I agree with you on the points that we should be able to select the best teachers for our schools, however, I think most of that is rhetoric designed to distrac

I agree with you on the points that we should be able to select the best teachers for our schools, however, I think most of that is rhetoric designed to distract from the fact that it's a budgetary issue. Selecting the best teachers and best schools requires school choice, not bureaucrats deciding for us who is best and who is not. School choice, vouchers and real reforms are no where near this debate. The debate is framed in this language to obtain popular support. It's a budgetary issue, remove the ethos and pathos and you'll find at the core of the issue a budgetary one. The council needs to eliminate $40 million dollars, one way to do this is to ensure all your teachers have no seniority and thus are all at the bottom of the pay scale. Layoffs will just remove the lowest paid employees so they all must be fired and then rehired to ensure that their previous seniority isn't factored into the calculations. A $40 million dollar deficit spread across 1926 teachers is $20,000 per teacher per year, you're not going to negotiate that kind of drop. Anyone want to bet that the avg. teacher salary minus the base teacher salary in Providence is about $20,000? However, a cold numbers based story like that wouldn't play well to the public so you need something else like selecting the 'best' teachers, and you can be sure that if the board was given the option that the 'best' would become the 'cheapest', especially in an uncompetitive market such as public schooling (aka. state sponsored daycare). I'm a big fan of real school choice, but this just seems like a way for the school district to lawyer their way out of an agreement, and obtain popular support by couching the argument in terms that are not on the table. If it's about letting the best teachers rise to the top, the school board should fire all the teachers, and provide vouchers for parents to use in obtaining their children's education. This is about firing a bunch of people and rehiring the same people at a lower price.