Too Much

If you think it takes too much for government employees to get fired, check out Reason's two-page diagram of how to fire a teacher in New York City.

Unfortunately, I think this says a lot about the modern education system, particularly in urban environments, when even the worst teachers are offered this kind of job security. John Stossel notes:

The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher. Most just put the bad ones in pretend-work jobs, or sucker another school into taking them. (They call that the "dance of the lemons.") The city payrolls include hundreds of teachers who have been deemed incompetent, violent, or guilty of sexual misconduct. Since the schools are afraid to let them teach, they put them in so-called "rubber rooms" instead. There they read magazines, play cards, and chat, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year.

The solution to this, of course, is to change the tenure laws and ensure that teachers are paid and retained based on their performance, not because of draconian hiring and firing rules. These rules should be established not to protect jobs, but in order to promote educational achievement by students; something that clearly does not enter the picture in New York City's practices.