Why it's too hard to fire bad teachers.

• Author: Weele, Maribeth Vander

At one Chicago school, a teacher locked a special education kindergartner in a closet for hours for defecating in his pants.

Another teacher repeatedly used emergencies as excuses for being late, arriving minutes before 10 a.m.--the magic hour before which, under union contract, she could not be marked absent and be docked pay.

The principal of these teachers' school got rid of them the best way he knew how: He transferred them to other schools.

The alternative to such transfers is dismissal hearings that can take years to complete, soaking up a principal's critically needed time and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees from the school system. And even then, success is not guaranteed.

Public school officials throughout the nation complain about a shared problem: the Byzantine process required to fire inadequate teachers. Although good teachers are the single most essential ingredient in improving education, union power and legislatures have all but completely protected the tenures of the teachers who fail at their jobs.

The catch is that even small numbers of ineffective--and downright dangerous--teachers harm thousands of children for life. "Even if only five percent of the teachers in public elementary and secondary schools are incompetent, the number of students being taught by these teachers exceeds the combined public school enrollments of the five smallest states," Stanford Professor Edwin M. Bridges wrote in Education Week.

In one New York City case, the issue went beyond competence and into criminality. In 1990, Jay Dubner, a special education teacher, was convicted of selling $7,000 worth of cocaine and was sent to prison. But it was another two years before the New York City Board of Education finally fired the teacher after a year-long hearing that cost $185,000. The teacher argued that he should retain his job because he was rehabilitated, and a civil court decision overturned his dismissal. Even after years in jail, Dubner continued to collect pay checks. At one point, he worked a school job during the day while spending weekend nights in jail on a work-release program.

School districts across New York State spend on average nearly $200,000 and 476 days on each teacher dismissal hearing--more, in some cases, than it takes to convict someone of a crime in the courts, according to a 1994 survey by the New York State School Board Association. "You have to provide documentation on top of documentation on top of documentation," said Erica Zurer, vice president of New York City's Community School Board 13, which oversees one of 32 subdistricts in the nation's largest school system. As a result of publicity and a few flagrant cases involving drug and sex crimes, the New York State Legislature streamlined the process this year. As of September 1, school districts are permitted to suspend without pay any employee convicted of drug crimes or of abusing a minor, either physically or sexually.

In Illinois, the legislature set up an unwieldy process that in 1992 resulted in...