Some people are up in arms because NYSUT recently told teachers how to qualify for Tier IV before the new Tier V goes into effect. One blogger claims that NYSUT is gaming the system. In my opinion, this is one of the few worthwhile things NYSUT, or any teacher organization, has done in quite some time. It is their JOB to advise teachers of their rights under the law, so they finally got one right.
Detractors would say that NYSUT is simply helping teachers exploit a loophole in the law. Apparently, the detractors say, this is wrong.
We didn't hear much from these same detractors when Mayor4Life Bloomberg accepted the CFE funds that were meant to reduce class sizes and used them not to reduce class sizes. Not a peep was heard when said mayor began using school closings as a backdoor method of putting senior teachers on ice. The same deafening silence was heard when Bloomberg claimed that he could evaluate untenured teachers based on flawed test scores, in direct contradiction of state law, because these teachers happened to have been hired at the wrong time.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, a loophole is always acceptable when it's in the first person, such as "our loophole". It's only in the third person, "their loophole", that it becomes unacceptable.
Is there a single person out there who thinks Bloomberg wouldn't fire all senior teachers if he could find a loophole that allowed him to? I didn't think so.
