Andy Rotherham in The Atlantic:

Last year, Adam Gray was named the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. Despite the honor, Gray, who is in his twenties, was dismissed from his South Boston high school shortly thereafter because of rules that make seniority more important than performance when deciding layoffs. He now teaches at the prestigious Boston Latin… 

So while the crazy anecdotes and examples are amusing, the bigger issue is that we’ve created an environment in which our schools can’t really respond to the demands for improved student performance, or think creatively about productivity-enhancing reforms. In other words, at the very time we need our schools to become more effective and more agile for the job we need them to do tomorrow they are still saddled with yesterday’s constraints. That’s no laughing matter.