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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."
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.
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.
this is the best news to happen to k-12 education in a long time.
some background facts. primary school tenure was first designed as part of the progressive movement in the early 1900s. At the time a teaching position was a super sweet patronage position that a politician awarded his friends. teachers didn't actually do anything, and were replaced when the next pol came in. Nobody was learning!
one of the successes of the progressive movement was to make a professional class of primary school teachers who were insulated from political fortunes and were professionally schooled in the art of teaching. This was accomplished through employment contracts that made it really hard to fire teachers.
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. They also have a strong union that will ensure protections. So there's no need for special laws that give teachers more advantages than everybody else at the expense of their students.
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
Oh, it's a bad thing, depending on which way you look at it. For union busters this means you can finally sacrifice the weak and infirm on the altar of efficiency. For education activists this means teachers will be more concerned with their job security than ever before, creating a chilling effect in alternative curricula and teaching styles that would reach kids the system would otherwise fail.
In other words, the education system is about to get a whole lot more one-size-fits-all in California.
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.
Uhhh most states have 'fire at will' laws that mean you can get rid of a person for any reason or no reason whatsoever.
The long history of public employment abuse definitely shows some sort protection is needed.
Goodbye Lousy Teacher's!
Goodbye Older, Higher-Paid Teachers!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
1) The abuses go both ways. That's why the need for tenure is in question in the first place. At every place I ever worked, even though it's at will employment, management made sure to have a good case together before letting anyone go out of fear of any litigation. Through the court system there is some level of protection if rights are being violated.
2) You second statement can be said for anything. "The long history of [insert whatever you want here] abuse definitely shows some sort of protection is needed."
Some of the details of California's rules really seemed ripe for this ruling, but I don't think that it's ultimately necessary to throw out the entire concept. Case in point, two years? That is too short. The word "tenure" itself was based on an expectation that it would take ten years to get there.
On the other hand, teachers can only work with the students that they are assigned. The only way to fairly assess teacher performance is to compare not only the performance of the students during the year that they're assigned to that teacher, but to compare all other years both before and after.
The simplest way to do this is to remove assessment from the teacher's responsibilities. Let teachers teach, let section, unit, quarter, and semester tests be a function of the school district or the state, and use curriculum services to ensure that what the teachers are asked to teach actually matches what the district or state expects them to do. This frees up teacher time from rote grading of exams, and lets them spend more time on their lesson plans and on extra assistance if students need it.
The other advantage is that now one can track both the student's achievement across multiple teachers, and the teachers' achievement across multiple students over multiple years, and how those students have done as they've progressed through the grades. This allows the school district as the employer to identify teachers that are struggling or are bad-fits for the grades that they're teaching, or to identify teachers whose majority of students do poorly for the long term. It also lets the system identify teachers that receive severely underperforming students, to honestly assess how they do with students that come in to a school year without the fundamentals needed to succeed on the level that they're normally expected to.
It can also show exemplary teachers that take students that are highly underperforming and bringing them up to levels to succeed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Goodbye Older, Higher-Paid Teachers!
You forget that teachers still have a strong union with strong union contracts that will make firing a teacher without a damn good reason difficult.
"Lousy" and "older and higher paid" are not mutually exclusive terms. However, I concede that the GP's message was somewhat diluted by the unfortunate inclusion of an errant apostrophe; grammar and composition are certainly relevant to this conversation.
Write failed: Broken pipe
What consequences? You took out due process. Now that you have removed due process, any elected school board member can just fire all those teachers.
In every job I've ever held (IT and later engineering), I've seen employees abused by management. The employees ranged from bad to mediocre to great.
Unpaid OT (as non-exempt), unpaid on-call time 24/7/365, vacation blackouts with a use-it-or-lose-it policy, reprimands for not completing insane workloads and salary / promotion denial are some of the ways in which I have personally witnessed management abusing employees. Some of these things not only happened to myself, but the majority of my coworkers at 4 separate mid to large organizations.
You will not normally win a lawsuit against your employer with the current labor laws. They will get away with abuse after abuse until something changes.
These corporations thrive through abusing the working class. Stop defending this behavior.
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
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.
Sued for what exactly?
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.
That's very very unlikely to happen. The school board and parents would come down hard on any administrator who was that dumb.
Should we give IT workers tenure too? What if the boss threatened to fire everyone who doesn't want to program in VB6? See I too can come up with completely ridiculous examples to prove non-existent points.
Tenure would do nothing to stop this, and would in fact make it worse. Without tenure, you're free to go work somewhere else if you find the current environment too oppressive. Anyone working in IT knows the importance of being able to switch jobs. You can't plan on working in one place forever. If there were tenure, you would be unable to switch jobs without starting on the bottom at the new place. Good luck escaping a bad work environment under that system! Imagine the horrible political environment that would result from management trying to force out a tenured employee that they couldn't fire, so the only way is to make the environment so miserable the person quits.
The word "tenure" itself was based on an expectation that it would take ten years to get there.
It actually stems from the Latin word tenere meaning to hold, as in tenant, tenacity, etc. It's not etymologically related to the number ten.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
Not all states allow unions to have much power at all. Favoritism and influence can play a huge part in getting School Board employees wrongfully fired. I will not say that I have never seen a lousy teacher but they are rare. I have seen numerous students that never should have been allowed in a classroom. Teachers have not been allowed to fail many students that need to be failed. In my area it seems that the teachers must beg and cajole students not to drop out of school as our beaches and the like are far too tempting and the curse of the GED diplomas causes kids to quite school early. I would suggest that no driver's license be allowed for school drop outs before the age of 35. That one law would stop half of our drop outs from happening. I would also like to se employers refusing to accept drop outs or GED graduates.
The abuses go both ways.
No, the abuse is always top down. The more power, the more abuse. And why should we have to go to court for every damn thing? That's half the problem anyway, write crappy rules and let the courts "fix" it. Damn lawyers have more clout than anybody... well, after accountants..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I love hearing the terms "protected by US employment law". It sounds akin to "protected from flame thrower by first dousing one self with canister of petrol".
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
Sued for establishing religion in violation of the First Amendment as applied to the several states by the Fourteenth, perhaps?
In real life, the opposite is true, unfortunately. Even without tenure, incompetent teachers will never get fired, UNLESS they either get active in union politics or express mildly controversial opinions. An obedient drone who doesn't do his job is nevertheless an obedient drone, and thus is not threatening to administrators.
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.
Of course, now the best teachers will flock to the poorest schools since they no longer have job security. It's about time! I refuse to work for any Wall Street firm which gives year-end bonuses. How can you attract the best and brightest by making the job more attractive? That's insane.
While I can at some level understand refusing dropouts, refusing GED graduates is stupid. The GED is basically the outer 'catch' block of the primary school system, and without it, there's no legitimate way to get a diploma if you have unusual circumstances. The fact that some kids use it to 'escape' primary school should tell you that there's either a problem with primary schooling, or that the GED process isn't sufficiently strong - but in both cases, the solution to the problem is NOT to make the GED worthless.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
That's your argument? It's OK to cheat poor kids out of an education because ... religious bogeymen might do scary things?
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.
Your position is not only short sighted but ignorant. Precedent precedes many many things. Think about the precedent this sets for someplace like Oklahoma where they push hard to denounce science and only want to teach that the earth and everything else was created in 6 days. Teachers have to push back just as hard and now they can be summarily dismissed if they don't fall into line.
Be very careful what you wish for.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
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.
And the one that taught you that the punctuation mark goes outside the quotation marks.
There are global differences:
"Instructors in the U.S. should probably take this into account when reading papers submitted by students who have gone to school in other parts of the globe." stolen from:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Tenure is not due process.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Teacher tenure, at least when I had family members who were teachers, was not the same as university tenure where you can't be fired. There was always a chance to be fired if you screwed up. Early stages of tenure meant you didn't have to renegotiate your contract every year or wait until just before the school year starts to find out if you still have your job (at which point it's too late to find a teaching job at another school or district).
You narrative that children are getting cheated out of an education because of tenure is a complete myth.
Right. Judge Treu either misunderstood and misquoted, or deliberately lied, about the teachers' expert testimony.
Treu wrote that the teachers' expert, David Berliner, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." Berliner actually said that no more than 1-3% gave him "cause for concern."
The "economic study" Treu relied upon was one study -- a white paper that wasn't peer reviewed.
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter...
Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?!
Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14
Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. Judge Treu’s decision contains this paragraph:
There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms. Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective.
David Berliner says:
June 10, 2014 at 15:56
You and the judge misquote me. I said during deposition That I had never seen a “grossly ineffective” teacher. I said I estimated that the number of poor teachers I’d like to get rid probably is no more than 1-3 percent. The questioning i got was about this statement in TCRECORD:
“There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.”
When asked what percent might actually show up as cause for concern regularly, I said no more than 1-3%. I said nothing about 1-3% being grossly inadequate.
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 ?
Why? The reason is that they made it up in order to find an excuse to apply the 14th Amendment. Their real purpose is to destroy unions.
They're crying crocodile tears about poor and minority students.
If they were so concerned about poor and minority students, they would equalize education in all the districts, and bring back the low-cost taxpayer-supported public universities in California.
Yes.
To clarify that, most of the charter schools routinely expel students who have any problems, either academic or behavioral.
It's the Pareto principle: 90% of the students are easy to teach; 10% of them are difficult. The difficult 10% cost the school as much as the easy 90%. That includes for example handicapped kids, or kids whose parents speak a foreign language, or kids who are having trouble with math, or English, or any other subject. And yes, there are some kids having disciplinary or behavioral problems.
The reason public schools are so expensive is that they have to take all students. The reason charter schools are cheaper is that they can pass the difficult kids on to the public schools.
Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, described all this in an article about Eva Moskowitz' charter schools. Moskowitz' students do very well on the tests, because if any of their students is having trouble, she expels them. And they go to the public schools.
Too bad we can't fire posters on /.
Teachers are supposed to teach the approved curriculum. If they teach something else, yes, they should be fired.
The stupid decision to teach creationism as science is a political decision -- but it's not one for employees of the schools to override, that's for the voters and perhaps the courts.
Suppose the approved curriculum was to teach, correctly, evolution and discuss creationism only in religious history classes. Suppose a bunch of "science" teachers began to teach creationism as fact and not even mention evolution. Would you have the same belief that these teachers shouldn't be fired (at least if they had survived the two years it takes to get tenure in California?)
K-12 teachers are there to teach what they are told to teach. If they don't want to do that, they can find another job. The notion of "academic freedom" is ridiculous at that level -- if they want tenure, they should get their PhD and get a job in academia which includes tenure if they are good enough (most aren't of course).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
So some politically motivated judge makes a pretty crap ruling based upon ideology and not law.
Judge Treu isn't able to get his facts right, either. Treu quoted David Berliner as saying that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." What Berliner actually said was that 1-3% of teachers would give him "cause for concern."
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter...
Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?!
Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14
Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. Judge Treu’s decision contains this paragraph:
David Berliner says:
June 10, 2014 at 15:56
You and the judge misquote me. I said during deposition That I had never seen a “grossly ineffective” teacher. I said I estimated that the number of poor teachers I’d like to get rid probably is no more than 1-3 percent. The questioning i got was about this statement in TCRECORD:
“There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.”
When asked what percent might actually show up as cause for concern regularly, I said no more than 1-3%. I said nothing about 1-3% being grossly inadequate.
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.
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.
People have tried that. It doesn't work.
According to Diane Ravitch (and pretty much everybody else who has studied the data) the one factor that most strongly predicts standardized test scores (and their delta) is family income. That wipes out every other factor. Once you've done the demographic correction, the effect of the teacher is too small to be measured.
There's no statistically valid test that measures the teacher's teaching ability.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
By Valerie Strauss
May 3, 2014
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:
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.
There's another reason now why teachers will avoid disadvantaged areas.
Everybody in education knows that the one factor that predicts a kid's test results is family income. Family income also predicts a kid's increase in test results over a year.
Teachers who teach disadvantaged kids will get lower ratings because their kids progress more slowly, and these rating systems blame the teachers for that. So they'll get fired.
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.
Teachers should be aggressively recruited the same way Google
Oh god please no.
I want to be taught by someone who can teach, not someone who can solve stupid undergrad engineering puzzles.
My best school teachers were a geography grad who'd spent his previous working life as a Yorkshire miner (and geography was the least interesting subject he taught), one socially retarded biology PhD who lived with his mother but couldn't have had a better combination of discipline and enthusiasm, and one conservative ex-Cambridge tutor who stank of BO and pounded his fist on the desk at regular intervals with a passion that sometimes built up to throwing a chair across the room, but fuck me did he know and love his stuff and gave you infinite one-to-one time as needed. These are the sort of people who won't ace any stupid technical interview made by young upstarts for young upstarts, but start the game with a lot of knowledge and experience and spend decades perfecting the art of teaching.
On the other hand, teachers can only work with the students that they are assigned. The only way to fairly assess teacher performance is to compare not only the performance of the students during the year that they're assigned to that teacher, but to compare all other years both before and after.
Almost EVERY SINGLE JOB IN THE WORLD IS LIKE THAT, it must be news to teachers who never worked other jobs.
Every salesperson in a store can only work with customers that come in the store. Every bank teller can only work with customers coming into the branch. Every programmer can only work on projects they were assigned to. etc, etc.
That doesn't stop all other professions' performance from being assessed.
To the similar extent that a usual worker has in choosing their work, teachers also get the negotiate which classes they will teach next year, influenced by their capability and school needs. This is no different from how much a programmer can negotiate which projects they can work on.
To the similar extent that a teacher has little control of the environmental factors, guess what? Most other professionals don't have such control either? Can a programmer choose what kind of projects/schedules the company has going? How much control has a salesperson on the products he has to sell?
Hey, if you don't like the class you are being assigned, you can also quit. Oh, but the tenure is just too attractive? Welcome to the real world.
Oliver.
Except VB6 is not a central tenant of any religion that I have ever heard of.
You haven't been in IT very long, have you?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Try firing a unionized teacher. You'll learn all about 'due process'...
I'll try to keep posting this whenever you bring up "due Process" as if the ONLY recourse teachers have is tenure. They have all the same due process recourse everyone else has, for every other job, plus they are heavily unionized to boot.
im 11 years removed from HS now and there are still some of the bad teachers in my old school teaching. I can recall a math teacher who would always be late to class, pick on students she didnt like. I remember one day im sitting there doing my work and she sent me to the principals office for talking to another student. The funny thing is the student she accused me of talking to was not even in the class that day! When I pointed this out to the principal, he informed me that she was there longer than he was and there wasnt much he could do. I ended up getting the highest regents grade in our entire school, a 98, and she failed me for the year. The teacher I got the year after knew the situation and let me have a free ride that year but it really fucked up my grade overall and this teacher is STILL THERE!!!! something needs to change.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Having worked for a union shop (U.S. DoD civil servant), I will simply assert that you're very, very wrong.
I think this is a bad ruling, too, but the real reason that poor teachers disproportionately affect minority students is that (a) in many under-performing school districts, the student body has an over-abundance of minority students, as the non-minority students have decamped to private institutions and (b) better teachers take plum jobs in better performing public schools with fewer lower-income and/or minority (aka lower performing) kids, leaving the worse teachers in the lower-performing schools. You don't need political machinations to explain this ruling when simple statistics will do.
And, yes, "If they were so concerned about poor and minority students, they would equalize education in all the districts, and bring back the low-cost taxpayer-supported public universities in California."
Finally, yes - I use generalizations. YMMV depending on the particular kid, but statistically, the reasoning is sound.
That is all.
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.
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.