for teachers, but even the Postie article acknowledges that when there are bad teachers on the payroll:

Michael Mazzariello, a former chief prosecutor of DOE teachers, faults administrators.

“The principals say we need to get rid of these teachers, but it’s the principals who gave them tenure and rated them ‘satisfactory’ year after year,” he said.

Clearly the attack on teacher tenure in New York is beginning its earnest propaganda phase.

You can bet the Daily News won't be too far behind with another in their series of PERV TEACHER stories and Campbell Brown and some of the other professional teacher concern troll class will be out in full force using a handful of examples of teachers engaging in unethical and/or criminal behavior to push the idea that all teachers are unethical and criminal and therefore not worthy of any due process protections at work.

After the propaganda phase, they'll put pressure on the politicians to gut teacher protections at the state level.

Given that Sheriff Andy Cuomo is engaged in what is turning out to be a real political race for re-election, I am doubtful he'll take the tenure battle up this year, not publicly in statements and certainly not politically since the legislative season ends in a few days.

But you can bet after he's re-elected that he'll be more amenable to the reformers' desires and I can envision a movement here in New York State where some in the political class start talking about gutting teacher due process protections, using both the California teacher tenure case and the propaganda that's coming from the Post and Daily News as cover.