

The story behind the rise and fall of America's master math teacher - whughes
http://reason.com/news/show/28479.html

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mkelly
I'd be interested to hear more from the administrators who wouldn't let him
run his program how he wanted to run it. Were they just being trolls or was he
causing problems for everyone else at the school?

Anecdotally (not so much from my own schooling, but from talking to teachers),
it seems that primary and secondary education is full of petty, childish
people who are so threatened by anyone competent that they try to sabotage
them. I have no idea if that's what happened here, though.

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patio11
Well, he was flouting union work rules routinely. Whether that counts as
"causing problems for everyone else" depends on your point of view. Union
officers generally consider it to be pretty darn important. They work their
entire lives to make sure that nobody can pull a stunt like a) creating a
separate advancement path outside of their control and b) negotiate higher pay
as a result of it. Note how that is a recurring element in the story -- "Hey,
we're demonstrably the best math teachers in the country. How about more
money?" "Nope, pay scale says you're less useful than a clock puncher who
stayed in one place for the same amount of time. Sucks to be you."

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smanek
I hate teachers' unions. My highschool's highest paid teacher was a gym
teacher (who had been around for 40 years), who made ~$150K. While I had a
great calculus teacher who only made $60K. The Calc teacher had a masters in
math, and had over 90% of his two sections of Calculus BC students get perfect
scores on the AP (and no student from his class had ever failed to pass the AP
exam).

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/04/2...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/04/23/at-
last-neoliberal-press-bias.aspx) The problem is that if the district wants to
get rid of a poor teacher, that teacher has the right to stay (and force a
younger, non-tenured, teacher to get let go instead).

