Earlier this month the Asbury Park Press published a Center for Union Facts op-ed explaining how the Newark Teachers Union is harming kids by protecting bad teachers, but not everyone’s happy with us. On Saturday, the Press published a letter criticizing us as follows:

Let’s follow the writer’s lead and allow Newark’s administrators to fire as many teachers as they want. Where are the replacements going to come from? Will there will be a steady stream of qualified, experienced teachers committed to social justice applying to work in Newark if they will have no protection from arbitrary administrators — and less pay — as would inevitably be the case without a vigorous union to defend them?

This is the classic — and depressing — response to criticism of union protection given to bad teachers. As CUF asked in another op-ed published earlier this year in The Orange County Register, why would we react to bad administrators by protecting bad teachers? Why don’t we raise the bar on them both?

Remember, our research discovered that .032 percent of Newark’s tenured teachers get fired annually. It’s hard to say the precise number of bad apples among Newark’s educators, but it’s more than one in three thousand.