#It’s a lot harder to fire a bad NYC teacher than a bad cop

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(L-R) UFT President Michael Mulgrew, Constance Malcolm, mother of Ramarley Graham, Randi Weingarten, former New York Gov. David Paterson and Rev. Al Sharpton at the front of the “We Will Not Go Back” march and rally on Staten Island where Eric Gardner died in police custody.
William Farrington

Pot, meet kettle: Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, says police unions need to stop protecting their misbehaving members.

Yes, that Randi Weingarten, who as local United Federation of Teachers chief butted heads with Mayor Michael Bloomberg over his refusal to place ineffective and dangerous teachers back into classrooms. The union contract she championed wouldn’t let him fire them.

But in an interview with the Chief-Leader, a union-backed news service, Weingarten argued in favor of changing police-union-contract protections that make it hard to fire problematic and dangerous cops.

“You have people of color being treated in a discriminatory way and being brutalized by law enforcement. If you don’t, after [George] Floyd, recognize that there’s an issue, then you’re not seeing the experience of people of color,” she said.

In her decades as a union leader, Weingarten has never had any problem defending and protecting incompetent teachers — who most often worked in low-performing schools in predominately minority communities.

The city employs more than twice as many teachers as cops — 79,000 teachers versus 36,000 cops. And it’s a lot harder to fire a bad teacher than a bad cop: It typically takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Instead, most bad teachers — the ineffective, the incompetent, even the outright abusive — get sent to “rubber rooms” where administrators hope they will resign or eventually retire. That is, when they’re not simply left to keep “teaching.”

Together with other unwanted educators, they form the Absent Teacher Reserve — whose members the UFT is constantly trying to get back into the classroom.

Weingarten’s UFT successor, Michael Mulgrew, has been pushing Mayor Bill de Blasio to accelerate the re-absorption of ATR misfits in classrooms over the objections of school administrators. And the mayor has rushed to comply.

At one point, de Blasio’s Department of Education basically paid schools to hire from the ranks of the ATR. Chancellor Richard Carranza even brags about the resulting “progress.”

Every union puts its members’ interests above the public’s. But some unions have a lot more success in that regard — with Weingarten’s members (in the city, at least) winning the prize for excessive privilege. It takes a lot of chutzpah for her to call on another union to give up protections more mild than what her own people enjoy.