The math teacher walked up to my desk in the windowless computer room where I was grabbing a bite to eat while catching up on the British leader’s debate on C-SPAN’s website. “I have a question for you,” he asked. I was excited to explain to him the details of the Westminster system, but instead he asked “do you support the new law that would allow principals to remove teachers without regard to seniority?”

Well, there’s another peaceful lunch period shot to shit, I thought.

According to this Daily News article, Jonathan Bing from the Upper East Side and Ruben Diaz from the Bronx have indeed made such a proposal.  And there I was, surrounded by teachers, all looking to see what I thought.

So what did I think? Ultimately it was and is a variant of what I already thought and think… that is to say that I believe that principals should be able to fire whomever they want. Of course, this is not realistic option until principals themselves are put under such pressure that they will have a strong disincentive to get rid of quality teachers. And we are a long way from that world, so in the short term giving principals more power would just empower a huge corps of mediocre administrators to purge their schools of personal rivals.

But I didn’t say this in the teacher’s lounge. Instead, I stuffed the remainder of my roast beef sandwich into my mouth and garbled that “just because I support educational reform doesn’t mean that I support every example of education reform.”  

It’s hard for me to do this—my instinct is always for more conflict and more combat.  Maybe it’s because I’m a native New Yorker, or maybe it’s because I’ve seen in the poor neighborhoods the results of bad teaching, but I’m not afraid to say that incompetent people should be fired.  But if you have to work with these people then you sometimes have to take a softer line and angrily chew your lunch.