Teacher tenure is considered holy gospel in most of America’s public schools.

But this policy does nothing for children, and tends to protect teachers who don’t necessarily deserve job security.  Why is it we never hear stories about tenure protecting “good” teachers instead of helping “bad” ones?

One bad teacher was former band instructor-turned convict Matt Lang, who is now sitting in an Illinois state penitentiary.  Lang was convicted of having sex with a 16-year-old student from Alton (Illinois) High School. But the mother of his victim is suing the nearby O’Fallon school district, where Lang previously worked, claiming administrators and union officials conspired to hide his previous relationship with an underage student.

And there was such a relationship. Lang ended up marrying a former student from O’Fallon High School, and it’s a legally accepted fact that he had sex with her while she was a student.

O’Fallon administrators and union officials deny knowledge of that sexual relationship. But for one reason or another, they conspired to hide the reasons for Lang’s forced resignation. The lawsuit claims their conspiracy allowed Alton school officials to unwittingly hire Lang.

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If only they were as determined to cut spending.  Alas, Congressional Democrats are hell-bent on taking care of their friends in the teachers unions.

The original $23 billion “Education Jobs Fund,” or “public schools bailout,” in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, fizzled, despite earnest lobbying by both the AFT and the larger National Education Association.

That number was trimmed to $10 billion and inserted into the Afghanistan war spending bill in a cynical maneuver cooked up by Big Labor.

While that passed the House, word is emerging that the pork-laden war bill isn’t going anywhere in the Senate.

But Big Labor’s pals aren’t giving up.  They’re a tenacious bunch that will find one way or another to continue spending oodles more on a bloated system that’s underserving America’s children.

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If President Obama is really serious about education reform, he ought to consider putting D.C. school Chancellor Michelle Rhee in charge of the effort.

This lady is not afraid of a major challenge, as evidenced by her latest brawl with the AFT.

Rhee is courageously targeting the sacred cow of teachers unions – tenure. It’s the system that pretty much guarantees a teacher a job for life, if he or she can make it through the first few years. It doesn’t matter if they go on to become good, mediocre or bad teachers. With tenure, they are pretty much protected until retirement.

But Rhee understands that such a system can no longer be tolerated in Washington D.C. schools, which have a dropout rate of nearly 40 percent. She knows that the school district must have the power to sift through the teaching staff, keep the good ones, work with the middle-of-the-roaders, and get rid of the bad apples.

She also understands that it has to work both ways. She’s willing to develop a compensation system that would offer teachers much higher pay, in exchange for the union abandoning, or at least reforming, the concept of tenure.

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