Coming from across the river is the sound of union bosses from the New Jersey Education Association gasping because can't believe reporters from the Bergen Record didn't buy their spin the last few days, as the newspaper has been attempting to explain why public services in the Garden State cost so much (yet produce so little.)

The complete series can be found here. One of the things I like about it is that it has the appearance of a series in search of the Truth, rather than a he-said/she-said hodgepodge of balanced crap that doesn't actually take a stab at telling readers what is really going on.

Today's installment gives you a flavor. Note the quote from NJEA's top flack-catcher that "it should never be easy to fire a teacher." At least he's honest:

Daryl DeNitto is one of those teachers.

The kind who coaches the debate team and chaperones the prom. The kind who stays after school when he doesn't have to. The kind students in his history class buy ties for.
He was voted the best teacher at North Bergen High School this year.

Deborah Noone has taught in the same district three times as long as DeNitto. Four years ago, the state determined that she "failed to adequately monitor and supervise" her special-education classroom when two boys and a girl engaged in sexual acts. The district tried, and failed, to get her fired.

DeNitto makes $47,550. Noone makes $86,350.

New Jersey has the nation's most expensive public-education system, but the public doesn't always get the most for its buck. Teachers are paid based on how long they've been around, not on how well they perform. And tenure job-protection rights ensure that once they've taught for more than three years, it's likely they'll be around for good.

The state's largest teachers union says its members need tenure so they're protected from arbitrary firings.

"It should never be easy to fire a teacher," says Steve Wollmer, spokesman for the New Jersey Education Association. "You should have to prove your case."

But tenure rules -- instituted almost a century ago to prevent political interference in New Jersey school employment -- require districts to negotiate a complicated and expensive bureaucratic process to prove that a teacher does not belong in a classroom.
As a result, it doesn't happen very often.

For instance, not one of the more than 10,000 teachers in Bergen County has been fired via the state's tenure-hearing process for at least a decade.

Over the past decade, just three Bergen teachers have gone through a full, formal tenure proceeding; the state Education Commissioner -- the arbiter of tenure matters -- has allowed all of them to remain in the classroom.

This is the kind of stuff that makes NYSUT/Sheldon Silver's insistence that all new charter schools be automatically unionized seem so ludircous. Like, duh!