One reason for our poor public school system is teacher's unions!

The L.A. Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that the Los Angeles Unified School District principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing teachers who fail to perform. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000 each.

Using the California Public Records Act, it discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.

http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/854792/