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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.
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.
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.
Interestingly, that seems to be completely made up.
In 2012 there were 170 teaching days for elementary school teachers. After the strike and contract negotiations there were 180 teaching days in 2013. High school teachers also had a 10 day increase. In both cases, the length of the work day also increased (see the same link as before).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There is FAR more to union protection of teachers than featherbedding.
The people to blame for many school problems and whose effect is largely ignored in the current debate are school administrations.
Here's a classic written by a (now retired) terrific science teacher who fought the Rutherford, NJ, administration over how they tested students and won in court after a protracted struggle. Steve Masone greatly inspired many of his students, self included. He had the guts to take on a pretty toxic administration when he could have just coasted and sacrificed his students instead.
http://www.hammerofchalk.com/
The administrators concerned retired comfortably without consequences to their careers.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And that was an unprecedented show of government authority when it happened. It is highly highly unusual, and generally requires intervention from the highest level, such as when Reagan told the aircontrollers' union to fuck off
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!"
A little Googling indicates the prison guard union in CA gives twice as much to Democrats as Republicans, and spends much more than that on ballot initiatives.
I had a teacher who was a minotaur. We complained to the superintendant but he wouldn't do anything.
He would show up 20 minutes late, shit all over the floor, and complain about the humans who tresspass in his forest.
He wasn't even trying to do his job, but I guess competence or dedication of a teacher can never be questioned.
This is a true story. Its on the internet so you know its true.
There is no teacher shortage.
When you hear that schools are having a difficult time getting teachers, that indicates that the school/district/state is an awful place to work.
It's not unusual for there to be five applicants for every science position. There could be 30 for an English position. It's even worse for primary education. The only place there might be a shortage is in Special Education.
I thought everyone else on here would feel like me, and that's that school was a goddamn bad and nefarious joke after the 6th grade or so. I muscled through it because I've always understood that you have to play by the rules to an extent, you have to do a certain number of things to keep the system satisfied with you or you'll lose out in some major way or another. EG, had I not graduated, it might have been a lot harder to get into the school I'm now attending. Still, though, the fact that all these educators who were such fucking rank-and-file, stick-close-to-curriculum (party line, that is, in Mass.) bullshitters earned such a great living doing it... it really opened my eyes to exactly how fucked this world is. I think the goal of the education system should be to get kids to want to seek knowledge on their own. Any teacher who doesn't do that is failing. All of the teachers in my school career who did that? They were way before high school. High school is a bad joke, I'm sorry. Elementary school is where the most money should be spent, if you ask me. And I think there should be a lot - a lot - more technology instruction at that level. I think kids who show aptitude in technology and science should be given the tools, no matter their background, to continue to succeed in those fields -- if it interests them enough to fill out these forms and do these steps. Later it leads to internships? Imagine if they had something like that when we were going to school, 20-somethings. Think of where we'd be.
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
When you factor in the cost of living in CA, $70k doesn't go all that far....
But I digress. Six years ago, starting pay for a *full-time* high school teacher in my former home county of Brevard, FL, was $22k, with another $3k/yr bonus for a "high demand" science/math teacher. Since then, benefits, class sizes, and general conditions have only grown worse. The teachers I know (and I know many) routinely put in 10+ hour days, plus more weekends than not.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Is there any demonstrated correlation between college grads and losing a few teaching days?
10 calendar days per year less than the national average. 1 hour less per day than the national average. This adds up to Chicago students losing two full school years (or more) compared to the national average by the time they get to college.
I don't know if you really need a scientific study to make the demonstration that 2 years is a huge gap, but one thing is for sure: the odds that such study could be done by someone who went to school in Chicago are tiny - with a college graduation rate of 12%, which is 1/3 of the national average and even lower than Alaska.
lucm, indeed.
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.