A highly regarded high school science teacher at Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts was suspended in February because someone thought that his students had created inappropriate projects that looked sort of like weapons. The teacher Gregg Schiller was suspended after two students turned in devices that could shoot small projectiles. Schiller reports daily to a district administrative office.
One project used compressed air to propel a small object but it was not connected to a source of air pressure, so it could not have been fired. (In 2012, President Obama tried out a more powerful air-pressure device at a White House Science Fair that could launch a marshmallow 175 feet.)
Another project used the power from an AA battery to charge a tube surrounded by a coil. When the ninth-grader proposed it, Schiller told him to be more scientific, to construct and test different coils and to draw graphs and conduct additional analysis, said his parents, who also are Los Angeles teachers.
The story notes that President Obama tried out a more powerful air-projectile at a White House science fair in 2012, which launched a marshmallow 175 feet.
Schiller’s suspension removes a popular science teacher who held a number of valuable roles in the school. Parents, teachers, and students have rallied to oppose his removal. Some think that the real reason he was removed was because he is the representative for the teachers’ union.
“As far as we can tell, he’s being punished for teaching science,” said Warren Fletcher, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.
Schiller teaches Advanced Placement biology and psychology as well as regular and honors biology. Students are concerned about Advanced Placement exams for college credit in May.
“The class is now essentially a free period,” said 17-year-old psychology student Liana Kleinman. “The sub does not have a psych background and can’t help us with the work.”
Schiller initially prepared lesson plans for the substitute, but the district directed him to stop in an email.
“This is really hurting my students more than anything else,” Schiller said in an interview. “I would never do anything to set up a situation where a student could be harmed.”
He coaches the school’s fencing team, and administrators have determined the team cannot compete safely without Schiller in charge.
Schiller, 43, also was the teachers union representative on the campus and had been dealing with disagreements with administrators over updating the employment agreement under which the faculty works. His suspension, with pay, removed him from those discussions.
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-me-lausd-science-teacher-20140410,0,5329192.story#ixzz2yVcx9Gwy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Damn. One more example of the degree of employment risk from administration teachers would face if there were no tenure or due process.
exactly
It figures. Why do something extraordinary. The micro minds, “experts” won’t understand it anyway. They push for more scientists and then do not listen to the ones they have and even when they have real science being taught – oh no, we cannot have that. It happens over and over.
This video pretty much sums up what just happened…
http://davidrtayloreducation.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/rsa-animate-drive-the-surprising-truth-about-what-motivates-us/
Greg is a great teacher who even after being taken out of his class continued making lesson plans for the sub. The district made him stop. Clearly this is another case of stupidity from a deform superintendent and his board of do nothings. I feel sorry for the students of Lausd who are missing the teaching of Greg and Iris Stevenson and all the dedicated educators in teacher jail. There are many stories like these and only one solution to this madness -fire Deasy and his board.
Who made the decision to suspend? If the account is accurate, it’s one of the best arguments around for tenure. What are parents and students saying? If an AP period is essentially a free or study period, the parents and students should be up in arms. I’ve never encountered a situation where teachers were not permitted to design lesson plans for subs to implement, particularly when those subs have no expertise in the subject matter. The school district needs to be made to justify this suspension.
Tenure won’t save a teacher who allows his students to bring “weapons” — or air-puffing science experiments, whatever — to school.
Launching rockets was the big excitement on middle school sites when I was still teaching. When conducted under supervised and controlled circumstances, they are safe and engaging activities that demonstrate scientific methodology. That is not the same as bringing weapons on campus.
Yes, I know. We agree with one another here — I’m just as disgusted with this as you are.
Yet one more example of the stupidity in public education I commented on the other day. As before, there will likely be a kneejerk reaction to defend teachers here — and in this case, the teacher certainly wasn’t at fault — but I will reiterate what I said previously: To the students being subjected to this stuff, it really doesn’t matter who is responsible for the stupidity. Brain-dead administrators have done more to screw-up public education than teachers ever thought of doing. The public school “product” right now is really, really bad.
This stuff happens in private schools as well. It just doesn’t make the news and is hushed up. The Catholic schools in our state now have a “morals clause” the requires either 1) teachers lie to keep their jobs, or 2) only mute saints are hired. Guess they missed that lesson about throwing the first stone. The cannonization process will make the licensure process look like a piece of cake. One private school I taught at previously fired a VERY good social studies teacher. As far as we could tell, she was fired for bringing in veterans to talk to the students and some parents complained. No real reason.
It doesn’t take a jerk or a knee to see that this situation is wrong and why due process is needed in the schools. Teachers must make difficult decisions and there are a wide variety of parental views on life, to say it mildly. Much of mathematics is an extension of military needs or gambling. Plus many of the number theory, geometry, and algebra concepts come from the Islamic and non-Christian world which rankles ultra-right conservatives. Even Newton had a secret, somewhat mytical life. Next, we’ll be scrutinizing teaching parabolas for mimicing the path of a projectile.
Given that religious schools are created in part to provide a religious education, and given that parents probably expect and demand a certain level of morality on the part of teachers at such a school, I don’t see where the Catholic schools are out of line.
“many of the number theory, geometry, and algebra concepts come from the Islamic and non-Christian world which rankles ultra-right conservatives.”
I would really like to see proof of such “rankling.” This has more than a whiff of urban myth about it.
MathVale – Do you actually know anything about number theory, geometry or algebra? And tell us more about Newton’s secret “mytical” life.
Jim, Newton’s mysticism is well known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies
From many, many examples of early Islamic and other non-Christian contributions to mathematics, see
Gillberg. Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers
From the Online Etymological Dictionary:
algorithm (n.)
1690s, from French algorithme, refashioned (under mistaken connection with Greek arithmos “number”) from Old French algorisme “the Arabic numeral system” (13c.), from Medieval Latin algorismus, a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi “native of Khwarazm,” surname of the mathematician whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West (see algebra). The earlier form in Middle English was algorism (early 13c.), from Old French.
algebra (n.) Look up algebra at Dictionary.com
1550s, from Medieval Latin algebra, from Arabic al jebr “reunion of broken parts,” as in computation, used 9c. by Baghdad mathematician Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi as the title of his famous treatise on equations (“Kitab al-Jabr w’al-Muqabala” “Rules of Reintegration and Reduction”), which also introduced Arabic numerals to the West. The accent shifted 17c. from second syllable to first. The word was used in English 15c.-16c. to mean “bone-setting,” probably from Arab medical men in Spain.
And MathVale is a mathematician.
I’m confused… He coaches the school’s fencing team, but there is a “problem” based on a couple of science projects that resemble weapons? The reason for his suspension was obviously a pretext for the real reason. This is ridiculous…
This is why ALEC is pushing to remove teachers’ due process.
I doubt ALEC has any interest in anything educational at all. I think they just want public education to disappear or at least become much less of a burden on the tax base. Getting rid of collective bargaining is just one piece of that process.
Are we headed to book burning?
Sozo…we have had book ‘burning’ for years in the form of people as biased and Right Wing as the Cheney’s making decisions what should be written in America’s text books about our history, and what should be written and taught about science, as with their push for Creationism equal to Darwin. They carry more weight wtih the Texas text book publishers than educators. No more Catcher in the Rye, no more Huckleberry Finn.
Why should anyone suddenly be surprised? Libraries now have to keep lists of books we check out. Have you forgotten the Patriot Act and other Executive orders still in place since the Bush administration? And now Obama reinforicing it all and leading his Education donkey, Duncan, to finish the job of dissolving our public schools for free market, hedge fund, profit.
This is not an uncommon occurrence in LAUSD. There are many, many teachers in “Deasy jail” in the district. They report to the district office and must sit still in cubicle with no access to reading material or electronic devices from what I am told. Many are there due to trumped up charges and their union activity. They can end up there for years. Deasy is a reformer bully bent on getting his way no matter what.
Yes, Diane…I have been writing here since almost the beginning of your blog site about how weird and dysfunctional California and LAUSD are, and how little pushback there is from the general community, or even from LAUSD teachers and retired teachers. Rarely does anyone come out to fight this with a show of force and numbers.
We repeatedly hear from about a dozen teachers on this blog site, and generally all LAUSD teachers who write are of the same opinion about this vile administration and the damage it has done to education and to students. But the BoE evidently feels safe to support anything Deasy and Broad want. Why?
With only about 30% of the public coming out to vote, I guess few in this city care at all about the leadership we get. Monica Ratliff got elected with a minimal vote such as this only due to the fact that the Latino community of her District, a strong voting block, went to the polls in a special election and voted for her.
Ih the case of this science teacher, his principal, or Deasy, may just have been looking for a way to put him in teacher jail. He may be too high on the pay scale, may be too respected by his students, or any other false charge they cooked up to ‘can’ him.
Vergara v. California, and also the pending Buchanan legislation to fire teachers for cause, play a part in this new scenario.
Because of the war on public education, this will happen with more frequency as the fake ed reformers use their money, influence and power to get more administrators hired to run the pubic schools sabotaging efforts to teach kids even more than they have in the past few decades.
The problem here is tenure…
Teachers need real tenure. Not the eunuch’s shadow of tenure that they have now, due process.
Of course, even this the oligarchs are trying to take away. They believe that nothing should stand in the way of their making whatever decisions they wish to with regard to the lives of others.
Perfect phrase Bob..”eunuch’s shadow”…since teachers have been made to feel like eunuchs by their corporatized masters…such as Deasy at LAUSD, and his puppet master, the oligarch Eli Broad.
Not mine. I picked it up from the great George Steiner. It was used by him in his breathtaking book of essays dealing with the consequences for our intellectual life of the Holocaust, Language and Silence
There was a debate the other day on Diane’s blog about whether we should use the term The Resistance to refer to the movement against Ed Deform. Some thought that we should extend the palm leaf to Ed Deformers.
On reflection, I agree that we should welcome them into our science classrooms
so that our students can see for themselves that there are forms of life below parasitic wasp larvae.
Several years ago, a student in my district made a wooden replica of a Civil War gun for a self-directed project in History class. The teacher was so impressed that he kept it displayed in his classroom for a while. At the end of the school year, the student picked up this solid wooden gun to take it home. A bus driver saw the “gun” being carried out to the kid’s mom’s car, thought it was a real one, and called it in. Three schools were locked down. A misunderstanding and one of those things, right? Wrong! The teacher got in major trouble over it. Over a gun that couldn’t shoot anything.
Teachers are removed from classroom on the most tenuous charges, and 100s of teachers are currently housed in teacher “jail”, not even informed of the accusations that put them there. Many believe it is designed to sow fear and intimidation among the teachers, and is part of the disruption advocated by the Broad Academy for Superintendents (non-accredited). I am nonplussed at the support Deasy receives by our board – how can it possibly serve the students to have a demoralized and broken teaching corps? I can only assume the money poured into the board’s campaigns from “reform leaders” (Rhee, Broad et.al) colors their outlook. Even Ratliff voted to extend his contract and give him a raise. Broad’s donations to the United Way, and other civic groups, has secured their support for Deasy also. I was surprised the article even made it into the L.A.Times.
Thanks Melissa…right on point. The LA Times has never done an in depth article on teacher jail although many of us have written them to suggest it as a timely and vital topic. That would be Karin Klein’s call.
Somehow in reading this article and the subsequent one about King, I realized I am glad I am not on either coast nor Texas where all these fads and experiments seem to start. Good thing Show Me staters let them experiment although the extortion that is RaTTT funds is bringing this crap to Missouri.
Maybe there is something to being a little supposedly “backward”.
Nothing ‘wacky’ about this story. It’s part of the plan to take out the intellectuals, create fear in the rest, and dumb down the next generation of proletariats. Watch LAUSD go bankrupt, then the billionaires will raid teachers’ pensions.
I agree this is a calculated maneuver. However, I’d like to see L.A. teachers make a much bigger deal of it. This is the type of misdeed by officials the general public can understand–particularly the educated, voting public. This teacher was removed from his classroom for teaching science. His A.P. students are being taught by a substitute who does not have expertise. He has be prohibited from even supplying lesson plans.
Across town, a teacher was removed from his classroom and castigated publicly by his superintendent for restraining (with a wrestling move) a student who brought a drug to school and openly displayed it to classmates, walked in and out of class, possessed a box cutter (weapon), and assaulted the teacher. That community is supporting its teacher.
These are situations everyone can understand. Educators need to create huge uproar and get the public on our side. Parents get that teachers are being set up, placed in untenable positions, and then slammed for incompetence. These two instances are hills worth dying for. We need to use every weapon in our arsenal to get these stories out.
Teachers have become whipping boys for Deasy’s LAUSD. 95% of them are scared of ANY type of accusation against them will land them in teacher jail long enough to not renew their contracts. Total abuse of power, no due process and scare tactics. This a beast that feeds on mostly defenseless children. Perhaps the only ones that have the real power in this case are the students. THEY(Students) need to organize and expose Deasy and the reform movement for what it really is. One of the last big chunks of taxpayer money to take, besides social security, which is next on the radar.