While LD 1858, a bill intended to improve education, moves through the Legislature, various stakeholders will pat their own backs while claiming they are participants in improving education. They aren’t, and it doesn’t.

The bill claims to improve education by evaluating and removing ineffective teachers. It won’t.

Later, if the crime is investigated, we will find political footprints linking teacher unions, the Maine Education Association and the Legislature’s Education Committee.

We’ve all known wonderful teachers and ineffective teachers; we’ve known some that should never have become teachers. Our effective teachers know them and so do our children. Ask them.

It is known that ineffective teachers can retard their classrooms by half a year, and exceptional teachers can advance their classrooms by an additional half year. That’s a difference of one school year.

The bill, LD 1858, would require that a teacher, before being placed on probation, be observed as substandard for two consecutive years. That means that unlucky students assigned to an ineffective teacher for two consecutive years will essentially be one grade behind.

Worse, the next year will be the teacher’s probationary period, coupled and probably lengthened by a period of teacher rehabilitation.

The bill, which actually protects ineffective teachers, does nothing for their students, who will be denied the education and the future they need and deserve.

Thus, 20 to 40 students will be sacrificed to protect each ineffective teacher.

Oh, if only children had a powerful union and could whisper in the ears of legislators.

Richard Sabine, Lewiston