In a post below, Steve notes how impossibly difficult it has become to fire public employees in California. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in the state's educational system, where the union hijacking of the firing process has led to jaw-dropping outcomes. In the past decade, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has only been able to fire four teachers out of 33,000; statewide, only 20 percent of teacher firings have anything to do with classroom performance. That's bad enough when it comes to keeping merely incompetent teachers in the classroom. But, as a horrifying story out of L.A. Unified proves, it's even worse when it extends to protecting criminal behavior.
Mark Berndt, an elementary school teacher in L.A. Unified, stands accused of 23 counts of lewd conduct towards his students, the details of which are so unseemly as to be unrepeatable in this forum (for those with strong constitutions, the details are here). Yet even despite the presence of photographic evidence of his sickening behavior, L.A. Unified was unable to fire him.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, Berndt was able to exploit the byzantine personnel system for six months after being removed from the classroom, finally opting to resign. If it was just a matter of getting him out of the system, that may have been an acceptable (though far from ideal) outcome. But because he was never actually fired, Berndt now stands to receive lifetime health benefits and nearly $50,000 a year in pension money.
His story is an extreme example of a deeply corrosive pattern in California's public education system: there are virtually no consequences for even the most flagrant misbehavior by teachers. Thus, no one should be surprised as the integrity of Golden State schools continue to crumble. You get more of what you subsidize.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, Berndt was able to exploit the byzantine personnel system for six months after being removed from the classroom, finally opting to resign. If it was just a matter of getting him out of the system, that may have been an acceptable (though far from ideal) outcome. But because he was never actually fired, Berndt now stands to receive lifetime health benefits and nearly $50,000 a year in pension money.
His story is an extreme example of a deeply corrosive pattern in California's public education system: there are virtually no consequences for even the most flagrant misbehavior by teachers. Thus, no one should be surprised as the integrity of Golden State schools continue to crumble. You get more of what you subsidize.
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