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California Students, Parents Sue Over Teacher Firing, Tenure Rules
The L.A. Times reports that a group of students and parents, fed up with what they see as overarching job security in California schools, are suing in the hopes of making harder for poor teachers to stay on the books. From the article:
"The lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit, advocacy group Students Matter, contends that these education laws are a violation of the Constitution's equal protection guarantee because they do not ensure that all students have access to an adequate education.
Vergara versus California, filed on behalf of nine students and their families, seeks to revamp a dismissal process that the plaintiffs say is too costly and time consuming, lengthen the time it takes for instructors to gain tenure and dismantle the 'last hired, first fired' policies that fail to consider teacher effectiveness.
The lawsuit aims to protect the rights of students, teachers and school districts against a "gross disparity" in educational opportunity, lawyers for the plaintiffs said." Perhaps related.
While in rare cases job security is a problematic issue due to incompetence (or worse, in extreme cases), stripping away job security typically creates even more, worse problems in the long term with an even faster race-to-the-bottom. If this succeeds, they could find themselves, instead, fighting against the school board hiring cheap, less-competent or less-experienced teachers because they can get rid of the expensive, experienced ones quickly and easily.
Also, teachers are, in most places, unionized (the article doesn't seem to mention if California teachers are or not). Go against the union in such a drastic manner and you may find yourself with a widespread strike on your hands.
The union negotiated contracts are designed this way to protect the union members that have paid the most dues. This is common across the board with union contracts. The unions care about the union members first, then the job itself, even though the individual union members may have different priorities. I'm not saying this is bad or wrong, as looking out for your own is generally a noble thing, but it's something that the courts have supported for forever and it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
Sorry, did I read that correctly?
Tenure? In state-funded primary and secondary schools? In a country as brutally meritocratic as the US?
Tenure is meant to promote academic freedom and allow brilliant scientists with a proven track record to express potentially unpopular idea.
It's not meant as lifelong guaranteed employment for people who can't cut it in the real world.
Any idea that seniority should come ahead of ability is fucking bullshit anywhere, but especially when educating our youth. Japan does this, and it's a fucking basketcase. We are better than that.
if when you as parents fail to live up to your responsibilities the teacher can have your child permanently removed from class because they are there to teach and not babysit?
I thought tenure was a way to keep administrators from messing with academic freedom. Without it teachers would "follow the party line" and never research or teach anything controversial.
It's easy to talk of "bad teachers" and say that unions keep them employed. But the truth is that "bad teachers" are the minority. Unions keep more "good teachers" employed at a livable wage than "bad teachers".
It is normal that the minority get the spotlight, just as it is normal that the Chihuahua barks the loudest.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Interestingly, Obama always supported the all-powerful teachers union in Chicago, who managed to get working conditions so good for their members that the schools had to cut the number of teaching days to afford those gold-plated teachers.
Great sound bit, lousy argument. Any cost no matter how small would be argued by the schools as some massive threat to their ability to operate. If our kids school division had to pay for new instruments for the music room, or new text books, or turn the heat on, they'd threaten cutting the number of teaching days to pay for it. The Chicago teachers union might well be gold plated... I'm not saying it isn't, but the fact that the school "cut teaching days" to pay for it doesn't tell us anything at all about anything at all.
As a direct consequence, this is one of the areas in the country with the lowest ratio of college grads.
Doubtful. Is there any demonstrated correlation between college grads and losing a few teaching days? The teaching year isn't uniform accross states, or developed countries... even local variations such as weather related school closures, snow days, power failures, flooding, not to mention teachers strikes etc also "deprive" kids of teaching days all the time.
Has anyone linked that to college grads? Or does it turn out that in fact a school year plus or minus a week or so makes very little difference whatsoever? I betting on the latter.
Since when have k-12 teachers been researchers?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Except professors don't teach at high schools, which is what this seems to be about.
And probably more to the point, the bigger problem is no one can agree on what a bad teacher is to be measured by beyond anecdotes. But I strongly suspect its "shouldn't have given my child a bad grade!"
Uhh huh... Meanwhile in the real world there is a real teacher shortage. And a move like this sends what message? When my niece asked what do I think she should study I told her anything other than teacher. Why? Because they are under paid, over worked, glorified baby sitters having to wipe the asses of both the kids and the parents.
I'm sorry but the statement that "nothing could be done" is a lie.
Baloney. I have personally complained about bad teachers, and I know other parents that have as well. I have NEVER heard of a teacher fired for incompetence, or anything other than blatant criminal behavior.
If the teachers were truly ineffective or incompetent, then you should have complained to the school's administrators and insisted that your students be removed. That is your right. If they refused, then you take the issue to the school board. If that doesn't work, you file a complaint with the state (and also against the teachers license if you actually have evidence).
Can you cite a single example of any of these things resulting in a California teacher being fired?
If you failed to do that, it indicates to me that maybe the teachers really weren't that bad.
This is an idiotic statement. That is like saying that global warming isn't a "real" problem because if it was you would have personally volunteered to stop breathing. The fact that I haven't dedicated my entire life to firing a single teacher doesn't mean that teacher "isn't that bad".
But let's assume your claim is true: that a group of parents really could get a teacher fired if they are willing to dedicated hundreds of hours of effort. Should we really set our standards so low that a teacher is only fired if they are so egregiously bad that parents are willing to do that?
And goodness knows, if YOU can't have it, no one should. The same people who bitch about "the war on sucess" or cry about class warfare ruining the country will get in a line to gripe about the sweet pensions and benefits that public workers, teachers, or union auto workers get because it is unfair that they can't get the same thing.
Working hard is the secret to success until someone gets something you don't then the game is rigged and it is all unfair.
And adding to this, the 90% of the teachers that are competent and conscientious really would LOVE to have the remaining 10% shown to the door. They really would, as those 10% are a drag on the rest of the faculty.
The problem is the double-edged sword of tenure. Remove the tenure protections and yeah, you get to fire those 10%. But in the meantime you've put those good 90% in the position where they have no job security and get watch their already low salaries stagnate relative to the rest of the economy, and they also need to worry about being fired for personal politics. A lot of those 90% are going to throw in the towel and walk out the door at some point.
So who will be left teaching your kids? Any recently graduated kid with a bachelor's degree who can pass the mirror test. And they'll stick around just long enough to A) get fired for complete and gross incompetence or B) get some experience and quickly move on to something else far more rewarding and lucrative. Oh sure, you might get a handful of golden souls who really give a damn and can suck up these crappy conditions because they are already retired from another profession or have a spouse who is making good money, but these folks are one in a million.
Tenure is a flawed system for sure. Bad people will look good just long enough to get tenure, then they will drag their feet until retirement, not caring a whit about anything. But that same tenure is a huge perk that the good 90% enjoy and desperately need for them to do what they do for the pay that they get.
Full disclosure - I am a tenure-track college professor and a member of my state teacher's union.
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Because none of those others who has to get a degree to become a professional have to deal with children. In addition I haven't heard of any CEO having his mother come to the board meeting and complaining that her boy isn't getting the job done because the board isn't helping him after work enough, while ignoring that little Steve Balmer has missed 10 days of work this quarter, and it still isn't his fault that people don't like Windows 8 UI designs.
Should there be some form of performance metric? Sure. It needs to be very carefully set up though, and the child's own performance needs to be a part of it as well as the parents. NO teacher is going to be able teach calculus to a kid who skips 2 days a week to babysit for his siblings because his parent(s) can't afford childcare. It also needs to be politics resistant, I don't want my kids teacher worried about their job because some new guy won an election. I want them worried about how to best teach the next chapter, and that is it.
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By the time they get to college, this "tiny difference" adds up to more than one semester.
Not all tiny differences add up. My parents used to pull me out of school for a week most years for family vacations etc. Over the course of school from K-12 then I lost a full semester easy. Plus the flus, doctors appointments, deaths in the family, snow days, easily another couple months. I STILL maintain it didn't cost my education anything at all -- and that was me actively "missing" actual classroom time where the other students were still present, vs the school just not having school for that time.
This applies to everyone, including people from Chicago. If you consider that people "clock out" an hour early, then Chicago students (and teachers) also do, so the gap remains the same.
Again no. They don't mentally check out an "hour early"; they mentally check out after they've hit their concentration / absorption / knowledge retention limit, or whatever you'd like to call it; or completed their major tasks for the day. Extending or shortening the "day" by an hour makes no difference to how long you can concentrate. It just changes how much time you waste after your 'done'.
[...] you can discard that because it's a mere 0.13$ in his pockets every minute...
No I can't discard taht. Because that's 13 cents a minute every minute. Its a small value, but it accumulates in a very understable way. But not everything works like that. Learning is more "chunky"; in that you learn in chunks. When I took math, for example, I was good at it, I absorbed a typical "lesson" within the first 10-15 minutes of the class, and then got bored. Some of my classmates had a rougher time, and it took most of the lesson. Others just didn't grok it even with 45 minutes, and needed after school tutors etc.
But the point is the lesson is absorbed as a chunk. Adding 1 minute to each math class I ever took would have been several hours more "math class" in my life but with no benefit to me whatsoever. The teacher wouldn't present 1/60th of a new concept in that extra minute that would graually accumulate and be the equivalent of university Calculus I by the end of highschool. That's not how learning works, spending 1 extra minute each day doesn't give you an extra lesson learned after the end of each month.
Either the teacher has enough time to teach the concepts or they don't. Kids learn at different rates, so the average lesson is designed around most of the kids fully understanding it within the first half of the period; the last half is is for the slower kids, and for practice problems.
Adding a minute to each class would have accomplished essentially nothing. It doesn't accumulate benefit the way getting paid a few cents extra per minute does.