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beautiful

I am willing to bet Michael Daly a soup-to-nuts dinner at his favorite NYC restaurant that if LIFO is overturned and NCLB isn’t changed much during reauthorization, we will never again see a garden-variety K-8 music or art teacher reach his or her highest possible step on the salary ladder.

Now I’m wondering- if seniority rights are ended and there are teachers on maternity leave who plan to return in Sept, what happens to them? Will their status as new parents unfairly impact them? My first year as a new parent was terrible; I asked for support several times and got none, but if my seniority meant nothing and layoffs had happened, I am sure I would have been shown the door. Oddly, one of the people who felt I was a liability was blowing sunshine up my rear a year later when my kids made big gains on the test.

It stinks that Breinberg was bumped from his first school, but I don’t see anything unfair about it.

I have to ask. What’s up with Breinberg’s cornrows? He looks like a creep.

Daly, it would seem that you and Bloomberg are politically related where both are exploiting the economic stress and situation that many teachers are going through by only concentrating on the elimination of seniority rule. You took a proud moment of seeing these children show America their talent by exploiting those children’s shining moment and mentioning the elimination of seniority rule (civil service law for ALL unions) with respect to Mr. Breinberg’s future employment status. Here was an opportunity for you to tell Bloomberg that money is sorely needed to continue and expand the Arts. You know that the Arts have been cut to the bare bones to make room for testing and test prep material. I am sure that Mr. Breinberg understands the purpose of the seniority rule and why it is in place for all union workers, not just teachers. As you are well aware, corruption, cronyism, and nepotism do show its ugly heads when there are no laws in place to keep those tendencies at bay. Hence, the seniority rule.

So I say to you and to the mayor, don’t pretend to celebrate the successes of the children and their teachers who if you plan to crash the party with your insensitive comments.

Mr. Breinberg is undoubtedly an amazing, dedicated teacher. However, there are many, many amazing, dedicated senior teachers in the system who will never have such a public audience for their work, but still perform small miracles every day. They spend extra hours tutoring students, spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars of their own money on student supplies, and in some cases, become surrogate parents to students who have no other caring adults in their lives. If LIFO is overturned, many of these teachers would be on the chopping block for reasons such as whistle-blowing or the fact that they are two costly (hey, it would only take one “U” rating, something based solely on principal opinion/bias and not that difficult to do). Sadly, the general public will never know how miraculous they really are, as in Mr Breinberg’s case.