Another day, another embarrassing story about an appalling teacher in the New York Post.  Apparently, among other things, Queens teacher Francisco Olivares has: impregnated and married a 16 year-old ex-student (whom he taught when she was 13), sexually molested two 12 year-olds and, in 2002, ”backed a girl against a wall and caressed her arms while urging her not to transfer, saying, ‘I’m becoming very fond of you.’” Inevitably, Olivares has won all of his hearings and is now in the Rubber Room—paid $94,154 a year by the city.

Stories like these fall like jujubees from the magical world of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the result is that teachers are made to look like a bunch of malingering perverts.  And some, like Olivares, seem to be exactly that.  But many teachers are doing their best to clean out the Augean Stables that are New York City’s worst schools.  Stories like this make it hard for the city to recruit able and intelligent people into the profession, and the end result is that the students suffer from more mediocre teachers. Who wants to teach, when you will get paid less than half of the salary of a man like Olivares?

Should we then blame the New York Post?  The truth is that the real culprit is the United Federation of Teachers and the arbitration panel that is in its pocket.  The contract that determines whether teachers will ultimately be fired gives arbitration panels tremendous power.  And these arbitrators are often professionals who are very friendly to organized labor—partly because clauses requiring arbitration are demanded by unions, thus leading to a big payday for the arbitrator.  And so the arbitrators refuse to get teachers like Olivares out of the classroom

This provides a degree of separation from the union leadership.  A case like Olivares’s is so beyond the pale that union president Michael Mulgrew will not defend it.  But he doesn’t have to: a panel of faceless arbitrators does his dirty work for him.

National teacher corps like Teach For America are considered a prestigious choice for many high-level students—indeed, more Harvard students are going to TFA in 2010 than to any other employer this year.  But how many of those new teachers will stay in the profession?  As long as the union is wasting all of its effort protecting the Olivareses of the world, they will not stay.  Teachers should be able to look at their colleagues and be proud—not embarrassed.