Why Taveras fired rather than laid off the teachers

[boston bean]

Last night, the Providence School Board voted to put all 1,926 teachers in the city school system on notice that they might be out of a job next year. Mayor Angel Taveras says the move was necessary because of the city’s budget crisis.

But were the teachers fired? Laid off? Dismissed? Terminated? Given pink slips?

For many average workers, that probably sounds like a distinction without a difference – if you lost your job, you’d use any of those terms to describe your misfortune.

But in the world of public education, each of those words has a specific definition that can mean the difference between a job and an unemployment check for a teacher. That’s why educators begged the school committee to issue layoff notices rather than dismissal notices, to no avail, as my colleague Alex DiPrato reported last night.

http://blogs.wpri.com/author/tednesi/

And this mayor is a Dem.

When I was at the protest today, it was stated the unions didn't tell the teachers about the protest.

[Igel]

1. Sometimes "dem" and "repub" are just labels.

The school district my kid's in has precisely this kind of problem.

The way the values and goals are falling into place isn't "dem" or "repub" but "worker" versus "customer." The workers are scared for their jobs. The taxpayers are scared for their kids' education.

89% of the local district's discretionary budget is personnel. 20% hole in the budget. If you have 200 teachers at the school and you know you're going to have 140 if you have to lay off in order of increasing seniority *or* you know you could have 165 if you get rid of old-timers, what do you do? If you know that many old-timers were trained for different curricula and are struggling meeting minimum requirements--good at 9th grade science or general math 10, but now all the kids take biology/chemistry/physics and alg. I, alg. II, geometry--does that matter?

If you're one of those teachers, do you voluntarily yield the classroom to younger, cheaper, better trained teachers? That would be altruistic, a good (D) value. On the other hand, you'd have your retirement coming up, seniority is a key point in the union movement, and workers rights are a good (D) value.

You can't pull $30 million out of the air. You're a good Dem. You lucked out last year: At the last minute money flowed down from above to keep you from actually reorganizing or downsizing. So this year you have the budget cuts you were spared last year *and* a new round of budget cuts.

Let's be clear. Your choice is this. Is the *real* goal to have an safe educational system that trains and teaches kids the best it can? Or is it to keep public employees employed in accordance with their contracts and loyalty to your employees? Two (D) values are butting head to head here. Every time you try to reconcile the two you find that the only way to do that is to reconcile your debits and credits, and that just ain't happening.

In better times, as a (D) you'd just expect more money to solve the problem. Raise taxes. Not going to happen this year.

So, like all good politicians, both (D) and (R), you decide to go with the people who put you in office and hope for the best. There are parents than teachers. Sometimes (D) and (R) are just labels.

Then again, it's also a very nice trick: Because there are more parents than teachers, by siding with the parents (ostensibly) you show that you care about the kids. On the other hand, by firing all the teachers you panic the parents. They can pressure the state. They can voluntarily increase their own taxes. I've seen both happen. (Protesting teachers, on the other hand, reduce parental good will. When given the choice of your paycheck and benefits and the public good, you pick your own good benefits. Makes teachers into a parochial, selfish special interest. This is abysmally bad feel-good politics.)