An earlier post about the Vergara case contrasted the testimony of a plaintiff (a student) who said Ms. McLaughlin was a “bad” teacher with a video in which several students spoke highly of the same teacher, who was named by the Rotary as Pasadena Teacher of the Year.
Christine McLaughlin, the teacher who was the subject of the post, left the following comment:
“I was so surprised to hear of this post regarding the case and my involvement. I want to point out two important facts that might add additional insight into this case.
1. The case was a lawsuit against the State and lawmakers, not individual teachers. The teachers listed in the student’s testimony were pawns in this process. I was sadly one of those pawns.
2. Miss Monterroza stated that every teacher she had in PUSD from 5th through 9th grade were “bad” teachers. Except one! The one that recruited her to join this lawsuit. He had his agenda because he was RIFed and he did not like the system. I was moved into his position ( I was RIFed that year too).”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I want to point out that when I took education law for my administrative certificate back in the 80s, the professor who taught this course, who was very conservative politically, pointed out two US Supreme Court cases. Both were against individual teachers. The two cases involved teacher incompetence. In both cases, the US Supreme Court ruled that so many factors affect the academic achievement of a child that it is impossible to determine if the teachers themselves were the primary cause of these students lack of progress.
This is why the Vergara ruling is flawed. One cannot say that tenure laws cause teachers as an aggregate to be incompetent. Individuals make up an aggregate class of teachers. It makes no sense to say that even though most individual teachers are competent, but as a group, they are incompetent because of tenure. That is why I think that when this case gets appealed to the federal level, it will hopefully be overturned.
You are being too logical, liberal teacher, although I hope you are right. I question whether logic enters into some decision. Certainly common sense is often ignored.
Please cite both cases for us. It would be good to refer to the cases directly when discussing teacher evaluations and student performance.
Also, if you can cite the cases, you would help the judge in the Vergara case.
Why did non-cognitive impacts, including relationship based teaching, as mentioned by Ms. McLaughlin, not seem to matter in this case?
Hopes is necessary for many teachers to be able to continue, despite the ongoing corporate assault on public education and teachers.
If logic meant anything to the attackers and the courts, then there is plenty of evidence to contest the very premise of the case, such as the fact that states with union protections for teachers perform better than those which don’t have them.
There is also a lot of evidence to refute the Chetty & Kane nonsense and VAM, and to support the impacts of teacher experience and educational levels, including NAEP.
Who were the defense lawyers? Was education their specialty? I can’t find that info on their website. They don’t have nearly as much information posted as the plaintiffs have.
For God’s sake, how seriously did they take the fact that they were up against a plaintiff team led by Ted Olson, the lawyer who effectively ended the vote recount and gave us George H Bush as president, despite his losing the popular vote?
I really wish the failed defense team in Vergara was scrutinized as closely as the failed prosecution team was in the OJ case!
cx: George Dubya not H
cx: Hope not Hopes.
Argh to no way of editing in WordPress!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Supreme Court has changed a lot since the 1980’s. Let’s hope precedent still counts for something.
The Supreme Court has decided precedent no longer has precedent. It is an ideological and political free for all now.
Great point about precedent!
I think it’s only a free-for-all for the ideological and political right though. They have the power and they seem to consider the left to be pathetic, bleeding heart white loons and people of color, none of whom really matter to them.
And talk about ending jobs for life where they really occur. Time for SCOTUS term limits!
This blog has just hit 13 million views.
😃
Why does it keeps attracting a high number of views? Because it presents vital info excluded from the MSM, and because it offers folks like Ms. Christine McLaughlin a forum. Heartfelt thanks to Diane.
And to Christine McLaughlin:
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” [Mother Teresa]
From your friendly neighborhood KrazyTA.
Keep on keepin’ on. Know that you are in the hearts of many.
😎
This has to be brought to the appeal. Clearly this shows bias.
Sent from my iPhone
>
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This was my reply to Ms McLaughlin on her post:
“So good to hear from the subject herself! Welcome. But your post poses more questions (admit I haven’t read the transcript): a witness claiming that she had all bad (except one) teacher in 5 yrs– the testimony strains credulity. One might think that on the strength of your award-winning career alone, the testimony would be easily discredited. Was the testimony discredited, and the suit won anyway for other factors?”
I’d like to add: I was so sorry to read you’d been “RIF”‘d. I can’t help wondering why a Vergara case is even mounted, if local districts are able to “RIF” an award-winning & tenured teacher…
First I’d heard that a teacher recruited prop plaintiff’s for this case. I wish that person lots of real good luck in the rest of his career. When he’s nearing forty and feeling anxious about owning a home and raising a family because he has no job security and makes too little money, I hope he looks back on this case with pride.
Yup! That’s why us old folks know the words to “I’m sticking with the union”. It’s only when there are RIF’s that seniority comes into play, and there are RIF’s only when there are lay-off’s. Lay-off’s increase class size and teacher’s student loads and disrupt whole schools. And when a district squanders $$$ buying tech toys like iPads, RIF’s are sure to follow.
This guy who was bitter over losing his position needs to look down the road just a little way. He probably believes the nonsense that all LIFO tenured teachers are dinosaurs and the young “innovative” TFA’s can fix all that’s wrong before moving on to their real, delayed, careers at McKinsey.
Yeah, and just wait until he hits retirement age and realizes that teachers with no union protections like me are exploited terribly. We are very low paid (and often hourly workers), don’t make enough money to get by on, let alone to save, have no pensions and are expected to live on about $900 per month from Social Security when we retire.
I could go live in a ghetto, since I will officially retire next month, because I can’t afford to continue living where I’ve been (renting) for the past 15 years, but I have no money to move. (Yes, homeownership was never an option for me.) Anyway, that’s the kind of income that even poor people in the ghettos can’t survive on in my area.
The reality is that I’m in arrears on my rent due to a further decline in my already low income and a high increase in my rent. I have applied to many places but I’ve been unable to find additional work. SS won’t actually start paying me until mid-September, my job put limits on our income and wouldn’t give me work for July, and I don’t qualify for unemployment compensation. I won’t get paid my measly wage again until the end of August. My landlord will not wait to be paid, and anyway I won’t get paid enough money then to cover back rent. I’ve been fighting becoming homeless for about three years now but, at this point, I have no more resources or anyone to turn to for help, and absolutely no one cares. So I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will lose everything I own and be put out on the street and homeless before the fall. The only thing that could save my life now would be winning the lottery, but that is an intolerable hope.
The truth is that I could never afford to really stop working either, but SS has a limit on the amount of income I can earn. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. No one fully appreciates the “I’m living on a fixed income” cries, because the elderly are not revered in our society. No wonder the suicide rate for seniors is high.
As problematic as unions can be, not valuing the protections that unions provide workers is extremely short sighted.
I’m so sorry for your troubles, Chi-Town. Been there.
Thanks so much, Dolphin. I hope you are doing okay these days.
I am truly sorry to read your hardship in teaching life. This concerns me greatly. I cannot imagine how uneducated immigrants manage their living without teaching degree?
You and Dolphin remind me my own teacher who had a gambling spouse. His life became misery after a retirement. Your story has now explained the reason that we have to many corruptions in union and corporate. Yes, money and survival have brought humanity and human dignity down to below zero.
Back2basic
“It is incredibly easy for these new instructional approaches to look good on paper or to work well in pilot classrooms in the hands of highly skilled experts,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, “and then to turn into mushy, lazy confusing goop as it spreads out to classrooms and textbooks.”
Mushy, lazy people are ruining the Common Core, just like the “highly skilled experts” knew they would!
I don’t even think they hear the arrogance and contempt anymore, I really don’t. They’re so far into the bubble there’s no rescuing them. You’d have to send a search team 🙂
Ed reform can’t fail it can only BE failed, by teachers and students and parents in, um, actual classrooms. Of course the “highly skilled experts” are above reproach.
Reality intrudes on another glorious theory! Quick! Blame the front line workers!
Mr. Hess is correct. From the college laboratories, to the K-12 classroom, new teaching strategies fall apart very quickly. New theories of learning every week, so many variables. It’s no wonder that so many teachers are resistant to change. One barely learns one new way when another is mandated.
Can we declare a moratorium on all new teaching strategies for five years? Let’s see if the old ones work first.
Daniel T. Willingham has written on this very topic. Darned if I can find the article though, so many new teaching theories to read about!
Daniel Willingham is the go-to psychologist for corporate reformers, like Bill Gates, plus he does not believe in developmentally appropriate practices for young children. I do not believe a word he says, including “and” and “the.”
The corporate reformers like Dan Willingham? If so, that gives me some hope for the reformers. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Willingham’s book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” has more truth on its first page than you’ll find in the whole corpus of constructivism. Among the things I learned from that book: 1. that telling stories is a good way of teaching; 2. that quizzing works because it causes the brain to recall information, and science shows that the act of recalling is what transfers knowledge from short to long-term memory banks; 3. that framing a lesson as a problem to be solved helps to engage students. What I like about Willingham is that he has cognitive science to back up all his assertions, whereas most education writers (e.g. Freire and Calkins) tend to pull beautiful and plasuible sounding prescriptions out of their butts. Teachers, dare to think critically about what we were fed in education school!
Cares, can you post the article you mention about developmentally appropriate practices for young children? I have read just about everything Willingham has written and he speaks truth to me. But I am always willing to listen to another opinion.
I assume you are familiar with his website?
http://www.danielwillingham.com/
I love new teaching strategies in schools where nothing is mandated, because they allow individual teachers to find what works best for them. For example, I’m very student-centered, calm and quiet. The guy in the room next to me works best in organized chaos. The guy down the hall is a wonderful, interesting orator, and lecture actually works well for him.
It took me a long time to find my optimal strategy. I am grateful that I worked in schools where a) teachers were allowed to be different, so I had many different examples and models, and b) I was allowed to experiment with the different strategies as I pleased, without scripted classes.
If the method was tested over the long term, and then we were given time to master it, it might make sense. However, we tend to have superficial training and then a new method comes along a month later. I think we should learn from those Finns.
The Finns are patient and will set long range goals to work towards. We Americans want the quick fix and lack patience. We would never settle for slow incremental gains as we had before NCLB, we thing the miraculous is common place and comes on demand.
Too true! There was a time when children were nurtured and ALLOWED to grow at their own pace. Now, it’s “hurry up and grow up,” which is part of the developmentally inappropriate CCSS.