I was curious to learn whether the plaintiffs in the Vergara trial actually had “grossly ineffective teachers.” The answer is “no, they did not.”
Not only did none of them have a “grossly ineffective” teacher, but some of the plaintiffs attended schools where there are no tenured teachers. Two of the plaintiffs attend charter schools, where there is no tenure or seniority, and as you will read below, “Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara both attend a “Pilot School” in LAUSD that is free to let teachers go at the end of the school year for any reason, including ineffectiveness.
It turns out that the lawyers for the defense checked the records of the plaintiffs’ teachers, and this is what they found (filed as a post-trial brief in the case): (See pp. 5-6).
“Plaintiffs have not established that the statutes have ever caused them any harm or are likely to do so in the future. None of the nine named Plaintiffs established that he or she was assigned to an allegedly grossly ineffective teacher, or that he or she faces any immediate risk of future harm, as a result of the challenged statutes. The record contains no evidence that Plaintiffs Elliott, Liss, Campbell or Martinez were ever assigned a grossly ineffective teacher at all. Of the remaining five Plaintiffs, most of the teachers whom they identified as “bad” or “grossly ineffective” were excellent teachers. Because none of the five Plaintiffs are reliable evaluators of teacher performance, their testimony about the remaining purportedly ineffective teachers should not be credited. Nor could Plaintiffs link their assignment to purportedly “bad” or “grossly ineffective” teachers to the challenged statutes. Not a single witness claimed that any of Plaintiffs’ teachers were granted permanent status because of the two-year probationary period, would have been dismissed in the absence of the dismissal statutes, or would have been laid off had reverse seniority not been a factor in layoffs. Indeed, Plaintiffs did not call any administrator of any of Plaintiffs’ schools to corroborate their testimony or in any way connect the teachers they identified to the statutes they challenge. Furthermore, any threat of future harm to Plaintiffs caused by the challenged statutes is purely speculative. Plaintiffs Elliott and DeBose are high school seniors who will almost certainly graduate in spring 2014. Plaintiffs Monterroza and Martinez both attend charter schools that are not subject to the challenged statutes at all. Beatriz and Elizabeth Vergara both attend a “Pilot School” in LAUSD that is free to let teachers go at the end of the school year for any reason, including ineffectiveness. As for the remaining three Plaintiffs, there is no concrete, specific evidence supporting any claim that they will be assigned to grossly ineffective teachers due to the challenged statutes; instead, their claims are based on pure speculation.”
One of the plaintiffs (Monterroza) said that her teacher, Christine McLaughlin was a very bad teacher, but McLaughlin was Pasadena teacher of the year and has received many awards for excellent teaching (google her).
Surely, there must be “grossly ineffective” teachers in the state of California, but no evidence was presented that the plaintiffs in the case had teachers who were “grossly ineffective.”
What about turnover of teachers in high-poverty schools in California:
Betty Olson-Jones, former president of the Oakland Education Association, testified: “Oakland has an extremely difficult time retaining teachers. The statistic that I was always struck with was of the beginning teachers in 2003, there were about 300 who began in Oakland, and by 2008 about 76 percent of those left. Generally, the turnover rate is about 50 percent, even higher among some — in some schools. I feel that part of the reason is that the conditions are very difficult, very high-poverty rate in Oakland, lack of support services. Oakland has very few counselors, nurses, one librarian left, high class size, high standard of living in the bay area. Children come with a lot of needs that aren’t fulfilled, and teachers are expected to make up that difference and are agonized often by their inability to do so because they lack the support and the conditions to do so.”
What about working conditions? Anthony Mize taught at the Vergara sisters’ school. He testified: “There was a back-to-school night where there was drive-by shooting 30 to 50 yards from behind my classroom. I remember talking with a mother at the time. And I was just about to say to the mom, ‘and your son has trouble paying attention,’ and seven to nine shots rang out.”
None of this testimony impressed the judge.
After wincing at the STUDENTS MATTER interview this afternoon on HUFFPOST LIVE, and then the exclusion of you and your HUFFPOST vertical on the Vergara decision, I was appalled at the coverage of this story… to the exclusion of counterveiling viewpoints…especially in defense of teachers and TRUE educators, and concerned citizens alike… Once more the mainstream media silences reality and truth…and the fact that this ruling was itself UNCONSTITUTIONAL AS HELL….
I love the timing. The entire ed reform chorus all fan out to bash teachers the moment the Common Core testing period ends.
I knew that was a short-lived romance with public schools 🙂
Back to full-time bashing!
I don’t agree with the ruling either. But, an honest question here: What made the ruling unconstitutional?
Why are you making these excellent points here and not in court in the form of an amicus brief or as part of the supposed intervention of CTA in an appeal? We have all known Vergara and the Reed case before it were put up jobs where both the plaintiffs and defendants were colluding to get rid of teacher tenure- so what’s the surprise?
Evidence that this was not about the students Another agenda is at work here. This must be reversed.
She’s pulling these points out of the post-trial brief filed by the CTA, Leonard. The CTA is already in the case as an intervenor. It made made these points to the trial court and it will make them again to the appeals court.
This was a kangaroo court. The whole thing was a farce, a mockery of justice. Obscene.
Yes, the appeal should be a “piece of cake”.
Is this the judge in this case?
http://www.robeprobe.com/find_judges_result2.php?judge_id=4056
How much did the judge get paid by the plaintiff’s backers?
Robert,
A friendly reminder: Law and the courts are not about justice but about the law. They are two completely separate issues.
I’d advise all to read Andre Comte-Sponville’s chapter on “Justice” in “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” to understand why.
Was this information ever filed during the discovery process?’ If not, shouldn’t there be some kind of penalty for withholding this information?
This case reeks more with each passing day.
I ‘m not an attorney, and I don’t play on one on TV, but don’t you think a competent judge would have thrown out the plaintiffs’s case because they lacked legal standing to file the lawsuit?
The plaintiffs themselves suffered no harm, Their willingness to serve as plutocratic puppets, however, will harm millions.
Well, today the gadflies at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are buzzing around the Vergara decision. A feast for them, clearly.
Noting the ruling it becomes more and more obvious that the Judge, for some reason, ignored the evidence and listened to the statistics of professors, who to my knowledge, never taught k-12. It is a sham of justice for sure, but how can that judge possibly base everything on the opinion of 2 professors and if he did then how did the defense rebut those two? I’d be curious to know if there were other experts that disagreed with them. I also wonder if this judge knew only too well where is bread is buttered come election time?
Did anyone catch “The Takeaway” on public radio today?
Does Michelle Rhee live on a different planet?
I can do nothing but quote Oscar Wilde. “It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.”
John Deasy should have been one of the plaintiffs, as well as Obama and Duncan. Amazing spit crossed this man’s lips. I think all the unqualified Broad Supers, principals, etc. should be FIRED. They don’t have the proper credentials, so how they can be anointed/appointed stumps me.
Kangaroo court, indeed.
Every dog has his day – these soulless a-holes will certainly have their day. I hope those kids who allowed themselves to be used in such pathetic fashion were paid well for their coached and fake testimony.
Follow THAT money.
Sickening.
My daughter has told me I should stop caring about these issues, because it is bringing nothing but anger to my life. She may be right, but if not me, if not you, then who?
Donna,
Your daughter should be told that you do it for her children so that they won’t be ruled by oligarchs. Your anger is admirable.
Those who are passive may be blithely living their lives without anger but, they are an impediment to a better world.
My wife tells me the same thing, and she’s also a teacher.
Your anger is righteous. You are reacting to injustice. Sometimes anger is projected at the wrong target but not in this case. It is healthy to channel the anger into action whenever possible.
This is a good piece, I thought. Not that it will make a dent in the huge ed reformer media blitz:
“Instead of imagining a world in which teachers are easier to fire, we should work to imagine one in which firing is rarely necessary. Because you don’t put an effective teacher in every classroom by holding a sword over their heads. You do it by putting tools in their hands.”
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-schneider-vergara-teachers-20140610-story.html
Right on!
Reblogged this on Susan Schneider and commented:
Absolutely spot on.
Just when I think that this decision couldn’t get any worse. HOW ON EARTH DID THE PLAINTIFFS HAVE STANDING TO SUE????? This case shouldn’t have even gotten to trial. It should have been thrown out as lack of standing.
Can you imagine the flood of lawsuits this could open up. This judge is a fool. Schools will go bankrupt
Sadly, that’s probably the point of these cases. Then everyone will have to go to charter schools because the public schools won’t exist. Ka-ching! For those deformers.
I’ve been wondering about the specifics of the plaintiffs’ case. How much harm have they endured at the hands of bad teachers. Now I know, the answer is “zero to none”.
But oh, one of the students interviewed said he “just knew” which teachers were bad. Well now. Why is anyone bothering with high-stakes testing, VAM, and all the rest? Hire these students to ferret the bad apples! They *just know*!
My thoughts/concerns are what will this case mean in the future if an appeal is lost. What actually will happen to the teaching profession in California? (and elsewhere) Will teachers simply become at will employee’s? Will teachers who hold unpopular political beliefs be fired? Will veteran teachers be “let go” as soon as they reach a high pay level? Will teachers accused of misconduct by a vindictive principal be terminated without a hearing to defend themselves? Will teachers be shown the door for speaking up for the rights of their students? These questions need to be asked now before new laws are passed to decimate what is left of the teaching profession.
This is a California education lawyer who seems unsympathetic to teacher tenure yet is quite critical of the opinion.
I think his (practical) analysis of the likely appeal is solid.
Why should teachers have a special status when the rest of us are all at will employees?
Harlan, you are back in gear, ready and raring to go!
Launch time. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . . .
Blast off.
See Harlan soar into stratospheric galaxies of non-reason, straight into the bottomless black hole of no critical thinking.
Harlan, does being an at-will employee necessarily make for a better society? If so, who gets the “better end?
Are you aware that tenure is a right to a hearing to show cause for firing, and it protects against cronyism, nepotism, and oppression when it comes to academic freedom, something educators thrive upon in order to advocate what is right for students in their developmentally proximate zones of cognition.
You have made it very clear in almost all your posts that you are no egalitarian, so why propose that we should all be the same? In your view, we all need to have the same absence of rights to put us on an equal footing.
I did not know you were THIS sociable. Your misery loves our company, does it not?
But you yourself have stated that not all people are equal, and that’s what, you claim so often, to be expected in the natural Harlan order of things.
Certainly, Harlan, YOU are not the same as anyone else . . . .
But to be fair, you are NO snob. Based on most of your posts about collectivism vs. individualism, it’s a no brainer that you’re really not better than anyone.
Keep on posting, Harlan. As I am upset about the absurdity and the injustice behind the Vergara case, your post could not have come at a better time for a good cheap laugh . . . . . .
I am obliged to you.
Always happy to give enjoyment to you, Robert. Protecting against nepotism is a good point. Firing to make way for the Super’s nephew is not unheard of. But if a teacher is not getting his kicks from posing as a radical (so many do), and is sticking to his last, then I don’t see why tenure is needed to protect a teacher from expressing unpopular views. A teacher shouldn’t be radicalizing his students. He doesn’t really know what’s best for society but only thinks he does. I don’t think a teacher in the public schools has a special mission or license to say any thing. What is called critical thinking can be taught without raising issues about which the teacher himself is ignorant, but doesn’t know it.
Nepotism is especially a concern when politicians control institutions that employ a large fraction of the jobs in a local area. This is why it makes sense to worry more about it in a public school district than in an independently managed school.
TE said, “This is why it makes sense to worry more about it (nepotism) in a public school district than in an independently managed school.”
I can’t repeat what I shouted to my empty home office when I read this wrong headed thinking. My explosion of laughter and the words that followed had the “F” word in it and the word “Idiot”. That was my instant reaction. Thanks for the comedy.
Public schools are 100% transparent, and the school boards are elected. Do you have any idea what happens during an election if there is any hint of fraud or any other unacceptable behavior like nepotism. Elections even at the school district level can get heated.
If there was nepotism of any kind, it could easily be discovered and might lead to a scandal in the next school board election. Someone already working in the district would know and possibly leak the info to the media or someone who was running against an incompetent for a school board position.
But in the private sector where there is little or no transparency, nepotism is a given and there has already been cases of nepotism discovered in fraud investigations in Ohio and in Florida in the private sector charter movement.
Does that mean nepotism never happens in the public schools? Of course not, but it’s risky for a highly placed administrator or elected school board members to do something this stupid, because it could lead to being fired or losing the next election.
Lloyd,
I don’t think that you understand that we are agreeing here. I think it is important to have strong controls over publicly elected officials who are also in charge of many jobs in the community. I think that it is less important to have strong controls over independent schools where the students can choose, or not choose to attend.
I’m still laughing at your logic. I don’t think attending a public school is the same as deciding on shopping at Target or Wall-Mart.
That is a heck of a non sequitur.
The public schools offer a lot of choice through electives, but Common Core Standards offer no choice, and what private sector charters offer is no transparency, lower pay on average for teachers, but higher pay for managers, a high potential for fraud and going out of business, etc. For instance, in Ohio, more than 150 Charters have gone out of business because of fraud (in some cases nepotism was involved with relatives were paid six figures) costing the state $1.5 billion, and in Florida many elected state officials have a financial stake in the private sector Charter schools they are voting to support.
Public schools don’t go out of business and even without Obama’s Machiavellian Common Core regime, there are ed codes in each state with requirements for graduation and those required classes are not a choice now and won’t be a choice in Private Sector Charters. Kids will still have to take English, math, science and history to graduate. And for sure, in the private sector Charter schools there will be fewer electives to choose from because those classes are expendable and without them profits will increase for hedge fund billionaires selling shares in their education ventures.
In addition, more than half the teachers in public schools have a masters degree in the subject they teach, while lower paid teachers in private schools have less than a third.
In Finland, all teachers are required to have a masters in the subject they teach, every teacher belongs to a strong labor union and 99+% of the children attend public schools that are guided by flexible common standards where teachers make all the decisions on what the teach and how to do it.
Public schools are totally transparent but private schools are not—they are answerable to no one but a distant CEO and stock holders looking to make a profit. Because of the transparency in the public schools and the fact that teachers that still have due process job protections aren’t afraid of blowing the whistle on fraud, it is difficult for elected school board members or administrators to hire their family and friends and give them high paying jobs. In public school districts the pay scale is public and every job comes with a description but this info is hidden in the PSC schools.
Without job protection and transparency, it will be easier to pull of this sort of fraud. But in the private sector world of business, what often happens to whistle blowers?
In France, every child by age four is in early childhood education but in the U.S. that number is about 60% of children. In addition, because of this program in France over the last thirty years, poverty was reduced from 15% to less than 7%.
The rate of poverty in the U.S. has hit a fifty year high and 23% of children live in poverty.
I’m still laughing.
Indeed public schools do offer choice inside the school doors. I have tried to get folks here to explore where the consensus of choice fails. I think it depends on who is paying for the class, who is offering the class, and at what age is the student making the choice. Want to work through it with me?
Compare the U.S. public school elective choices with European countries that offer no sports, drama or music programs. In Europe, the focus is in academics unless it is a vocational school. Anything extra, the parents have to pay for and it has to take place after school hours or on the weekends—-this includes sports.
Vocational schooling is the one choice missing in most public schools in the U.S., and who got rid of those programs? Not the teachers or their unions.
And even in the U.S., depending on funding, elective choices differ from district to district and school to school depending on funding—a topic that would offer so many diverse examples, it would be difficult to debate.
For instance, when my wife and I decided to move from Southern California, to the Bay Area, we researched all the choices we had in every school district. I spent days only the internet using Google researching districts and schools around the SF bay area from near Stanford to the north bay in Marine County and beyond. There were so many choices it was mind boggling, but it was easy to identify the schools with the biggest challenges and they were all in high poverty and high crime areas, which we made the choice to avoid.
We finally settled on a public school district that offered our daughter so many choices, she was gone from before 7:00 each day to about 8:00 each night and was involved in, for instance, sports, academic decathlon, and science groups that went off to compete against other schools. She had a buffet of choices and took advantage of them to the point where we had to restrict her choices.
And before you mention that this same choice should be offered to kids who live in poverty, well, the community where we live has many apartment buildings that charge rents similar to the rents found in poverty areas a few miles away. On walks to town, I’ve often seen waiters in their uniforms waking to town from apartments to go to work in a local restaurant, and their kids attend the same schools our daughter went to. Some of our daughters friends lived in these apartments where the parents made the choice to live in a better community that offered better schools for their children while they worked for poverty wages—sometimes two or more jobs.
The word “choice” is a PR trick by private sector Charter schools to suck in ignorant fools who think choice means their kid will benefit, when in fact, it means nothing of the sort. It’s bait. It’s a scam. It’s a con, and it is leading to fraud all across the country.
There are 3.3 million public school teachers in this country, and it is not their fault that you made a choice to live where you live and that you were unhappy with the public schools your children attended from the choices you made.
When we compare simliar schools with similar population in the US to any-similar schools in the world, we beat them every time for academic results.
I should add that not all school boards are paradigms of virtue. See this discussion: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/07/19/prince-georges-county-no-democracy-for-us/?replytocom=218962#respond
Sorry if this post comes in before my post about our agreement.
Perhaps it’s a special job.
You obviously have no clue.
Why should everyone else be at will?
I love the race to the bottom. People say: “I don’t have that so you shouldn’t either!”
Instead, they should look to improve the quality of their own lives and eliminate their misery.
Here’s what people should say: “They have that and I want that too!”
Harlan, I am glad to see you back after your hiatus, even though I tend not to agree with your comments.
I have inferred (using my CCSS close reading and critical thinking skills) that you are an untenured private school teacher, and that you work in a functional enough environment that you do not fear dismissal if your work is competent. I used to feel the same way.
I have worked in a similar environment, but one in which administrators rotate in and out every couple of years. I have seen plenty of unjust dismissals due to the whims of aggressive administrators, and unfair treatment of faculty (at the hands of admins, colleagues, parents, and students) who fear speaking up. I think tenure/ due process rights can create a needed buffer and permit teachers to conduct their work without undue fear.
I have also worked in traditional public schools, and I have not witnessed much in the way of difficulty in firing teachers who need firing, provided that the administrator is willing. Many teachers who have needed dismissal are quietly told to resign and do so, and thus don’t show up as firing statistics. Tenure doesn’t really come into play there, but it is an ace in the hole in case of unjust persecution.
Per your post, Harlan:
“A teacher shouldn’t be radicalizing his students. He doesn’t really know what’s best for society but only thinks he does. I don’t think a teacher in the public schools has a special mission or license to say any thing. What is called critical thinking can be taught without raising issues about which the teacher himself is ignorant, but doesn’t know it.”
Harlan, I really think you don’t get it. Especially on the point of “a teacher doesn’t have a license to say anything.”
As a history teacher, I have to cover events that parents are sensitive about. Their kids talk about a class discussion and relay incorrect information or recount the story wrong. Then a parent comes after me with incorrect information or a one-sided view.
Since I teach world and modern European history hear are issues that have arisen:
Catholic parents have questioned me about how I teach the Reformation. Though I am careful to note that I teach it in a historical vacuum, they fear that the Catholic Church comes off poorly. (Which I can’t help because, well, you know why.)
Jewish parents (we have a sizable Jewish population in one neighborhood) have been less than gracious about my use of documents from BOTH the Jewish and Palestinian sides of that issue.
I could list others but I won’t, because it would take a while.
In each case, I used primary sources that were usually run through major, respected university packets. I presented students with a variety of backgrounds and tools to answer questions from any angle.
It was due process protections that kept unreasonable parents (who don’t want their kids to think critically but only hear one perspective) from really trying to damage my reputation. I never started an insurrection. When this happens, it’s only a parent or two. But that’s all it takes to damage a reputation, put you on the radar of an administrator who doesn’t like conflict and will sacrifice a teacher for their own convenience or to add to personnel file that may build up over time.
Harlan, I think you make a mistake that many others do. You paint with a broad and often ideological brush. Doing so makes you forget or possibly dismiss the exceptions or smaller moving parts that can be affected. That’s fine. And as I mentioned before, if I have radicalized students it’s in favor of America. The wonderful flexible Constitution. The freedoms that our society has. And so on. We all know the nation isn’t perfect but it’s done a lot better by its citizens more often than not. And kids leave my, and many other history classrooms, with the knowledge of this when compared to other societies and historical events.
This is the same fatalistic argument used to support drug testing of welfare recipients. “If many employees, including I, have to take a drug test, people living off my taxes should have to.” This escapes the thought that perhaps nobody should be drug tested except positions where public safety is reasonably concerned (e.g. bus drivers).
Nobody should be fired at-will. Nobody should be treated this way. Every employee should have due process rights.
But even if you don’t accept this, why would you want any teacher fired at will? They have gone to school to get degree(s) in education, and then, they can just be fired because the principal doesn’t like them? Due process is about really making sure there are _grounds_ for releasing a teacher. This is key to a professional teaching environment. If teachers thought they could be fired for dirty stares, or any little reason, they wouldn’t ever choose to take any chances with novel ways to engage their students. They would have to become strict conformists, and I don’t see how that is good for students at all.
Bottom line: Why have teachers be in jobs that sink to the level of corporate zombies? I say we make most people’s jobs have the protections that teachers have.
Public school teachers are civil servants. What public school teachers call “tenure” is basically the same civil service protections that are granted to any other civil service job after satisfactory completion of a specified probationary period. For most civil servants, that period is 6 – 18 months, depending on the position. For teachers, it is three years before they are granted civil service protection, which simply means that an administrator must prove that allegations of incompetence are true and not simply made up to do away with a teacher for political or personal reasons. Teaching is intensely political an personal. Many people label a teacher “bad” simply based on personality issues – your child doesn’t “like” a teacher, or you don’t like that they don’t bend to your wishes regarding your child, or you think they are “mean”, whatever. Principals may want to get rid of a teacher who asks inconvenient or embarrassing questions during meetings or who advocates for children in the face of increasing pressure to “produce” high scores. Sometimes, a principal may want to get rid of a teacher because his/her niece just graduated college and wants a teaching job. And in response to your question regarding who else has this kind of job protection, I introduce into evidence police officers, sanitation workers, court officers, government clerks, customs officials, air traffic controllers, and even my husband, a meteorologist at a major airport. I think EVERYONE should have this kind of protection, which, by the way, is common in many countries in Europe, whether the job is public or private.
In California it is not three years before tenure (or due process rights). Teachers were informed of the decision by March 15 of the second year teaching.
Educators need academic freedom to be able to teach controversial topics, so they are not fired for teaching about evolution, etc. Duh.
Personally, I don’t think that anything is more radicalized than the TX Republican Platform which delineated how the party is against the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools.
Although controversy ensued after that was publicized and they since retracted those statements, this showed the real intent of the GOP, and neo-liberals in general, from both parties. Those are the same people who support military style charter schools for poor children of color, which require that students and teachers comply with the strict demands of totalitarian rulers, without questioning authority:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10144-texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools
Points well made, Steve K., and Alan. Perhaps parents deserved the option of sending their children to schools which will NOT disturb them.
What do you think?
Yes, to all your questions, Mr. Joshua.
That’s EXACTLY what is happening here in Florida and that’s the plan Jeb Bush formulated for us all with ALEC.
Our state legislature made us all “at will” employees three years ago. We’ve had 96 employees fired from the district offices over the last year and a half. The astounding common factor in all of these employees’ stories is that ALL of them were 2 – 3 years from retiring at full pension benefits. No more. Now they get a much smaller pension benefit and are left looking for work at the age of 60+.
Our Broad-trained superintendent even sicced his private investigator on a school board member who publicly questioned some of his policies. People are punitively moved into jobs they have no experience or training for then are fired for lacking the “needed skill sets”.
Vindictive “principals” with just a few years experience are being hired every month and they are cleaning house of all the experienced teachers who might dare to question their crazy decisions.
Teachers at one school are being intimidated, publicly shamed, and investigated for teaching their students a song on Earth Day that advocated saving an adjacent public park used by their school that the superintendent wanted to sell to a developer for a shopping strip.
We have armed guards at the entrances of all district buildings now and they stand in the back of the room at all board meetings, intimidating citizens who dare to attend the meetings with the expectation of being allowed to speak.
Our brave new world of Jeb Bush’s “school improvement” policies made all of this not only possible but inevitable. I’m glad teachers are waking up to the reality that this is a fight to the death for our profession and that the reformers are not reasonable, fair, trustworthy, interested in children, or anxious to do what’s right. They all follow “the ends justify the means” philosophy. Beware!
The more I look at this decision, the less sense it makes to me. By which I mean that I literally do not understand what it is. I don’t see any distinction between the facial challenge and the as-applied challenge. There’s no standing analysis. There’s no injury analysis. There’s no causation analysis, unless you count the weird language stating that the court’s job is to determine whether the statutes “cause the potential and/or unreasonable exposure of grossly ineffective teachers to” poor and minority students.”
“Potential and/or unreasonable exposure”?
I can’t imagine this decision will be affirmed. There’ll be too much exposure and heat for the appeals court to not send it back.
“There’s no causation analysis, unless you count the weird language stating that the court’s job is to determine whether the statutes “cause the potential and/or unreasonable exposure of grossly ineffective teachers to” poor and minority students.”
I think it’s the weakest part of the opinion and it’s the whole case.
I have no earthly idea how tenure places a disproportionate number of ineffective teachers in poor and minority schools. He says it does, in two paragraphs, but I don’t know he got there.
Flerp, how many hours of research do you figure a judge and his staff would put in on a case like this, and how independent would that research be (iow, do the parties provide resources beyond testimony and supporting documentation?)? I ask because some of the details in the decision feel incredibly “intimate” to me–the references to teachers being the most imporant *in-school* factor in a child’s education and the “dance of the lemons” being the most notable.
I am not a lawyer, I did NOT fall into a crevasse and get thawed out by your scientists, and this isn’t a legal argument–tenure obviously isn’t responsible for the fact that segregated districts are choosing from a shallower talent pool. But it serves a major role in locking in that disadvantage.
You are losing me here Tim. Are segregated districts choosing from a shallower talent pool? I think not. White segregated suburban districts likely have their pick of the litter. I teach in a largely African American segregated school that has many good teachers in my humble opinion. Do integrated schools have deeper talent pools? Good luck finding integrated schools in New Jersey, but there reportedly are some.
This is a fair point. It’s not totally uncommon to see opinions that are short on analysis from state court judges, partly because state court judges are overworked and tend to have fewer resources than federal court judges. They also tend to have less talented clerks than federal court judges. (I realize that may sound snotty, and I don’t mean to say state court clerks aren’t good or that all fed clerks are great, but it is what it is.)
That being said, the general rule is one clerk per case, and thus the total court resources devoted to a trial court opinion is a maximum of two people who are each working on many other things. In some judges’ chambers, the clerk does 95% to 100% of the drafting. Other judges are more hands-on, especially if they’re younger. The more trials that a judge sits on, the more difficult it is to draft robust opinions — it’s kind of like trying to write a novel after a full day of work that requires nonstop attention and public speaking.
The only thing the parties provide is the briefing, which can range from total crap to enormously helpful. The quality usually corresponds to the lawyers’ billing rates. The better the briefing, the more a court will rely on it. And to be clear, by “will rely on it,” I mean “will face some temptation to cut and paste directly from it.”
I can only speak from my own experience, which is the experience of someone who writes inefficiently and aims to err on the side of overworking rather than underworking something. On a decision like this, I would have wanted the first draft to really impress him, to truly be one of the best opinions he’d ever seen in his life. I probably would have puked at least once during the process. I would have spent a couple hundred hours. The judge would have spent maybe ten hours, but an extremely productive and important ten.
State court conditions don’t allow that kind of overdrafting. And now you’ve got me thinking about the poor clerk on this opinion. But this should have been better.
NJ teacher, I was using “segregated” as short-hand for the segregated districts where there are intentional concentrations of people of color. You are correct to point out that this common usage is a bit of a misnomer, as in our part of the world, the wealthy white/Asian suburbs are more segregated than the inner city. In any case, yes, the exclusive wealthy white/Asian suburb gets the pick of the teaching litter, and at the other end is the challenged (usually inner city) district made up primarily of poor people of color.
I am in agreement Tim. I guess I am getting a little tired of the assumption that less skilled teachers teach in high poverty urban districts. It is hard to teach in a neighborhood that experiences frequent shootings. It is challenging to teach students who rarely venture any distance from their homes. It is not easy to interact with children who have never met anyone of one’s ethnic background. Perhaps these teachers are made of stronger mettle and deserve commendations for their perseverance in the face of adversity rather than the derision of the community at large.
Job protections & pensions for workers are long gone in corporate America. Unions in the private sector have been decimated. This is about the destruction of the rights of workers in the public sector. Teachers are first. Other public sector workers like police & firefighters should get ready. Without government to stand with working people, we are at the mercy of corporations. They have no loyalty to people or country. They exist only to bring a profit each quarter.
I agree but I think you have it backward. The attack is on the public sector itself. Public sector unions are the only entity with any political power that is standing in the way of privatization.
I was thinking today we should privatize the USDOE. Why not? If “public” just means “publicly-funded” then it fits the definition.
We’ll hire an AMO (agency management organization) and then everyone in DC can work for a contractor, too.
I agree. But It begs the question whether there SHOULD be public sector unions at all. I say not, or at least not a closed union shop. The Wisconsin solution, in my view is reasonable.
So Harlan, you oppose free labor in a free market? We can assume that labor applied to public purposes is still free. Do you also oppose freedom of assembly?
Sounds like California needs to have Moral Mondays for teachers like they did last summer (Or are they still going on?) in North Carolina.
It’s possible this verdict will be overturned on appeal. If so, I’m convinced the “almost billionaire” will appeal the case as far as possible. Win or lose, the media exposure plays into their overall strategy. They are planting a seed that they hope will sprout and spread.
To them, it isn’t about what’s right or wrong but who wins.
This is only one battle in an already long war to save the democratic public schools. You win some. You lose some. The Walton family started this war decades ago and they’ve probably spent well over a billion dollars so far spreading their lies.
And make no mistake, this is a war that’s about greed and flawed ideologies. Gather the troops and plan the next move on this chess board. Keep them off balance and don’t let them do the same to us.
Never give up the good fight.
This decision does seem ‘unreasonable’ and sure to be appealed with a good chance of reversal. HOWEVER, I thought everyone here was against segregation and unequal education. I should think you’d be in favor of it, unless you want to argue that tenure doesn’t contribute to segregated sub-standard teaching. Curious times.
NJ has top rated schools in the nation and in some areas is #1. NJ is always in the top tier of schools along with MASS and CT. That’s with unions, tenure and seniority. It’s sad that you are so against a democratic institution like unions that fights for teacher rights and NOT at the expense of the pupils. I am wasting my breath on some kind of libertarian ideologue.
Why would a libertarian position be a bad thing? Are you happy with what we have now?
Anyone who applies sharp ideology (instead of reason and the facts at hand) to every issue he comes across cannot be trusted to judge what’s reasonable or not. That you fell into the bucket that decides this decision “unreasonable” is by happenstance.
That tenure contributes to segregation or sub-standard teaching is pap nonsense.
I’m just trying to understand the philosophical basis of education policy advocates on this blog. By “unreasonable” I mean not connected by cause and effect. Lots of people here are no good on cause and effect. I agree with you on this particular issue, mainly because the specific plaintiffs had not been injured. BUT, on the other issue that tenure contributes to the accumulation of the worst teachers in the poorest schools, MAY in fact be true.
It interests me that the public school teaching cadres are not concerned who teaches the hardest to teach, but only about their own welfare when claiming a higher mission. It’s the rankest kind of hypocrisy. I don’t believe those teachers here who claim to be nobler than I am.
The Vergarer suit exposes liberal hypocrisy. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not a new phenomenon. Anglican Priests trumpet spirituality but really are careerists. So with teachers.
Self knowledge is everything.
“Harlan Underhill
June 11, 2014 at 9:08 pm
I agree. But It begs the question whether there SHOULD be public sector unions at all. I say not, or at least not a closed union shop. The Wisconsin solution, in my view is reasonable.”
I would think that through if I were you. Do you want a police officer fired if he arrests a prominent citizen or a politician? How about a teacher who reports a dangerous condition in a school? How about an elections worker who counts all the ballots, when she’s told her job depends on not counting that stack over there?
Some public sector employees have a lot of power, like judges or prosecutors or county commissioners. They’re a power in their own right. They don’t need a union. That’s not true of the vast majority of public sector workers.
The thought of leaving public sector workers, and the work they do, up the whims of political appointees or elected officials and the petty little fiefdoms they’d create with that power should scare you to death.
Chiara, why waste your time?
Nothing scares Harlan to death, which is why Harlan scares me to death . . . . .
It is not clear that unions and tenure or due process rights are necessarily go together. Many tenured faculty at post secondary institutions have very strong tenure rights (or due process rights if you want to call them that) without any union.
Well now, there’s a point.
Our state and national unions have bedded down the reformers for a long time, and now, as a result of using no protection for teachers, the diseases are spreading like crazy. Vergara is one such maladie that has stemmed from the AFT’s politicla promiscuity with people like Obama and Bill Gates.
So why pay union dues?
Do those dues merely keep the union in business for its own sake, or does the union actually serve the popular will of is constituents democratically?
An idea of tenure rights per negotiations and contractual obligations along with tenure rights being constitutional and written into state law is a very appealing one.
The union may be serving as a mere – in recent time – middle man, and adds cost to something unnecessarily.
I hope Weingarten and Van Roekel are shaking a bit, although I doubt it because their assett base is so great, they personally will fare well with or without their organziations.
I am heavily pro-union and pro-big government when both or either truly serve their average every day constitutent and voter.
Neither do in recent times . . . . . .
I would think, Robert, that current experience would lead you to reevaluate your passionate pro union and pro large government support. I would argue that neither EVER serves the interests of the average member or citizen, except by infringing on the rights of others.
Have YOU ever thought you were infringing on the rights of others by supporting the union and big government?
You don’t see yourself as an immoral person I’m sure, but, well . . . you just might be in actuality.
We want a government, a dragon so to speak, to defend us from external and internal enemies but once it starts feeding off the folks who hired it, or worse, starts taking bribes to leave some alone and snap up others, it’s power needs to be redirected.
And even worse, now, the dragon is not feared abroad at all but IS feared at home.
You are defending that tyrannous dragon, Robert.
Harlan, here’s a piece that gives some history on tenure laws.
It’s funny that you support Governor Walker’s attack on the public sector, because Wisconsin was always one of the “good government” states in the upper midwest:
“Tenure has existed in K-12 public education since 1909, when “good-government” reformers borrowed the concept from Germany. The idea spread quickly from New Jersey to New York to Chicago and then across the country.
During the Progressive Era, both teachers unions and school-accountability hawks embraced the policy, which prevented teaching jobs from being given out as favors by political bosses. If it was legally difficult to fire a good teacher, she couldn’t be replaced by the alderman’s unqualified sister-in-law.
Tenure remains common in schools around the world, but since 2009, two-thirds of American states have weakened their teacher-tenure laws in response to President Obama’s Race to the Top program. California, where Governor Jerry Brown is far more sympathetic to the teachers unions than most governors, was not among them. The Vergara ruling is an especially big blow to unions on typically sympathetic turf.”
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/05/8546262/business-groups-fighting-back-support-common-core
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/california-rules-teacher-tenure-laws-unconstitutional/372536/
Annnnndddd, the grand prize winner for most ‘grossly ineffective’ persons award is…(drum rolls, please)
The Vergara judge, and John Deasy!!!
(Audience applause).
Behind every truly bad, grossly ineffective teacher stands an even worse administrator too lazy or too incompetent to do their job. Never blame a bad teacher for their own existence; they must be enabled by grossly ineffective management.
TAGO!
And without due process rights even more ineffective teachers will be given the opportunity to be incompetent.
Amen! How do people like Harlan and teachingeconomist do the mental gymnastics to convince themselves that employees are to blame for their lack of skills or performance and the employer is totally blameless and helpless?
In the 30-odd right to work states management alone creates the contracts — if teachers do not ratify they simply impose one or remain under the last ratified contract indefinitely (both happened in my district within the last 6 years. 2 imposed contracts and no new contract for 4 years meaning no pay raises of any kind); management sets the rules; management determines the pay scale and work conditions; management selects the curriculum and materials; management determines the schedule; management hires, assigns, and fires; management trains employees and sets expectations and monitors all employees; management supervises all employees with mandated constant walk-throughs and formal observations; and management sets and spends the budgets without teacher input.
Teachers may be “asked’ what they think to maintain the appearance of negotiations where both parties have equal status at the bargaining table but management is under no obligation to listen or change anything in their contracts and since striking and other overt actions are outlawed and punishable by massive fines and imprisonment, teachers have NO RECOURSE if they are unsatisfied with any of the above contractual items except to quit and find other employment.
Yet teachers, the employees, are blamed for all the ills of the system, including not firing themselves if they aren’t up to the job. Teachers must be punished for the effects of poverty, the idiocy of legislatures, the incompetence of school boards, the indifference of voters, the suffering of children, and as sacrifices on the altars of political ideologies.
Teachers, the new American Scapegoats.
Chris,
Were in my posts have I blamed anyone for anything?
Yep, the shop foreman can make life hell for the workers.
Reblogged this on Factionista Files and commented:
A big “Thank You” to Diane Ravitch for digging into the facts of this trial to uncover the politics behind plaintiff’s case.
It is INCREDIBLY troublesome when a case so full of holes can make it through a court system that is supposed to be just and fair. What was fair about this outcome?
If the appeal fails to throw out this verdict, we need to fill the streets of this country in protest. I, for one, do not intend to live in a country where corruption and lawlessness are a way of life. That is NOT what our founders envisioned and not what we can let happen to OUR country. It belongs to WE, THE PEOPLE, not to the monied profit-mongers who want to throw good people under the bus in order to take over our schools, our neighborhoods and our civil society.
Let’s all follow this case and publicize it from the point of view that demands FACTS to find justice!
There is a good deal about this country that our founders never envisaged. I, for one, approve of that.
Do you approve of that when it isn’t in your favor? I doubt it seriously, te.
Do i think it is good that one person does not own another? Yes. Do I think that it is good that women are viewed as full citizens of the country? Yes. Do i think it is good that Dr. Ravitch can marry her life partner? Yes. These are all areas where i have substantial differences with the “founding fathers”.
“”. . . a court system that is supposed to be just and fair.”
See my above comment to Robert. A court system and justice (of which fairness is one issue) are two separate concepts/realities. Courts are not based on “justice” but on law.
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
“There was a back-to-school night where there was drive-by shooting 30 to 50 yards from behind my classroom. I remember talking with a mother at the time. And I was just about to say to the mom, ‘and your son has trouble paying attention,’ and seven to nine shots rang out.”
Yeah, but forcibly integrating the schools will solve problems like this. And suburban parents will be totally fine with their kids being exposed to this kind of danger because they’ll have the satisfaction of knowing they’re striking a blow for “social justice.”
Sheesh.
Jack Talbot, the issue here–the shooting outside the school-is about teaching and learning conditions, which were ignored by the judge, not “forced integration.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/24/local/la-me-outthere-20100623
(A link to a Los Angeles Times article featuring a project done by Mize and his students in his classroom from 2010).
(Youtube link featuring Mize and a portion of his story).
http://cvn.com/witnesses/mize-anthony
(Recorded testimony from Mize at the Vergara Trial on the stand).
The poor case these plaintiffs make is exactly why we NEED tenure. To protect teachers from losing their livelihood based on the unqualified opinions of students and parents who hold no ability to accurately judge a teacher’s worth.
It’s been said to me, that teaching is unlike any service job. In the course of doing our jobs well, it is EXPECTED that our ‘customers’ will be left unhappy or unsatisfied. No parent likes hearing their student is being held accountable for poor behavior or to see a poor report card come home. But doing these things is necessary to help the student grow, experience his mistakes and improve. I can forsee teaching becoming a brown-nosing job where teachers have no control over the classroom because they aren’t allowed to enact consequences in fear of angering parents and losing their job, and where grade inflation is rampant for the same reason.
Education has lost its meaning.
This KIND of education has lost its meaning because you can’t play the petty tyrant over the captive students and parents any more.
So holding students accountable for their actions and their effort in the class and protecting the rights of other students to learn rather than being held captive by another students poor behavior is the teacher acting as a tyrant over parents and students?
I can see somebody here has never stepped foot into a classroom.
Harlan has only worked (and may still work) in a private school where they filter the kids. I think he has no clue why the private sector Charters, like the KIPP chain, throws out so many of the kids who come from poverty.
But soon he will be able to find out without putting his life and health on the line to discover what it’s like first hand.
Wow. This is amazing. This is the equivalent of going to court to sue McDonald’s for food poisoning but presenting no evidence that you were actually ill, no evidence that you ever ate contaminated foodstuff at McDonald’s, even that you ever ate at McDonald’s at all, and still prevailing on the strength of expert testimony that claims a statistical relationship between Big Macs and heart disease (but not food poisoning) without ever having been published in a scientific journal. No chance you could pull that off against McD. Apparently, blaming teachers is a lot easier and has a far lower standard of evidence than going against a corporation.
What one has to wonder: what went wrong with the defense if they haven’t been able to make this case effectively at trial? This is always the first line of defense – show that the plaintiffs have not suffered a damage and ask for dismissal. Was the initial defense team grossly incompetent, perhaps intentionally so?
Or the verdict of this case was in the bag before the trial started.
Nice analogy, EXCEPT in the public school world you can’t go down the street to Burger King. Thus privatization. Remarketization of education.
Just finished reading the defense post-trial brief, and I’m even more astonished with that muddled mess of a verdict. The plaintiffs clearly had no standing? Defense arguments were coherent, particularly when compared to the fact free verdict. I am inclined to agree with Lloyd Lofthouse that the outcome was in the bag before the trial started. The problem extends far beyond decision. The process, particularly strong bias on the part of Judge Treu, was deeply flawed. The positive of such a poorly argued decision is that it strengthens the defense case on appeal.
What is even more disturbing is the widespread teacher bashing that is occurring throughout the media, and extending all the way up to the President and Secretary of Education.
This may be unpopular, but if not through Vergara, how do we go about getting rid of ineffective teachers? Once you have exhausted all of the correct channels for trying to help GITs improve and they don’t…what next? Essentially, even if they commit a crime, it takes a long time to show them the door. Perhaps instead of focusing on termination, maybe retirement should not be such a long way off for teachers. I know some teachers who are just hanging on so that their retirement will be at least a decent wage for living. Take for instance in California, if a teacher starts at the ripe old age of 23 and works for 30 years, they still can’t get a good enough percentage of their salary, because they have not reached the correct age to factor into their retirement benefit. Is this fair? No, so then we have tired, burnout teachers who are there to get to that magical age where they can cash out more profitably. If a teacher has been proven to be ineffective through observation, poor student achievement, poor classroom management, poor attendance, poor interpersonal skills, why on earth would any school, parents or students be expected to endure that? If not Vergara, then what?
Eddbound, working conditions are so poor that the question should be, how do we build the support system to help teachers get better in their work. Close to half of new teachers leave in first five years. We need to improve retention rates. We need to improve preparation and recruitment. Vergara offers no answers, none at all.
“working conditions are so poor that the question should be, how do we build the support system to help teachers get better in their work”
During the years I was in the classroom—just a sampling—we were gassed with formaldehyde through the central air ducts causing nose bleeds and kids vomiting; the roofs leaked (it was so bad that the carpets felt like water filled sponges when you walked across them), there were dead animals under one portable classroom that I taught out of, and it took time to get the bodies out of a crawl space so small, humans couldn’t get in.
And in one portable, the floor bulged in the middle of the room so bad, the student desks slid down the slopes into the rows below the bulge. Eventually when enrollment declined, that portable was turned into storage. I also taught out of that room one year.
Then there were animals that somehow fell into a wall between classrooms (again, my room was one) and died over the winter break. We came back to school with a stench so bad, several teachers in that building, including me, had to evacuate our kids to the library and teach from there.
The yard work—mowing and blowing the lawns—was done only when we were in session and kids with allergies and asthma had lots of problems on those days.
To make extra money, the district sold sodas on campus through vending machines selling two thousand cases of Coke a week in addition to 60 ounce cups of soda for 99 cents from the campus snack bar. Kids came in after lunch higher than the international space station and by the end of that period, they were slack jawed, and flat on the ground blurry eyed.
In fact, when the district decided the school should be repainted to make the place look better than it was so it wouldn’t look like a prison (the gangs were so violent, we had our own campus police force of six officers), they spray painted while classes were in session. Kids were throwing up in my class from the paint fumes. Again, I moved my kids from my classroom to the library.
The more I complained, the more belligeranet district administration became in very covert ways. To them, we teachers—men and women—who complained, were just grouchy old ladies and the problems were all in our heads.
And these are only few examples—just the tip of that part of the iceberg showing above water.
This would be another situation where a defined contribution retirement plan would be beneficial, the ACA is also a help for those not yet eligible for Medicare.
The other question is how effectively the defendants attacked the “expert” study that the judge fell in love with. I haven’t seen that part of the trial record yet, but from what I can tell, the studies were seriously biased, and the fact that they had “Harvard” stamped on them should not have mattered given the problems that should have been raised. As we have been sharing here and elsewhere (and even at AERA) for years, most of the “studies” that have supported the right wing’s versions of reality have collapsed under close examination. That’s why the Waltons had to create that “Department of School Reform” out of the Manhattan Institute. They keep losing their cover and have to buy new ones…
Here’s a video of one of the “grossly ineffective teachers” and “2013 Pasadena Teacher of the Year” named in this lawsuit (by her former student and plaintiff Raylene Monterroza):
Mind you, this above video was played during court, and Ms. Monterroza was questioned about how it felt to watch the video of students praising her “grossly ineffective teacher” (starting at 00:49). She replied that watching it was upsetting, and that those students must have been lying as that wasn’t her experience.
Hmmm…
Watch the “teacher of the year” video again, starting at 00:49, where the students give their opinion of the teachers.
Do these kids sound like they’re lying?
Not only lying, but very carefully coached.
Sadly, they are being prepared for a role in the next iteration of “Waiting for Superman” or “Won’t Back Down”…
Remember: We won’t always win, but we can fight with all we’ve got…
Having watched lawyers do a good job at discrediting witnesses, experts, and testimony and also having watched a very bad job of the same (my case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which denied cert, and though the Board withdrew their crazy damages claim, they “won” on their right to fire me as a teacher for my work as an independent journalist), I know it is difficult for some decent people to discredit phony witnesses, especially when those witnesses are “children.”
But from this point on, every new “Vergara” is going to require that our side really dig into the lies and half truths — whether from academics or from children — that boost the well funded side of mendacity. We won’t always win (after all, we are in American courts in 2014) but at least we can demonstrate that our side was accurate and strong. I’m remembering that it of history — how all those cases going back decades (including the years of World War II) finally became “Brown v. Board of Education.” I guess I don’t believe a U.S. court would have ruled in our favor in “Brown” prior to both the defeat of Nazism and the growing movement for equality that included everything from “42” to the quiet but well organized Deacons for Defense…
But that’s another long story we can enjoy sharing some time.
Meanwhile, the “kids” who spout these lies need to be challenged.
Hold on. I think you missed my point, George, and are confused about which kids to whom I am referring.
The kids about whom I ask the question, “Do they sound like they’re lying?” are the kids in the video praising the teacher—the Vergara team’s example of a “grossly ineffective” teacher, one Ms. Christine McLaughlin—starting at 00:49 in the video:
Again, this is a video portrait, as you see, celebrating and profiling Ms. McLaughlin’s award-winning teaching, as the “Rotary’s Pasadena 2013 Teacher of the Year.”
The student plaintiff, Ms. Raylene Monterroza, claimed in her testimony that those students in the video can’t be telling the truth, as it conflicts with her own experience. She said that watching that video prior to her testimony, “upset” her… as it included countless students contradicting her and the entire Vergara team’s claims that Ms. McLaughlin is… again… “a grossly ineffective teacher.”
Again, watch the video portrait of Ms. McLaughlin (who was also won the Pasadena NAACP’s “2008 Star of Education” award, by the way) and ask yourself…
So which is Ms. McLaughlin?
a deserving, multi-award-winning “Teacher of the Year”, praised to the hilt by countless students in the video?
OR
“a grossly ineffective teacher” according to just one student, and a teacher who taught the (Vergara plaintiff) Ms. Monterroza “nothing,” and thus destroyed Ms. Monterroza’s education?
Watch it again while you ponder that question:
I think this answer is pretty obvious, and hopefully will be to any Appeals Court or Supreme Court judges.
Thanks. Sorry.
“Pilot” schools are LAUSD schools approved by school board–they are not charters
This is to break the union and bring in the charter schools. So how effective is it to have new teachers come and then go once he or she is deemed ineffective?
The problem with your arguments and comments here is that (1) a successful Vergara case will save public schools, hurting the prospects of charter schools, and (2) the people who are financially backing the case are not “right wingers,” they are liberal Democrats.
JI: A successful Vergara case will save public schools?
If employment protections for teachers are reduced or done away with, well, there goes a huge incentive to be a teacher. Intelligent and talented people will find much better employment opportunities, and your kids and grandkids will be taught by the leftovers.
Teacher tenure is a magnetic force that attracts talented teachers and retains them.
Students who fail in school, even under the most talented teachers, do so because of a host of reasons, including a home environment in which education is not deemed important and excessively large class sizes. One of the defendants in this case, who stated that her teacher was grossly ineffective, was actually taught by a master teacher and Teacher of the Year award recipient.
Finally, support for union crushing is a bi-partisan sport. It’s not so much Republican/Democrat as it is class warfare– the gutting the middle class by the elite.