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re: The USA TODAY article on declining membership in the teachers unions.  This quote is most telling:
Demographic changes are shaping union membership numbers. Public schools
rely more heavily than ever on young, inexperienced teachers who quit
after just a few years and are less likely to join a union than in
previous years. In 1988, the typical teacher had 15 years of experience,
according to research by the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard
Ingersoll. By 2008, it was down to one year. “An increasing number of
them are not sticking around,” Ingersoll said. “There’s this constant
replenishment of beginners.”

I had predicted that pretty soon, public school teaching would be like a Peace Corps stint.

“There’s this constant
replenishment of beginners.” Now I see that this time has already come.

Goodbye career.

The Post, in its trademark fashion, has put a spin on the turnaround story that would make Hearst and Pulitzer dizzy.

Where do I begin?
*Indeed Bloomberg would have much to lose if he shut down good schools, but that’s not enough to make the assumption that because Bloomberg wants to close these schools, the schools must be bad. This is one of the biggest logical fallacies I’ve ever read.
*Putting arbitrator in quotation marks subtly questions the arbitrator’s credibility and authority to make the decision. Of course, given that it’s the Post we’re talking about, they knew what they were doing
*The city was not forced to close the schools: the city made progress with teacher evaluations in February, but the Mayor, with utter stubbornness, insisted with pushing the plan forward, for reasons that by this point must be all too obvious. This also invalidates the statement that there was “no go on any plan to rate teachers”.
*The city and the union jointly agreed which arbitrator would work on their case, which is why the following quote at best is vague: “Typical: Arbitrators, who must get the union’s blessing if they want
more work on such cases, are famous for letting even the worst of the
worst keep their jobs.” Exactly what blessing are they talking about? Does the union have more power than the city as to how arbitrators decide?
*The article says at the end “Teachers win. Kids lose.” Have they been living in a cave? Did they not see how students and parents united their voices with teachers in saying “Don’t close our schools?” Would they do this if they really thought the alternative would be detrimental?
*There is something wrong with the whole idea that the Post is trying to promote: that disagreements over teacher evaluations and happening to have poorly skilled teachers in the system merits turning 24 schools inside-out without knowing for certain what will happen, disrupting everyone’s lives and making already hard lives downright miserable, including the students Bloomberg claims he’s trying to help. Believe me, it’s not.

There are probably many other points I could bring out. Bottom line: the Post is biased against the schools for their own reasons, is walking in lockstep with Bloomberg, and is unreliable as far as giving an honest, objective opinion is concerned. Of course, this isn’t surprising given that the paper is owned by fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Indeed, “same old, same old” as the Post says, but in a different way: Billionaires for billionaires every time.