Did you get that? Two out of 45,000... Teacher tenure must go!
by Rolfe McCollister - Baton Rouge Business Report (excerpt)

Chas Roemer, a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from our area, said recently in a letter to legislators, “We should treat teachers like professionals. Good teachers need better pay and significantly better pay. The single most critical factor in educating our kids is a quality teacher. No other issue comes close. Barriers to ensuring quality teachers should be torn down.” Any argument with that?

He also pointed out a Stanford University study that says a good teacher can teach one and a half years’ worth of information in a single year, while a poorly performing teacher will only teach one-half of a year’s information in a year. Roemer notes, the vast majority of our teachers are of high quality and are underappreciated. But Roemer also shared some other stats with me. He said, “One-third of the state’s approximately 600,000 kids in K-12 are below grade level. The labor unions—aka the teacher unions—argue that tenure is nothing more than due process. I would argue it’s become a system that protects poorly performing teachers. In 2008, of the 45,000-plus teachers in this state, only two were dismissed due to incompetence.” Did you get that? Two out of 45,000. That’s less than 1/200th of 1%.

Roemer sent the letter referred to above to all legislators and BESE members and asked them to sign a statement of support to end teacher tenure in our state and mail it back to him. Would you sign it? If you haven’t decided yet which side you are on, let me share one other fact about tenure in Louisiana. Did you know that school bus drivers employed by a local school board for three years get tenure, too? That’s right. [See § 17:492, probation and tenure of bus operators.] Maybe now it’s clear where you stand on this critical issue, but how about your legislator or BESE member? Ask them before you vote this fall.