Sol Stern writes about teachers in New York and seven practical ways school administrators and teachers unions can educate their students better.

I first discovered how teachers’ contracts can undermine excellence when my two children attended P.S. 87, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in the 1990s. After dropping the kids off one morning, I noticed a disheveled, middle-aged man shuffling aimlessly around the schoolyard as the children waited for their teachers to bring them inside. He seemed in a stupor; I worried that a homeless person had wandered onto the school grounds. When I pointed him out to a fellow parent, she giggled and explained that he was a new teacher.

That can’t be true, I thought, and went off to see the principal, who briefed me about the seniority transfer clause in the teachers’ contract. Among all the applicants for a posted vacancy at P.S. 87, our obviously impaired new teacher had the most years in the system, so he automatically got the job. The teacher’s former principal, wanting to get rid of him, gave him a satisfactory rating and encouraged him to change schools—a practice known as “passing on the lemons.” P.S. 87’s principal didn’t even have the right to interview the transfer teacher before he showed up for the first day of school.