Let's put students' needs ahead of teachers' seniority and dollar desires

EXCEPTIONALLY devoted teachers should be celebrated. Instead, many of them are shoved out the door based upon a belief in the Philadelphia public-school system that seniority should always trump job performance. Many young, innovative instructors become the scapegoats of budget cuts because the layoff process is exclusively based upon who started teaching at the school district first.

Great teachers are an integral part to a student's academic success, and the difference between an effective teacher and an ineffective teacher can mean the difference between a student becoming a high-school dropout or a college graduate.

In the Philadelphia public-school system, standardized test scores as well as the number of students moving onto achieving a four-year degree are invariably low; meanwhile, the high-school dropout rate continues to remain high. The bottom line: This is a complete disservice to the children who are the future leaders of our city and nation.

I hope that teachers think about that before they vote to decide whether or not to join the picket lines. Missing precious instruction time pushes students back even further behind others who they're competing with to be admitted to college or to acquire enough skills to compete for a job in the workforce.

The current status-quo dysfunctional public-education system places teachers' desires ahead of student needs. The overwhelming majority of public-school teachers have a disdain for any accountability measures that link student success to teacher evaluations that rate their job performance. In the real world, anybody else who consistently underperforms at their job gets fired regardless of how long they have been at their current job.

An often-repeated fallacy that teachers-union lobbyists have been spreading over the local airwaves with television commercials and radio ads is that more taxpayer money dumped into the system without any accountability measures will guarantee better student results, and that the only real problem with the education system in the city is that there is not enough funding. The reality is that just throwing money at the problem would be cash down the drain if the culture of most public schools doesn't change how the institutions operate and function.

The teachers unions' main objective is to guarantee that the adults are able to cut ahead of the line in front of the children when it comes to the money that is reserved each year for the school district's budget. Our tax dollars are going somewhere, but not into the classrooms to enhance scholastic achievement.

It's time for community members to organize and to stand up and demand that their neighborhood schools will truly put students first and that our tax dollars, moving forward, will be spent wisely.

Schools are funded by citizens based upon contributions that they make from their wages to pay taxes. Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among all other large cities across America. If the teachers end up striking, the students who the teachers claim to be fighting for are the ones who will end up losing the most.

Jason Kaye

Philadelphia