Teachers like everyone else want what is best for their families. By forcing them to live in a crime-infested slum like Chicago, the BOE insures that only people who can't get suburban jobs will teach there, guaranteeing a lower quality of teacher.

The teachers are not responsible for the low quality of education, the administrators and especially the politicians are. It is like blaming the cop on the beat for the high crime rate.

It's the cops fault too.

They have these same residency requirements in the city of St. Louis for police, firefighters, and practically all civil servants employed by the city government. Needless to say the city has been in constant decline for decades while the suburbs and exurbs are growing exponentially.

It's the cops fault too.

Explain, please.

MB

As soon as East Orange NJ dropped them, after the Newark riots, every remaining white family fled the city.

Sure, OJ, the less choice the better; hell, make them live in the schools with the kids, even designate them co-parents. Reduce those obnoxious choices and we'll get the schools systems turned around lickety-split. You have these weird crevasses in your thinking where the readers from the Daily Kos could crawl up and feel right at home!

Jim:

It's called taking responsibility. Don't take government money if you don't want to be told what to do.

Doesn't the local government have a "responsibility" to hire the best they can, whether they live locally or not?

By the way, is this not a ruse used sometimes to eliminate an outsider racial group from gaining employment in a community. For instance proof of citizenship, being required before any employment can be had.(as in illegal immigrants, which by the way is a law that is on the books now)

Why the insult to policemen?

h:

No. They have a responsibility to their taxpayers.

Who runs police departments?

OJ: good point about government money; still, the rule does nothing to improve teaching quality, it just assuages liberal outrage over bourgeois teachers instructing poor kids. In the end, that "government money" is OUR money and should be given back to us in the form of vouchers. Now if I could only find a political party that agreed...

Jim:

Inner city districts pay a lot of money. Folks who want the money will live in the district if it's a condition of employment. Having folks who make good money live in the district helps gentrify neighborhoods or maintain the remaining good ones. It's a virtuous cycle.

OJ,

That's not true. The experience in NY has been that people have fled and NYC has a great amount of difficulty filling teaching positions with even the minimally qualified.

People will teach 70 miles away from NYC for less money so long as they can live far away from the animals.

Bart:

That has nothing to do with a residency requirement but the state of the school system, as your own comment points out.

The residency requirement exacerbates the problem.

Note that such city governments implicitly claim that their employment opportunities do a favor to the teachers(hence the reciprocity schtick.) So the bewailing about poor schools is more talk than belief(there's also some power-play mentality that's known to occur among politicians.)

Only a large city can implement this requirement.

Nearly every city has SOME neighborhoods which are less unsafe, where doctors and executives reside(although the schools are less so, as a result of student bussing.)

If the school system is going to pursue such requirements... demand that any city employee's school-children attend its schools. Wadda ya think will happen??