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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.
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.
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.
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.
pretty sweet to be in a politically connected union and have no ambitions other than riding your current job into a fully-paid retirement at age 55.
This used to be called "middle class."
You're so far divorced from the way things used to be, that now it's some kind of offense for people to retire while they still have their health.
Books have been written on the destruction of the American pension system.
The "how" varies from decade to decade, but it's not a pretty story, no matter which period of time you want to look at.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
but public pensions aren't self-funded, they have shifted liabilities to future taxpayers.
[Citation Needed]
Usually the story of underfunded pensions goes one of two ways:
1. pension contributions being diverted to other purposes
2. overly optimistic assumptions about future returns for the pension's investment fund
if your idea of "the way things used to be" is that a select few lived from the pockets of many, then don't be surprised if that way is now gone.
"Select few"?
Again, you're to slanting your language to make pensions some kind of personal offense.
The reality is that "many" had pension plans and the reason that today, only "a select few" have them,
is partly a result of their unions fighting to retain what was once considered a basic part of the American dream.
My idea of "the way things used to be" is a corporate culture where businesses balance the best interests of their share holders with that of their employees.
Costco's Dilemma: Be Kind To Its Workers, or Wall Street?
March 26, 2004
"From the perspective of investors, Costco's benefits are overly generous," says Bill Dreher, retailing analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. "Public companies need to care for shareholders first. Costco runs its business like it is a private company."
Costco appears to pay a penalty for its largesse to workers. The company's shares trade at about 20 times projected per-share earnings for 2004, compared with about 24 for Wal-Mart. Mr. Dreher says the unusually high wages and benefits contribute to investor concerns that profit margins at Costco aren't as high as they should be.
10 years later and you can still read similar complaints about Costco.
As a whole, America used to be more like Costco than like Wal Mart (2013)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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:
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.
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.