Bloomberg is a fear monger and a bully--- he wants EXACTLY what he wants when he wants it. The mayor must also realize that Cuomo and Silver see right through his union busting. If seniority was erased, Bloomberg would fire every senior teacher simply because they made too much money.

The Bloomie merit "system" is not pass/fail. He wants teachers graded like restaurants. While not a bad idea, the execution is impossible.
If you have a teacher with 15 years who got an A grade the last 5 years and a B this year, do you lay him off for a teacher with 3 years who got only a A grade all 3 years? Isn't it possible the senior teacher has a crappy bunch of student this year? Who judges the grade in the first place? Won't we need an appeal system as teachers' livelihoods are at stake? Would grading be clouded by costs as senior teacher are paid more? And you can bet there will be many, expensive lawsuits.

This is exactly it. Merit is too subjective within this context and therefore a merit based layoff system will ultimately be unfair.

Do not give bloombag more DOE powers, I know it's too late but do what you can to prevent this.
Call your senators and cuomo. Don't listen to bloombag, he's been wrong on almost everything except making his rich friends more rich. That means he wants to privatize everything and anything.

Yeah, because the private schools are doing SO much worse than the public schools.

Privatize education and you eliminate sub-par teachers.

Uh, they are. They're also getting more Expe$ive.

Private schools always have the advantage of not letting troubled kids back or just expelling them. That makes the class so much better than public schools.

Everyone else in the world figured out a system to justify their existence to their employers. /hyperbole

Teachers do a great job of using kids as their human shield, so to speak. Shouldn't they be held to the highest burden of proof since they are dealing with our kids? They always claim they need more and more since they work with kids. Fine. But you should have a bigger magnifying glass on you.

Why are people acting like it is impossible to judge the quality of teachers? Teachers, along with any type of employee, have been evaluated using various metrics for hundreds of years. The administration at the school most certainly knows who the crappy teachers are but the UFT is more concerned about keeping the jobs than teaching kids or being cost-effective.

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE did it correctly. He fired the bottom 10% of his managers every year. Quite the incentive, don't you think?

Screw you unions.

I think 'merit' is largely mythical and political. It certainly is in business corporations. I don't know about teachers. What objective standards are used to measure it?

It sounds like the union is the one fighting to keep the policy of canning the newest teachers. So the teachers should be dealing with their union if they have a problem with the policy.

And if they disagree with the policy, don't join the union (if that's allowed? Not sure) or vote to endorse a more merit-based setup.

Of course there are plenty of dinosaurs in the union who are only concerned with saving themselves. But if younger teachers stop joining (again, not sure if that's even possible in NY) then that could start to change. If the union only exists to protect seniority, then that kind of defeats the purpose of the union "fighting for everybody together."

It's impossible when you have too many cheifs and not enough indians. O, and those cheifs are being protected while the indians are being led off to slaughter as scapegoats.

Jack Welch - you mean the guy who popularized' shareholder value and later recently took back those comments and declared shareholder value as one of the root causes of the downturn? All the while collecting the billions and billions of returns based upon lies and deceit? That guy right?

Screw you UNINFORMED right wingers.

conservatives are using the recession as an excuse to bust up unions. that is it.

Perhaps. Is that wrong, though? Unions are labor cartels that have assets into the billions. They are more powerful than many "evil corporations" that liberals try and take down.

Assets in the 'billions' huh? Don't you think that's kind of hard when only 7% of American workers are unionized? Yeah, there isn't such a thing as a 'richie' union...

http://online.wsj.com/article/...

The United Auto Workers is sitting on $1.2 billion in assets, making it, by that measure, the richest union in the country by far.

Altogether, the union's investments generated about $38 million in interest in 2008, according to the UAW's latest filing with the Labor Department.

That's just one union.

Unions are the outcome of people's exercise of the fundamental rights of expression, association, assembly and contract in a capitalist polity. If you don't like unions, you need to get rid of either the rights or capitalism.

I don't have to always side with unions to support their right to exist.

Americans have the right to organize and collectively bargain. That does not mean I always think they should win every labor dispute. That would be foolish, imho. Every dispute is different as every business sector is different.

yes, it is wrong and duplicitous to frame this as merely financial. for example, in Wisconsin the unions have already agreed to the financial aspects of the governor's proposal, but he is still pushing to impede their collective bargaining rights.

the rest of your comment is much too vague and politically-charged for a proper intellectual response.

There's nothing vague about the power unions have in this country. Look at the MLBPA vs. the NFLPA, to stay topical.

As for Wisco going for deeper cuts, it's a negotiation. Each side tries to screw the other, more or less. Isn't the governor trying to do a good job for the people of Wisconsin: Get efficient services for the people