On July 21, Mike Quigley got word that he was being laid off from the south-side public high school where he’d been teaching science for the last eight years.
But all the other fired teachers, maybe as many as 1,000 of them, stayed fired.
None of these teachers would continue to receive salary and benefits for a year—a protection tenured teachers believe their contract guarantees them. In fact, the teachers’ union has filed a suit in federal court challenging the dismissals and asking for their jobs back.
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Mike Quigley was merely one laid-off teacher among many. But he’s made an important contribution to the generalized mood of fear and loathing among his peers: his experience added a layer of paranoia.
More important, an unsatisfactory rating alone shouldn’t have blacklisted him. It shouldn’t have kept him from being hired by another CPS school.
To which Moriarty responded: “Who said he [Quigley] is on a DNH list? There is no DNH list that I know of. As I showed you in last night’s e-mail, [Employee Services] indicated that he is NOT DNH’d. He is eligible to be rehired.”
They say the story told them this: There may be a do-not-hire list. You may be on it. If you are no one will tell you, but you’ll never work at CPS again.
