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Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional In California
An anonymous reader writes "Tenure laws one of the most controversial aspects of education reform, and now the tide seems to be turning against them. A California judge has handed down a ruling that such laws are unconstitutional, depriving students of an education by sometimes securing positions held by bad teachers. The judge said, "Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience." The plaintiff's case was that "California's current laws make it impossible to get rid of the system's numerous low-performing and incompetent teachers; that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first were harmful; and that granting tenure to teachers after only two years on the job was farcical, offering far too little time for a fair assessment of their skills." This is a precedent-setting case, and there will likely be many similar cases around the country as tenure is challenged with this new ammunition."
Sound like it is a bad thing...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Goodbye Lousy Teacher's!
Tenure exists to ensure that professors can pursue unpopular lines of inquiry without being troubled by university politics. It makes no sense in primary or secondary education.
Perhaps it's more of an issue at the primary and secondary levels - at universities, it takes a while to get tenure, and the bad apples should be sorted out by then (although there are certainly those who get tenure, then do things they probably shouldn't). It does make me wonder whether there'll be a push for something similar at the university level, though. Given the horror stories in the press about how adjuncts and lecturers are treated, moving away from a tenured faculty (claiming "cost" and "responsibility" reasons, or whatever) might fit just fine.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That's just what we need. More instability in the job market!
It's worth pointing out the law was ruled unconstitutional vs. the California state constitution, not the Federal constitution. Any state that does not have a "right to an education" clause in their constitution probably has legal tenure laws, at least vs that argument.
The slightly breathless article claiming this is "new ammunition" for challenges in other states is overstating the usefulness of the ruling, especially considering the judge ordered California tenure law to remain in place during appeal. State constitutions are independent of one another, so a ruling in one state court carries very little weight in another state's court.
At the college level, tenure is an important consideration for professors. It allows research into areas that are unpopular in a contemporary setting without fearing for employment. It facilitates the free exchange of ideas that are so important in a proper educational setting. However, in a public school at the primary or secondary level, what new and contentious ideas are expressed? What fear do teachers have in parroting their lessons to the students? Lessons are handed down from on high and the teachers are responsible to ensure students are proficient (in theory). So why is it that we need public school teachers to have tenured positions?
I am open to thoughts on this subject, but based on what I know right now, providing high school teachers with tenure is a big load of crap. It keeps bad teachers in place and is simply one more outdated benefit that society can no longer afford. When high school teachers are working on original research and disseminating their results to students, then tenure is justified. Until then, it's just one more barrier to improvement.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
New teachers get the lowest performing kids. Veteran teachers teach the AP classes and honors classes. This is really the opposite as it should be. If teachers are retained or promoted based on performance, then those with students with higher skills will perform better. If a principal does not care for a teacher for whatever reason, he will just put the lowest performing, most troubled kids in that teachers classroom. This alone, will not solve the problem of low performing schools.
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
Except that the vast majority of universities in our country are more like secondary education institutions in that they exist to bring the masses up to speed rather than to foster research by the truly talented. Tenuring professors at a community college, for example, does not even remotely exist to allow these professors to pursue unpopular lines of inquiry.
The majority of the education system is like the head of the dog trying to catch the tail (the Ivy League and the rest)
I worked in schools as an IT guy for several years. I cannot tell you how many bad teachers were there simply because they had tenure. Far, far too many. Teachers should be judged by their ability to teach, impart knowledge, by their merits as educators. Full stop. Test results should count against teachers. As should ability to control the class at large. So many teachers fail in the basics of being an adult. Sadly, college does not prepare teachers to handle conflict, personality traits, student discipline, etc. Most teachers throw their hands up and either declare the children delinquents or send those same children to the office over and over again rather than try and get to the root of the issue.
I was blessed to have been given the chance to be a mentor for a student that wanted to go into IT via high school graduation and onto college. He was my intern for a school year. All he wanted was to learn in an environment that worked for him, not the stoicism of the classroom. I let him run with tasks to see him work and he shined. I spoke to the couselors about him and his grades for the year in other classes improved markedly because of a little care from someone. Schools suck largely because there is no accountability of the teachers. They "teach" students to pass the state standards exams. There is NO critical thinking taught, no thinking for yourself. Most kids in their senior year don't even know what a dangling participle is, let alone a gerund, or basics like using semicolons. My own intern thought Africa was a single country. He said others think the same. He couldn't find Israel on the giant wall map with the laser pointer.
Teachers need to be taken to task as well as school administrators. Education is not what it once was, sadly.
The thing is, what I see it do, working at a university, is protect old professors from having to do any work. We have professors who teach one class, or even none at all, do not have a research lab, and are barely around on campus. Yet they are not fired, because revoking tenure is a near impossible process. So they get to collect their paycheck and do next to nothing.
It doesn't seem to help with regards to unpopular research because you have to do a bunch of research to begin with to get tenure. Who decides if you get it? Your peers, of course. So if you show up and do unpopular research, well then you aren't going to get tenure. It is a very real popularity contest.
The only way it would help is if someone came in, didn't say what they really wanted to research, did popular research for 6-8 years, got tenure, finished up that research to satisfy the grants they had gotten, then started on their unpopular research. That requires an awful lot of planning and subterfuge. Hence you basically never see it.
It really seems mostly to function to protect a good old boys club and make sure that if professors want to be completely useless during their twilight years, but not retire so they can still collect more money and get to play big shot on the university's dime, they can do so with no real fear of retaliation.
There are important reasons for tenure in K-12 education, especially in this era. K-12 schools (and in turn teachers) in many areas receive incredible pressure from parents. It used to be if a child got poor grades the teacher wasn't the one blamed. Now there are many parents who have spoiled brats who they believe can do no wrong.
That being said, tenure's protections should exist but should make teacher's positions far less invincible than they are in many areas now. There should be a process of discipline and removal for poor teachers. It should be as objective as possible so as to avoid undue parental pressure.
Otherwise it creates a perverse incentive for teachers to inflate grades of their students.
I currently work as a technology director for a school district and have for other districts in the past. I see teachers spending the bulk of their time on netflix, pinterest, facebook, etc... Not teaching. I see students being given busy work in the labs creating idiotic power points on useless subjects and what do I see on my screen showing all the staff computer screens? I see those students teacher in their classroom doing up his fantasy football stats.
I even had 1 teacher who had 126 service calls to her room in 2 years. There was only 340 class days in that time, so she was avg. a call for help every 3 days. They all think they are gods gift and cant understand why dozens of their brightest students are doing everything they can to get into online courses.
Where I am now, I have the equivalent of an entire grade doing nothing but online college courses and other online courses. The students dont want to be sitting in a classroom with a failure teacher who does nothing but play youtube and netflix videos every day.
I hope this sweeps across the country.
TEACHERS!!!!!!! PAY ATTENTION TO THIS NEXT STATEMENT!!!!!
If you helped to get rid of the trash, it would make you more VALUABLE and you would get paid MORE.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND. When there are a hundred failure English teachers ready to work and 1 good one, guess how much the good teacher will get paid? If the failures are gone and the school has 1 teacher with a good recomendation applying, guess how much they will try to court you for the opening?
University professors have tenure so they can't be fired for research that goes against the groupthink. Public school teachers shouldn't be able to get tenure.
Also, I have personally seen this with chemistry and physics teachers. They can get whatever they want $$$ because their subject is hard, therefore other teachers dont want to do it. I have sat down with administrators trying to brainstorm how to get someone extra $$$ and get around the teachers union so we could actually attract competent teachers. When that fails, we follow the contract and hire the best we can for the $$$ the union says we can pay them.
This is great.... it's time to make everyone equal. I am a Marxist and don't understand why education is some type of protected class.
Finally, a judge with common sense in the most liberal state in the country, fed by the donation of teachers' union. Wha-da-ya-know ? There still are people with integrity. I meant the judge. Take an example from him big bald governor of shame...
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Everyone in Silicon Valley? I believe the the high tech SV actually is low tech when it comes to telecommuting. Just look at what the new CEO did @ Yahoo, no more telecommuting. They could save billions of dollars in lost time, gas and housing costs if telecommuting was used more heavily in SV.
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
They already inflate grades. At the last school I was a technology director for, we had 2 valedictorians and 2 salutatorians because 2 different camps of staff had already picked their winners at the beginning of the year and didnt like the other camp of teachers. What are the odds that 2 students will get the exact same gpa down to the 3rd decimal place and then to follow that up have 2 more students get the 2nd position down to the 3rd decimal place?
When you work in tech support at a school, you get to see what teachers have up on their screens all day (facebook, pinterest, fantasy football, etc...). It rarely has anything to do with school.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can't be. What next? PEU-Dem (Public-Employee Union-Democratic party relationship) found to be one party rule? Nah. A judge actually shedding light on Calfornia's corrupted system. It's got to be April. I'm sweating like a pig, it's 8 PM and the Sun ain't gone down yet though. Something ain't right. Damned pranksters.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Universities have decreased in tenure and didn't give it out easily to begin with; that is what I've been told, I don't have data to back that up but in my experience, only 1 person in the dept had tenure. It took the poor guy just 4 years from retirement to finally get it; the rest are probably not going to get it and they are not much younger.
Meanwhile teachers in k-12 only have to survive without making waves for 2 years and they are set. Now, people might hear that they can't be fired; but that is NOT the case. It depends on the system how bad that is.
The standardized testing system is a joke and you won't make it much better than the joke it is. Unlike most subjects, education is a FUZZY topic and trying to quantify it is is impossible to do. But we are making idiotic metrics so that we can "fix" the system along those metrics...
The reality is, from what I heard from a big player in the GOP is the plan is to RUIN public education and destroy the union as well. People like education too much so they must be made to hate it, then they will be receptive to formerly unpopular ideas like privatization of schooling and letting the poor fend for themselves -- a neocon dreamland. The expensive debt producing No Child Left Behind was designed to harm the system; it had no motives other than that. I got it from the horse's mouth.
Their plans have worked extremely well. we hate the unions, we hate teachers, we love accountability but hate that people wanting to keep their jobs are teaching to the tests we measure them on. Education is turning into wrote learning; which is great if your future is at Walmart or in a 1st world sweat shop. The elite can pay for better schools (because they are better humans; duh! they have more money ) so their kids can learn to rule. History repeats... One has to expect it to trend towards the norm of human history (which never was democracy or upward mobility.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If it is a pile, then rest assured it will be reinstated by the ninth circuit court.
The others will be evaluated highly time and again. Hence the majority of teachers (which are incompetent, have no doubt) tried to secure their positions by lobbying for these laws. The same is, incidentally, going on with professors.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My old professors who had retired from research were the best I had. The younger ones were all too focused on their research ("other job") to be an effective instructor. The older ones still taught because they loved to teach and it really showed in their classes.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
"Tenure laws one of the most..."
Can the poster buy a verb? Or maybe have their non-tenured English teacher buy one for them?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
That was just an underhanded way of firing X% of their workforce without doing an actual layoff. They knew many of their telecommuters wouldn't stay if they had to come into the office everyday.
However, in a public school at the primary or secondary level, what new and contentious ideas are expressed?
That's easy. A 3rd grade math teacher insists on his students memorizing multiplication tables. The principal disagrees, saying "drill and kill" is just outdated, and the students must use calculators instead. The teacher ignores the principal, who knows nothing of mathematics instruction. The teacher is put on leave for insubordination, and eventually fired.
So they get to collect their paycheck and do next to nothing.
That must vary by field.
In the sciences, if a professor doesn't bring in funding for research, doesn't have any administrative roles, and doesn't teach, they don't get a paycheck. Their lab space will eventually be taken away and they will be left with only an office (which may be downgraded, Office Space style, to let active faculty have the nicer offices). It's a pretty pathetic way to go out and very few people seem to do it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Clearly, the submitter was instructed by a series of undeservedly-tenured English teachers.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
So instead of having excessively permissive state legislation permitting abusive "fire at will" scenarios, coupled with excessively restrictive tenure laws carving out a special exception for educators, doesn't it make more sense to just deal with the source and amend the problematic state legislation on employment itself?
This is like quibbling over how much painkillers cancer patients should legally be prescribed instead of treating the cancer itself.
Your example shows that if a knowledgable person takes a single student under their wing, the student might thrive. Now, imagine yourself in front of a classroom full of 30 students, most of whom are totally uninterested in your field. Do you have the same amount of time to commit to that one student who is really interested? You can't compare yourself to "bad" teachers, for you might be a bad teacher yourself under the same circumstances. Anyone can be a great teacher to one bright, really interested student.
However, in a public school at the primary or secondary level, what new and contentious ideas are expressed?
Another example: Instead of participating in "social promotion", an 8th grade math teacher fails 50% of his class since none of them can add fractions. The principal considers this outrageous since the students have been taking lousy math courses their entire lives and deserves a break. The teacher disagrees, and is aware of state (California) law which says teachers have the final say in grades, unless there is an error in computing the grade, or fraud. The principal fires the teacher, since such teachers can not and do not exist in the public school system here.
Extract "school grades" from standardized tests with local added questions. Measure teachers by the delta in each student between end of last year and end of current year. That way they're only measured on how much the student learns. Put in a demographic correction and there you go. Doesn't add any more tests, really does measure the teacher's teaching instead of the student's performance at grade level.
Finally, the US does something good for their broken education system.
A hundred words of verbal diarrhea punctuated with "right wing idiots." Typed with Obama Fan Club secret decoder rings firmly in place on each finger, no doubt.
What makes teachers so special as never to get fired?! Welcome to the rest of the workforce
Bear in mind, I'm advocating loose government control instead of strict and not complete lack of control.
1. Strict controls increase the administrative costs of having to comply with the rules and regulations. For every requirement dreamed of by bureaucrats, someone has to see to it that the requirement is met. This will unnecessarily inflate the budgets of schools, some of which are already operating on a shoestring.
2. Strict controls distract the teachers from doing what they should be doing- educating students. I'd rather the teachers concentrate on how to improve their students' understanding of their lessons rather than be fixated on whether or not they have fulfilled their quota of hours spent teaching, etc.
3. Strict controls in the form of standardized curricula, teaching methods and tests stifle creativity and innovation. If we accept that all humans are unique and different, why do we apply a one-size-fits-all approach to educating students? And if we search our memories of our most highly regarded teachers, it is often the case that said teacher went above and beyond the standard teaching methods to teach the students.
4. Strict controls disempower the teachers from exercising their discretion and choosing the most effective means to educate their students. There is obviously a big difference between how you would teach a class of students from a privileged background as compared to say students from a ghetto neighbourhood who may be distrustful of authority.
These are some points just off the top of my head. I will grant you that there are many horror stories of lazy teachers, corrupt school administrators etc in the education system, but the better approach would be to remove these people rather than introduce more rules and regulations to try and control their behaviour.
I had a worthless tenured teacher in LAUSD high school who taught my Algebra2 class.
Do I sue LAUSD or the state of California?
Sued for establishing religion in violation of the First Amendment as applied to the several states by the Fourteenth, perhaps?
Why should older teachers be (more than a little) higher paid? Is their productivity higher because they teach a larger number of students in a year? Do they teach the students who have the hardest time learning? Is "older" equivalent to more effective?
Do public schools exist to provide teacher paychecks? Or are they there for children to learn?
Without tenure, you're free to go work somewhere else if you find the current environment too oppressive.
Not if the oppression is at the level of an entire school district and you need both your income and that of your SO to make your household's ends meet. Worse, not if the oppression is at the level of an entire state school system.
It goes both ways; there may be a lot of sub-par lazy professors out there, but the fruits are so valuable that you can see it as buying a lottery ticket that actually has a positive expected payout. It's hard to picture a world where breakthroughs on difficult problems and honest research that lead to controversial findings don't exist, so we get too used to it - and forget these can't be allowed to happen if they are hindered by poor academic culture and policies.
A lot of professors that work hard are protected that way. Old professors also do not have to directly compete with young researchers, so it's much more likely a committee would make sensible faculty hiring / tenure decisions that are free from conflict of interest. It's another issue that academics have to deal with other kinds of competition, such as research funding, as well as erosion of the tenure system by e.g. abusing adjunct professors.
There do exist professors who switched to less hype-driven research topics once they got tenure; for the most convicted, it's part of playing a game to get their messages through. As you can see it's already a hard game to play, so we don't really want to make it even harder. It's also easier (and quite common) for researchers to move on to more difficult topics after they get tenure, where doing it before tenure is close to self-destruction. Andrew Wiles used his tenure status to gain 7 years of solitude, slow publishing small pieces of research he accumulated previously, just enough to avoid getting fired, and proved Fermat's last theorem, a centuries-old open problem. And there are actually more of these people than you think, that are willing to play some games while working hard even when nobody's watching.
It's also not so clean cut that you can only do popular research to get tenure. Having a "good old boys club" can do bad and do good; a bad academic culture is harder to attack, while good academic culture is also more easily preserved. At a place that has a well-established healthy culture, it's easier to do `unpopular' research and still get tenured, and keep it that way. Sure these tend to happen in top institutions with an abundance of resources and strong attraction to top researchers, but it can be sustained partly because there are strong protection mechanisms within these institutions.
Does the tenure concept need to be refined? Probably. Does it bring good to all universities? Probably not. But it is one of the strongest foundations of a thriving academia, which far-reaching effects, like a bottom piece in Jenga, so you need a view of the big picture and bring a much more stronger argument before you can take it away.
Everyone wants only the best and most talented teachers in the schools. Overlooking the labelling of teachers as "terrible" and "lazy public service employees". The best teachers, with bargain rate starting salaries. The best teachers, who will be denied pensions or retirement if they don't perform for 30 or more years in an oppressive bureaucracy. The best teachers who could otherwise be working in private industry, writing quality textbooks, expanding scientific knowledge, exploring the depths of culture, instead of babysitting the cretinous offspring of John and Jane Sixpack.
You don't get to have the best teachers. You get to have teachers who WANT TO TEACH. And we should support those teachers, we should be throwing money into the school system. That Silicon Valley libertarian goat fucker can go fuck a goat.
Tenure is a mixed bag. Yes, it can protect bad teachers, but it also...
1) Protects experienced senior teachers. You might not think this is important, but guess what? Older, experienced teachers are generally more expensive and have more political influence. Hip new administrator comes in, wants to to change things up, slim down the budget. Get rid of the older teachers first beacuse the younger are cheaper and easier to control.
2) Protects good teachers. You know the ones that actually teach and care about education, and don't just give A's to everyone for showing up and sitting at their desk. Actual teaching and enforcing academic standards tends to upset certain kinds of parents. Administrators don't like vocal and upset parents.
3) Protects teachers that push against the administration. Not teaching to the test, enriching the curriculum, doing what might be considered risky things by some ( lab experiments, field trips, etc). Administration often doesn't want this, because it creates headaches for them, but teachers want it because it enhances the education of their students.
4) In areas with strong influence by outside political groups, protects teachers that teach controversial subjects. Science vs. creationism is one example, but certainly not the only one. History, economics, literature, art...all of these can have controversial topics. Of course, we don't really teach these anymore, but that is a different topic.
Whether or not tenure exists and how it is granted is really missing the point. If you want to improve the quality of teachers, we need to be looking at the evaluation systems that are in place, whether they exist, and why they may or may not be working. Most teachers simply are never evaluated ever, or they are evaluated in completely useless ways. Address that, and then maybe we can deal more easily with underperforming teachers, adjusting the tenure rules as necessary but keeping its major benefits.
There is a right to a quality education In CA's constitution. Also there must not be disparities between rich and poor, black and white, etc.
The lawsuit claimed that poor, minority students were disproportionately damaged by last-in first-out layoffs and early teacher tenure because newer teachers will take jobs in low income schools. So when they have to cut heads district-wide, poor schools get hit hardest. They can't lay off the worst teacher in the district, only the newest one.
The plaintiffs pounded home the message that ineffective teachers harm students, and ineffective teachers are prohibitively hard to dismiss due to 5 specific job-protections enshrined in CA law, and poor students are much more likely to be stuck with an ineffective teacher.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
When I saw the above sentence my alarm bells rang
Why would a bad teacher only affected (and disproportionately affected) poor and/or minority students ?
And who are the minority students ? Those coming from the South of the Border ? Those with a dark complexion ?
How come then the poor White and the poor Asians are never counted as students needing help ?
Why ?
Re. Why should older teachers be (more than a little) higher paid?
Because they are more experienced, duh!
Would you hire an experienced surgeon to operate on you or one just out of school? Would you hire an experienced lawyer to represent you or one who just passed their bar exam?
So why the question with experienced teachers? I suggest you take a look at your influences, sources of information and your idealogical persuasions for an answer.
Because they are more experienced, duh!
How much more valuable is the 6th or 7th or 8th year of experience? If the students learn more, then teachers would be happy to be paid based of student test scores.
Would you hire an experienced surgeon to operate on you or one just out of school?
Teaching isn't surgery. If a surgeon has done a procedure 300 times, is it really a lot more valuable to have done it 600 times? I'm pretty sure most surgeons get paid at the same reimbursement rates for a procedure whether it's their 300th surgery or their 600th.
So why the question with experienced teachers?
Because teacher salaries are divorced from the value of their teaching.
If its no good for teachers, then its no good for CXO's. No special treatment goes all around. Want extra money? Work overtime. I don't know about California, but where I live, teachers are required to work from 8:00 to 4:30, then from 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm, Monday thru Saturday. Lesson plans are checked by the Principal daily. Student evaluation charts are to be done weekly. The curriculum must be followed. Students who are falling behind will need extra help and extra material, which needs to be checked. Tests made up must follow the curriculum. Marking assignments must be done within 3 days of the assignment date. Special needs students need extra help/assignments/exercises/marking. Extras that are needed and that the school can't afford the teacher will have to pay out of pocket. I don't know how many CXO's would work so hard for so little return. I doubt any would. Where I live, teachers must have an education degree. Teachers are evaluated on a monthly basis. Parents complaints are taken into account, but every parent has always described their child as the most gentle creature alive, and would never use 'lazy, sleepy, disrespectful or holy-terror' to describe them. Parents never-ever send their children to school without breakfast (but the school has a breakfast and lunch program nevertheless). Those who would just bitch about teachers have never heard the words 'lesson-plan', don't know what it is, and really believe the teachers day is over when the kids go home. They are trolls and tools and don't know the job from a hole in the ground.
All that'll happen is the kids in the disadvantaged areas will now have no teachers.
You'd have to offer me a LOT to work in a bad school, but I'll bet pay is the same or less than in the good areas,
the only thing making it viable for even bad teachers is 'tenure'.
So, you've just got rid of that, market forces take over - well doh, we can't get even bad teachers in these areas now.
The only way it would help is if someone came in, didn't say what they really wanted to research, did popular research for 6-8 years, got tenure, finished up that research to satisfy the grants they had gotten, then started on their unpopular research.
I kind of thought that's what every professor did. These guys aren't stupid after all, they know that tenure is the goal and see what it takes to get there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tenure is not the reason that the poor neighborhoods are the dumping grounds for bad teachers. The best teachers will get the jobs they want in the best neighborhoods. Without tenure I don't expect that teaching will become more attractive to the best candidates. I am surprised that the judge is really spewing this rationale. Judging by the original motivation for tenure and the politics behind its opposition this is more about crusading against government spending by those who can afford to buy off our elected officials.
Are you happy to be judged based on factors entirely outside your control? Cuz in this universe, the number one factor in a student's performance is the home he goes home to at the end of the day. A shitty teacher in Beverly Hills is going to have better standardized test scores than an awesome teacher in Detroit. But that's frequently a feature, not a bug, for social darwinists.
Uh, yeah? That's 300 more times to see something unexpected and learn how to deal with it before he gets to you.
Says someone divorced from the reality of both work and education.
Because they are more experienced, duh!
How much more valuable is the 6th or 7th or 8th year of experience? If the students learn more, then teachers would be happy to be paid based of student test scores.
There is no scientific evidence that any standardized test of students can demonstrate the ability of teachers, and quite a bit of evidence that it can't. Well-designed tests can give information about broad patterns like entire schools, or the nation as a whole, but they can't say anything about an individual teacher.
Just about all education experts (like Diane Ravitch, for example) who have looked at the data have found that the most significant factor predicting student test scores is the students' family income. You want to raise test scores? Give parents more money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
By Valerie Strauss
May 3, 2014
Louis C.K. tweeted “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!”
Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, took him to task and asked Diane Ravitch to critique what he wrote. Ravitch criticized Nazaryan and defended Louis C.K. on her blog. Nazaryan makes the false claim that teachers' unions oppose Common Core. Actually, the NEA and AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, which they support, but they complained about implementation after their members complained about lack of resources, professional development, curriculum, etc.
the American Statistical Association issued a report a few weeks ago warning that “value-added-measurement” (that is, judging teachers by the scores of their students) is fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable. The ratings may change if a different test is used, for example. The ASA report said:
Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions.
Report by American Educational Research Association/National Academy of Education said test scores are affected by factors beyond the control of teachers.
Diane Ravitch:
Your belief in using test scores to hold teachers accountable has no research to support it, nor is there any real-world evidence. Many districts have tried this for four or five years and there is no evidence–none–that it produces better teachers or better education.
It's designed to prevent about everything you see being proposed after it is removed. Hopefully this can be strung out long enough so that this ruling can die off for lack of standing.
As for the people that think it has no place below post secondary level, consider that it protects from regression in curriculum (such as known in Kansas and Tennessee) as well as indirect threats to employment (such as done with North Carolina's permatemping mandate for teachers).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sure, tenure makes no sense for schools.
But, what I'm really wondering is: Just what was the creative logic that the /judges/ used to conclude that tenure violated something (civil rights?) enshrined in the state constitution..
The "creative logic," as you correctly describe it, was that one of the consequences of unions was supposedly that they kept incompetent teachers on the job, that this was harmful to students, and that it was more harmful to black, minority and poor kids. Therefore, it violated the non-discrimination provisions of the 14th Amendment.
It's quite a chain of events from tenure to discriminating against minority and poor kids. Of course there's no evidence to back this up.
There's a more direct connection between school funding and discriminating against minority and poor kids. (The original purpose of charter schools was to be able to run state-funded, private schools known as segregation academies that could refuse to admit blacks during the Civil Rights days).
There's a much more direct connection between family income and student achievement. So if you really want to eliminate discrimination against minorities and the poor, then you should raise their incomes to Western European levels.
The plaintiffs pounded home the message that ineffective teachers harm students, and ineffective teachers are prohibitively hard to dismiss due to 5 specific job-protections enshrined in CA law, and poor students are much more likely to be stuck with an ineffective teacher.
The plaintiffs pounded away with a white paper that was never peer reviewed and never published by conservative economists who massaged data to get the results they wanted. As I understand it, this is the only paper that came to such a conclusion.
A scientist would make predictions and then try to confirm them in the real world. Economists don't do that.
At the time a teaching position was a super sweet patronage position that a politician awarded his friends.
If you take a look at the South and their regressive remake of education, especially North Carolina, you'll find that old system returning.
but the reasons that necessitated tenure are long gone, and all teachers are protected under the standard laws for hiring and firing, which cover us all.
...which are being eroded away by organizations like ALEC. Thankfully there are sensible states like Ohio that figured out how to get rid of these kind of groups.
They also have a strong union that will ensure protections.
I assume you're not a resident of any state in the South, inter-mountain West as well as not being a resident of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, or Pennsylvania.
So there's no need for special laws that give teachers more advantages than everybody else at the expense of their students.
There's no need to abandon tenure when you can establish the very "van der Snoot" academy that you always wanted.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The administrator doing that would be sued into oblivion and never work in education again
Only if they're in a sane part of the US that doesn't recognize any conflict with religion and evolution (read: not the South).
Now if you were talking about the Deep South, they'd be sued into oblivion and blackballed for not firing someone.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why not simply let the [overused libertarian bromide]?
If not for how private schools operate, you might have a point. On the other hand, not everyone has the option of being accepted at van der Snoot Academy or affording it - which is how you see the ugly side of private schools and how they don't work.
In the South, tenure is more related to union/protectionism than to academic freedom by virtue of cultural norms.
Fixed that for you.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Research also requires funding. A tenured professor wanting to do unpopular research might not get fired, but he won't get funding, either. So the research doesn't happen.
"And the history teachers never bothered to mention the Germans and Italians that were in American concentration camps alongside the Japanese."
Yeah? My mother had an italian surname and she joined the Navy. The Japanese-Americans were shamefully interned, but I'd like a reference to support your claim of internment of German and Italian Americans. If you're referring to POW camps, the German and Italian POWs were, by their own accounts, well treated, well fed, and given the option to remain in the US at the end of the war.
Tenure in elementary and secondary schools makes good sense. Otherwise, the school administration. ever eager to save a buck, would lay off the older, higher-paid teachers, and hire new ones at lower wages. Tenure isn't what it used to be anyway, with teacher annual competency reviews and three-year recertification programs. Fail any of these and you're out. Tenure, correctly managed, retains older, experienced teachers, even though they cost more.
i never understood why tech people think that they have the right to not go to the office.
you could telecommute to your classroom as a teacher too, video phoning in the lectures each day, what could go wrong?
face to face interactions is worth more than the cost of commuting in.
yes it does. I've had employees who litigate like crazy because they got fired because a) did not show up to work on time (hours late at a white collar job) and had a co-worker swipe their fob to "clock in", b) were shopping all day on ebay/amazon and then went off to a two-hour hair appt during core work hours ( and we were generous with flex-time), and c) dicking around the office and having their friends come in to chat beyond lunch, which is very unprofessional. Needless to say, these workers were all unproductive. Me and others have tried to reason with them, but their behavior would just come back a week or two later. If the upper-mgt or the company was at fault, then others in the same rank would also dick around, but these were isolated employees at a span of 10-12 years in my professional experience in 3 different career paths (all white collar). Personally, I don't like to micromanage, nor is it my job to devote time to do so. I have my own projects and coding to do, and as mgt, I coordinate efforts and troubleshoot problem areas. It is not my job to nag. I don't even care if you watch the occasional youtube, but if you disturb others and only work effectively for less than 3 hours, I reprimand those people.
There are people out there who just don't want to do work. They constantly ask for time extensions. I usually give 2 or 3 - other people in the same rank can finish it before or by deadline. I'm not their friggin' parent. I can see the pros and cons for work-at-will and tenure. But there are bad apples at both end of the spectrum. And I respect tenure, particularly at universities, but the amount of publishing associate professors and other non-tenured folks are expected to do these days (service work, etc) is abusive. But that's another topic.
Having a job is not a right; it's a privilege.
Well, in today's 'Merka, we don't cotton to none o' that fancy book-larnin'.
Dem kidz whut read dem librul lies all think Noah warn't d' reason we have spaghetti goats and turnip sheep.
Heck, The Flinstones is all the history they need.
Basically, we don't give priority to teachers. I don't like tenure, but I also see lots of politicians (armchair ones at home, as well as ones sitting in office) seeing teaching as "fair game" for political battles.
That goes for the Left, as well as the Right.
When has guaranteed employment divorced from demonstrable performance ever delivered a good result?
I do feel for teachers because by-and-large we don't pay them enough to be the teachers and counselors and
parents that they end up being in practice, but to me that's just an argument to pay them more (which we
should) and pay extra to the really good teachers. We should also contemplate allocating our resources
based upon need vs which district (and by extension property taxes) they live in because in the end, 20-40
years from now, if we don't educate these kids and prepare them to take advantage of the opportunities our
nation has to offer, intead of them working, paying taxes, and by so doing paying to take care of us... they
are going to be 20-40 years older, in jail or on public assistance with us paying to take care of them. We've
got to come up with incentives and solutions that work for both students and teachers.
What is so special about primary/secondary teachers that means that teachers with tenure are automatically better to retain than those without? If it's really a better system, shouldn't all employers base their promotion/firing decisions on seniority rather than merit?
I work at a job where I am promoted over more senior people if I do well and will be fired if I do badly. While the company is far from perfect at judging, it still does a much better job of choosing who to retain/promote than mechanically basing it on seniority. I can't imagine how we'd benefit by saying that we can only fire employees that are new (instead of ones who are unproductive) and that our best employees would be permanently stuck behind the more senior ones. In fact, I imagine we'd go out of business.
Mike
Interesting point, but I think the reason for the younger ones focussing on research is not necessarily because they don't like teaching, it is because their chance of attaining job security depends on them focussing on whatever keeps them well regarded and hence likely to get interviewed another short term contract at the end of that teaching year. That something is probably more balanced towards research outputs (regular high quality journal articles being published) than outputs from teaching.
I don't know about the USA but in the UK its not unusual for younger academics to have to pursue consecutive short term contracts for several years, each contract being 1-2 years long, before they have a chance of 'tenure' - a 'permanent' job (something that is open-ended and won't finish in months).
Why should older teachers be (more than a little) higher paid?
In pretty much any industry you can name, for any given job workers with more experience on the job tend to be paid more. There's nothing special about teaching in this regard. The only real difference is that in union shops the pay raises tend to be set by policy, rather than doled out semi-randomly by management whim.
This isn't a theoretical thing either. My father-in-law taught high school English for 25 years, which made him the highest-paid teacher at his school. So of course the first thing that happened when his principal retired was that the new guy tried to get him fired (and then predictably bitched about being thwarted by the tenure system). Even with the unions and the tenure he was forcibly retired.
This anti-tenure stuff is directly aimed at older experienced(=expensive) teachers.
The correct fix is simply to say that Tenure does not protect a teacher from underperformance, willful misconduct, or gross negligence.
Standard Disclaimer:
This ruling addresses the faults, as seen by the Judge Rolf Treu, of how these specific tenure laws are written and implemented. If other tenure laws allow firing of tenured teachers for proven just cause and tenure selection was given for those teachers with long proven positive track records, over 5 to 10 years, then the decision could have easily gone the other way. To imply that all existing Public School teacher tenure is at an end is an extrapolation nearly to the point of nonsense because tenure laws can be changed to address the faults found by Judge Treu in the existing laws.
All those young adjunct professors who are publishing like mad, refusing no committee assignment, and enduring any indignity their superiors can dream up in the vain hope of grasping the brass tenure ring. Often the decisions of the tenure committee are inexplicable, so you have no option but to put your nose to the grindstone and pray.
That doesn't excuse the attitude "I've got mine, to hell with this place," but it makes it more understandable.
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teaching requires face to face time, typically tech work does not. That is why things could go wrong.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Frankly if teachers are only contributing 1-14% to test scores then I have to wonder why we employ them at all. That's an abysmal number. We could replace them with scarecrows or hobos and still get those numbers.
Also, as I said before, I'd much rather have guesses based on data that is "fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable" than guesses based on nothing. And right now, we have nothing.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Honestly, quite often they're one and the same.
* A few years left
* Often don't want to be there, but can't retire yet
* Don't want to (or can't) learn new teaching methods, technology, or topics.
* Expect to be treated special due to age/seniority, especially by younger staff members
I've worked in multiple school districts. While there were some wonderful older teachers, the trouble-teachers were by far more in the camp of old and/or close-to-retirement VS young. They often didn't follow school rules, were disrespectful of younger staff, and generally not very effective at teaching. Their classes were ill-managed, and they tended to teach "the book" which means students were given some pages to read while the teacher played solitaire or napped at his/her (more often "her", but that could just be the gender distribution in my schools) desk.
Younger teachers were more active in monitoring their classes, more interactive with students, more involved with extracurriculars, and generally more easy to engage by both students and staff. There also made significantly less than their older counterparts. I don't know about firing, but perhaps a more normalized "performance-based" wage would be beneficial.
Again, this is not *all* old teachers, it's just that the curve tended to go that way. Getting set in one's ways and/or jaded can apply to many job types, but in education it's often fairly destructive to the students.
This is another one of those political talking points that amount to nothing more than dishonest quibbling. Yes, the kind of "tenure" that university professors get would make no sense for a high school teacher, but that's not what "tenure" means in public schools. It has the same *name*, but it means something *different*.
It's practically impossible to get rid of a university professor with tenure. An elementary school teacher *can* be fired, but only for specific causes. Here are the list of causes which, under my states laws, a tenured public school teacher can be fired:
(1) inefficiency,
(2) incompetency,
(3) incapacity,
(4) conduct unbecoming a teacher,
(5) insubordination
(6) failure to satisfy teacher performance standards
(note) teachers can also be laid off due to staff reductions.
This seems like a pretty complete list of the justifications a reasonable person would need for firing a teacher. If a principal has documentation of any of these causes, the teacher is out. Immediately. The teacher can appeal to an arbitration board, but pending any reversal of the firing the teacher is not allowed back on campus.
It's actually quite straightforward to fire a tenured teacher. Two of my kids teachers were dismissed, even though they had tenure. One for gross inefficiency, the other for conduct unbecoming a teacher (she told a black student he should "go back to the plantation"). The teacher fired for bad conduct was the head of the local teacher's union. The union did not make a stink in either case; it generally doesn't. It's OK with dismissals for cause, so long as there is documentation and proper procedures are followed. If there weren't documented cause or the teacher didn't get his right of appeal, they'd fight that, as they should.
The myth that you just *can't* fire a tenured public school teacher is sometimes spread by lazy principals. They'll tell unhappy parents, "Gee, I'd like to get rid of that one, but he's got tenure. It's practically impossible to get rid of a tenured teacher." There was a case like that in my town where the principal kept telling parents there was nothing he could do about a certain teacher. Then they school got a new principal, and a few months later he fired the teacher in question.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I have watch awesome newer teachers have opportunities ripped from them by horrific teachers who had "seniority" not only is this unfair but probably results in the loss of newer better teachers along with the fact that fewer great teachers would even enter the educational system. But this seniority would not only serve to protect horrible teachers but probably attracts them as they would know that in many other lines of business they would actually have to perform.
Found the Tentative Decision at http://studentsmatter.org/wp-c...
On page 8 it says
"Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective."
There is a huge difference between 1% and 3%. (That's like saying "I'll be there in 5 hours +- 2.5 hours"). On the other hand, how many "grossly ineffective" workers / managers are there in other professions?
Now, why have these teachers been hired? Is eliminating tenure really going to change this figure? Are competent teachers going to get fired because they don't have tenure? Why is the waiting period only 2 years? Similar considerations are discussed at http://intl.kappanmagazine.org...
With complicated systems like this, it makes no sense to look at one single element, and blame only it. So the decision will have large gaps in the logic.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
However, in a public school at the primary or secondary level, what new and contentious ideas are expressed?
That's easy. A 3rd grade math teacher insists on his students memorizing multiplication tables. The principal disagrees, saying "drill and kill" is just outdated, and the students must use calculators instead. The teacher ignores the principal, who knows nothing of mathematics instruction. The teacher is put on leave for insubordination, and eventually fired.
As an added bonus, if the teacher is not insubordinate, those students will be selectively examined, found deficient in multiplication and then the teacher blamed for their poor performance. I've had good teachers and bad in my years at school. One public school teacher was really bad/borderline senile, two if you include university, but the rest were ok and several were great. The two years of private school I had, had more bad teachers than in all the years in public.
If you want to kill a popular program, first you slander it, then you ruin it, then you kill it. That's why people fight the slander and try to stop the ruination. Everyone reading this post had a teacher who taught them to read, and most of those teachers were paid for out of taxes. Note the word "most" you pendants.
Are you happy to be judged based on factors entirely outside your control?
If what you do makes no difference in the education of the kids you teach then why are you even paid at all? Obviously, there is something you can control, it's just a matter of figuring out how to fairly measure it.
A shitty teacher in Beverly Hills is going to have better standardized test scores than an awesome teacher in Detroit.
Which is why you wouldn't make a direct comparison between those two. If teachers were less afraid of being measured and contributed to better metrics to evaluate teacher performance then the system would already be much improved.
That's 300 more times to see something unexpected and learn how to deal with it before he gets to you.
The GP said "a lot more valuable." You respond by stating the hypothetical that it might be slightly more valuable. Riiight.
If the situation hasn't happened in that first 300 times, then it is unlikely to happen very often in the next 300 times. Instead of grossly overpaying for that remote possibility I'd rather hire more teachers which I know for certain will result in better educational results.
Interesting ruling, but I wonder how long it will take some law school type to figure out they may be able to apply this case to other unions as well.
All unions, to my knowledge anyway, prize seniority over all other variables. You can be the most amazing employee ever, but when it comes to layoffs, if you have less seniority than someone else, you get the boot first regardless of your abilities.
The flip side of that is you can be the most incompetent employee ever and, due to seniority rules, you get to stay because you've sat in the chair longer.
What really burns me about unions is the two aforementioned employees are paid the same once they have been with the company X years. In my opinion, this creates serious motivational issues for both employees:
One realizes they can do the bare minimum and still get paid.
While your super employee realizes that busting their ass is rather pointless since the other one that is sitting in the corner, drooling on themself is being paid exactly the same as well. ( to add insult to injury, if droolio has more seniority, they have more vacation time to boot )
I fight with unionites all the time who try to tell me the pay is what it is because the Union fights for their members. I point out that since Union dues are a percentage of employee pay, the Union is actually fighting for its own pay raise, not the members. It also explains why the unions never back down over pay, but will instantly give in to health care premium increases since those come out of the employees pockets and not the Unions.
Repeating myself since you skipped it the first time:
Cuz in this universe, the number one factor in a student's performance is the home he goes home to at the end of the day. A shitty teacher in Beverly Hills is going to have better standardized test scores than an awesome teacher in Detroit. But that's frequently a feature, not a bug, for social darwinists.
Thus the problem in standardized testing and "merit" based pay.
Teachers are already measured. What they are "afraid of" is nakedly bullshit measures like...standardized testing, "merit" based pay, and the farce of forcing schools to compete for money. All of which undermines the professionalism and compensation of the job - by design.
Willfully obtuse. Unless you're going to tell me that you tell your supervisors that you shouldn't have raises based on expereince because there's little difference between your work now, and when you entered your profession 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago?'
Riiiight.
Tell that to this girl.
Grossly over paying? Please, not one of you Bircher-Baggers would touch a teaching position for less than six figures, so take your cheapsake crocodile tears somewhere else.
That's fundamentally flawed logic at its most basic. Yes, the teachers at the poorer schools are in the worst position, but assuming the cuts are based on firing the newest teachers in the district, rather than on a per-school basis, those poorer schools end up in the best position.
When they have to cut heads, they can't just cut out all the teachers at the low-income schools, because they won't have enough teachers to cover the classes. There are laws limiting class sizes, and all students are guaranteed an education, so there's a lower bound on the number of teachers below which those schools cannot drop. Therefore, if they remove the newest teachers, that means that most of the teachers at the poorer schools are removed, but because those schools are likely at or near the lower bound already, nearly all of those removed teachers must be replaced by someone, and more to the point, by definition, they must be replaced by someone with more experience than the teacher who was removed. Usually, that means that the quality of education improves.
And in the general case, poorer students are likely to be stuck with worse teachers no matter what, because the best teachers are more likely to get jobs in better districts with better pay. Tenure has no real effect on that whatsoever....
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Repeating myself since you skipped it the first time:
Didn't skip it, just pointing out that you refuse to address the obvious contradiction that either good teachers make a significant difference in a child's education or they don't. If they don't then why should we pay better or more experienced teachers any more? If they do, then let's figure out which teachers are better and reward them for it. You can't have it both ways, no matter how hard you try.
Thus the problem in standardized testing and "merit" based pay.
It's a problem, one that happens all the time in every industry, every profession, every incidence of human interaction. It's not an insurmountable problem, unless you just refuse to address it.
Teachers are already measured. What they are "afraid of" is nakedly bullshit measures like...standardized testing, "merit" based pay, and the farce of forcing schools to compete for money. All of which undermines the professionalism and compensation of the job - by design.
Again, you want to have it both ways. Are some teachers better than others or not? If the millions of teachers can come up with a better system than standardized testing, then we'd be totally okay with it. However, sticking your head in the sand and saying that there is absolutely no way to tell a good teacher from a bad teacher just makes you look silly.
Willfully obtuse. Unless you're going to tell me that you tell your supervisors that you shouldn't have raises based on expereince because there's little difference between your work now, and when you entered your profession 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago?'
No, just like you I want to get paid far more than I'm worth. However, if I were going to set up a system to pay other people, I would do it fairly, which means that I would pay them for their current skills (which include their relevant experience). Just being around for 20 years doesn't automatically make you better, in some cases it makes you worse.
Tell that to this girl.
First off, I tolerated your analogy in your previous post even though it was a ridiculous extreme - one minor mistake by an elementary school teacher is not going to cripple a kid for life. However, even in this case I would still rather have 50% more children getting the necessary surgery than pay twice as much to a doctor who can better handle a very rare case.
Grossly over paying? Please, not one of you Bircher-Baggers would touch a teaching position for less than six figures, so take your cheapsake crocodile tears somewhere else.
If teacher A would gladly do a job for $50k and teacher B who is 5% better wants $90k, then yes, teacher B is grossly overpaid. It is completely irrelevant how much Lebron James or the person who serves your McNuggets earns.
That's not true. Tenured professors do not lose their paycheck. It will, however, get eroded over time.
Regards
David Collum
Easy fix. You each day have to prove yourself as an educator. A student also should have to prove themselves a learner. Lets reward each as they colaborate to actually contribute to society. Bad teacher get fired after the class revolts. Be an smart a$$ as a student get kicked out by the teacher and rest of the class. Students and teachers should be accountable to each other. Solves class clowns, bulies, and layabouts.
That entirely depends on the institution/department and the negotiated contract. At no university I've been at could a tenured professor totally check out (stop teaching/researching/administrating) and continue to collect a paycheck or remain employed. It makes no sense for an institution to not have certain performance expectations of the faculty set in the contract.
In any case, it's unlikely an absentee professor would make it past the next post tenure review. Tenure doesn't make you unfirable, it just ensures you have access to due process before being fired.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
You're interpreting the number wrong. It isn't saying that only 1–14% of the material learned comes from the teachers. It's saying that only 1–14% of the test score delta between a typical high-scoring student and a typical low-scoring student is caused by differences in the quality of teaching—that socioeconomic factors play a much bigger role in that disparity, as does the degree of involvement of the parents in the children's education.
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IMO, nobody in the public or private sector at any level should have a job secured for life. We all should be hold responsible to perform and keep actualized.
as a Marxist there are an awful lot of things you don't understand, human nature being one of them
You are far removed from the point of tenure for someone who works at a university. The idea is that the *administration* can't drop-kick you for ridiculous reasons. If you're doing good (i.e., publishable) but controversial research, tenure keeps some jackass state legislator from leaning on the university president to fire you. When many faculty have not seen raises in years, tenure is one of the few remaining perks of the job.
I don't get your point, to be honest. Your links show that there are some teachers who are scum who take advantage of their students, which sadly is neither surprising nor new.
If your argument is that Mark Berndt should have been sacked, they had already started the procedure to sack him but he quit before he could be sacked.
If you're arguing they should have the power to sack him immediately, I disagree- everyone should be entitled to due process and be given an opportunity to defend himself. Giving him 30 days would not matter as long as he is kept away from students, which he was.
If you're arguing he should not be entitled to any benefits, I agree - that is a loophole that should be closed.
If you're arguing that LAUSD screwed up, then perhaps- I'll leave it to the pending lawsuit to decide the matter and punish LAUSD (or not) appropriately.
Whats all this got to do with strict government control over education anyway? This looks like a criminal matter to me.
Y'all realize, perhaps, that this is an unpublished "tenative" decision by the lowest Court available in California and, likely, even if it were binding, would be immediately lifted on appeal?
Then go read the decision. The judge accepts bunk, such as, that one student in one class with one "underperforming" teacher, looses $1.2 MILLION in income over a lifetime (try to calculate that over 12 years of education!). It is accepted that 5% of teachers are underperforming, by being in the bottom 5%!
Oh, the Court of Appeals is going to just LOVE this one...
My point still stands.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
So now schools can get rid of experienced teachers at will and teachers will have to live in fear of "the parents" even more.
Anyone who thinks this change is for the good is a fucking idiot.
Most jobs give tenure after 90 days....2 years is a farce? Eat a dick judge. By the way, can judges be removed from the bench if they suck? Oh, no, they can't.
This was one of the biggest loopholes in teachers union contracts - the inability to fire teachers who you wouldn't want to teach your kids. John Stossel did an amazing article on this topic. One example of the loophole was the inability to fire a petafile. Instead, they paid him to sit in an office for the duration of a school day. And you wonder why your tax dollars have nothing to show for.
For those interested, I recommend watching:
John Stossel - A System For Teachers, Not Students
John Stossel - Charter Schools & Teachers' Unions
GED is also used by homeschoolers. Many of which actually learn more than would be taught in school. (I would say "most" but I have no data for that.) GED just proves that you obtained the knowledge, regardless of how you got it. In fact, if I were an employer looking at hiring at the HS graduate level, I might even count the GED holder in higher regard than the kid who attended school, got the diploma, but of whom we don't know how much was really learned or retained. That being said, I might ask why, if the GED holder previously dropped out. Sometimes people have good reasons, and sometimes people who don't have wind up learning even more from the school-of-hard-knocks. It really depends on the person.
My father got two HS diplomas (back in the day). The first was a basic adequacy kind of thing. He did just what was needed and then got out. He spent some time in the working world, realized that he wanted more than he was going to get that way, and returned to High School to finish obtaining a college prep diploma.
Back to the GED testing issue... I could be wrong, and perhaps any Brits reading this can correct me, but I think that in the UK all students are administered standardized tests as part of their graduation requirements.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Odd the court is against Tenure for Teachers, not that I disagree, but any suggestion that Tenure protections be removed from Judges would be ruled unconstitutional by the Judges.
The reasons that would be put forward for not removing Tenure for Judges apply equally to Teaching.
Wolja Future Tombstone: Shit happened then I died
If you are a teacher and your principal lacks confidence in you then you should act first and resign. It's a matter of self-respect. The same should apply in any job or profession.
Incompetent teachers are easy to spot but difficult to document through evaluations etc,. If you want to know where the deadwood is ask the other teachers and ask the students. You can't put anything over on either of them. Confronted with this kind of feedback, resignation rather than waiting for dismissal is the proper course: simply a matter of integrity and self-respect.
Tenure is just one of many flaws in the education system and getting rid of it is no silver bullet. I would propose putting all teachers (and most public employees) on three year contracts renewable upon mutual consent. The American International School system operates successfully on this basis. Also probationary contracts for new teachers. The decision to extend or leave rests with the employer which is the way it should be.
Any organisation, educational or otherwise, would benefit from a mandatory 10% turnover rate to encourage the entry of fresh talent and new ideas.
What fear do teachers have in parroting their lessons to the students?
Teaching evolution in a christian conservative town when it is the teacher vs the town + principal of the school? Being told by the school board that you can't teach sex ed unless it is abstinence only? Having many valuable books banned from certain conservative libraries but wanting to teach with them anyway? (Like Huckleberry Finn for instance).
Not saying that tenure is the right solution to this problem, but there are a lot of things that make parents, the principal, the town, etc.. mad at teachers, that the teachers are actually doing in the children's best interest (depending on your point of view of course.... which is central to this issue: who decides what a child should learn? Should society have a right to set some sort of baseline learning that we want citizens to have before becoming adults? Or leave it entirely up to parents and have no standards? How do you strike a balance? How much leeway should teachers have to modify curriculum? etc...).