When the Los Angeles School Unified School District was sued by lawyers claiming that due process for teachers harms the civil rights of minority students, one of those who testified FOR the plaintiffs and AGAINST the district was Superintendent John Deasy. The high-powered lawyers are paid by a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.
The goal of the lawsuit is to remove the single most important protection that teachers have: freedom from arbitrary and capricious firing, and the right to a fair hearing before an independent arbitrator. This is not a right lightly awarded (or should not be); it is awarded by administrators after two years of teaching in the Los Angeles district. It is the responsibility of leaders to make sound judgments about teachers based on observation and to deny tenure to any who are “grossly ineffective,” or “ineffective” in any sense. In other jurisdictions, the probationary period is three or four years. Some states allow teachers to be fired at will. That seems to be Deasy’s goal.
The story begins:
“Last week’s testimony in the Vergara v. California trial raised many an eyebrow when Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent John E. Deasy testified on behalf of plaintiffs in a lawsuit whose defendants had originally included LAUSD.
Despite its supporters’ protests to the contrary, Vergara is widely seen as a frontal attack against statutory guarantees of due process and seniority rights for state teachers. The suit is the brainchild of Students Matter, a Bay Area nonprofit created by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and partly financed by L.A. billionaire Eli Broad.
“Under friendly direct examination by plaintiff attorney Marcellus McRae, the superintendent offered testimony that supported the suit’s contentions that the way in which teachers are fired, laid off and granted tenure has an adverse impact on the overall quality of the teacher workforce and illegally discriminates against low-income and minority students.
At one point Deasy’s apparent eagerness to anticipate McRae drew an instruction from Judge Rolf M. Treu for the superintendent to wait for the question before supplying the answer.
“Deasy readily agreed that due process laws complicated dismissals of “grossly ineffective teachers” and damaged the morale of the profession. “Morale is absolutely affected,” Deasy insisted, before attacking the state’s teacher seniority policies.
He also denied any connection between student performance and poverty. “I believe the statistics correlate,” he said, “but I don’t believe in causality.”
“Deasy’s performance as a friendly witness should not have come as a complete surprise, however. The day after the suit was originally filed against the state and the L.A. school district in 2012, then-defendant Deasy took the unusual step of issuing a press release endorsing the lawsuit’s aims. (Deasy, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this article.)
For the city’s public school teachers and longtime education policy observers, the spectacle of the L.A. school chief siding with a lawsuit against the very system he is paid to uphold has become a familiar feature of Deasy’s fractious, two-and-half year tenure.”
He really is for $ale. Wow! No shame Deasy.
He came to LAUSD already sold. He’s part of the Broad virus.
He certainly is! He was hired by Broad to infect LAUSD from the inside, which he has done. He’s praying Vergara and Students First are successful so he can fire career teachers and hire 5week TeachForAwhile (TFA) in their place. More $$ for his sponsor that way…
‘Scuse me — Students Matter (fake grass roots – so many!)
Sleazy Deasy, proving that if you’re a winner, you side with the money. It’s nothing personal — just business.
“. . . and to deny tenure . . . ”
IT”S NOT TENURE! It’s “due process” rights. We’ve got to think these things through before committing them to writing and re-inforcing the edudeformers’ discourse.
“In other jurisdictions, the probationary period is three or four years.”
And in Missouri it’s after five consecutive years in the same district. Due process rights granted on the first day of the sixth year contract.
Deasy, Duncan, Icahn, Romney…lead the company or in this case, public entity into the ground and then sell what’s left to the highest bidders!
Tracy…good comparisons…the corporate raiders will leap into LAUSD to buy up the property sites which were public schools paid for by the public, and they will get them for pennies on the dollar…read Naomi Klein and Shock Doctrine.
Yesterday Deasy bragged about all the new schools he has gotten built and opened in his reign of disaster, but it is strange that he has not used Construction Bond money to clean up the many rotting LAUSD schools…and why focus on new schools in a diminishing school population???? Can it be the corporate quid pro quo to enrich the builders at the expense of the taxpayers? How do billionaires in the construction industry factor into Deasy’s decisions?
Ellen Lubic
Our Fearless Leader. hah! He’s a martinet and a corporate lackey.
You wrote: “It is the responsibility of leaders to make sound judgments about teachers based on observation and to deny tenure to any who are “grossly ineffective,” or “ineffective” in any sense.”… In fact, administrators have more latitude than that in making the tenure decision. In the five states where I worked as a superintendent the legal advice we got indicated that a teacher could be non-renewed for any reason that was not a violation of federal laws. That is, you could not deny a continuing contract based on race, gender, religion, handicap or sexual orientation. You DID have to adhere to the mutually agreed upon evaluation procedures outlined in the negotiated agreement, but most collective bargaining agreements in the states where I worked provided administrators with the opportunity to nominate only strong teachers for continuing contracts. Stating that “tenure” is granted only in cases of demonstrable ineffectiveness is an overstatement, one that plays into the hands of those who claim that administrators’ hands are tied when it comes to eliminating mediocre teachers.
Deasy how do we get rid of incompetent superintendents.?You know the kind with a mere 3 years teaching experience in a private military school. The kind with a 99 percent no confidence vote by the teachers you supervise. The kind that have an enormous salary of 325,000 a year with a recent raise when teachers haven’t had a raise for over 6 years and have had to endure up to 2 weeks of furlough days every one of those years. The kind who tried to eliminate adult education completely. Adult education which graduates over 15 percent of your high school population and then offers them up to 300 classes on jobs like repairman, pharmacy tech, nurses aid etc for very little money. You slashed this job program by 70 percent. The kind that comes into a district with many many challenged learners in a low economic urban environment and adds physics and algebra II to the list of high school requirements. These kids can’t even get a diploma as it is, they need a jobs track not a track to college. They want job skills. Oh that’s right, you slashed the job skills adult education program and made it almost impossible for them to get the high school diploma. The one who wasn’t even interviewed for the job as superintendent because the Mayor and the Board were bought by Eli Broad and his phony, non accredited non academic teacher hating superintendent school. The kind who spent a billion dollars on ipads when the schools had rats, roaches, leaks, structural problems and your parents were chipping in to fix broken gas pipes and playground equipment. You are beyond incompetent. But how do we get rid of you? How do you fire a man who has only hurt the district and it’s employees and students and is charging ahead to do the same in this phony trial. Again trying to break teacher unions and teacher rights. How do we get rid of these people? Any suggestions?
Right on Julie…but a few corrections. It was a 91% NO CONFIDENCE vote from teachers, which the BoE chose to ignore. And Deasy’s last posted salary was $340,000 plus perks. He wanted $480,000 if he resigned and was hired as a consultant…remember how he scammed us all, even the LA Times by leaking his resignation?
I do not begrudge a Supt. of LAUSD that salary since he/she has oversight of 650,000 students and about 39,000 teachers and staff, but it is the continued bullying, mendacity,
temper tantrums, lack of transparency, firing teachers unfairly, not abiding by state education code, and bad decisions such as the iPads, and many more, that is tragic for the students, parents, and taxpayers of our district. Deasy is not a role model, nor is he an academic, nor a long term classroom teacher….he has been groomed by Broad and Gates to be a CEO and to show a profit for his mentors.
Operant question is how do we get rid of such a weak Board of Education that would give him another 3 year contract to further destroy our school system?
I agree and am so appalled by our school board – voting overwhelmingly not only to continue his contract, but to extend it! What are these people thinking???? And if they win LaMotte’s seat on the school board, we are really in trouble. On the website “Repairs not I-pads” on Facebook, I see parents asking where are the teachers? Why aren’t they letting us know what is going on? Its so frustrating as a teacher to have our voices so muted. The media seldom gives us a listen. People who are not teachers really don’t know any of this is going on. How do we get the message out??
Melissa…you ask the most important question. How do we get our voices out? On Monday morning I was interviewed by Lila Garrett on KPFK for her show Connect the Dots….and you can go to their website and find the Feb. 10 program in the archives to listen when you have a bit of time…it was only 20 minutes but I crammed as much of our perspective in as I could.
I think it is imperative that we not only speak to each other at this site, but that we form a coalition, a power base, of educators in LA to speak out to media and at as many venues as will have us. This means we all write letters to the editors, we all do call-in shows, we all come to Beaudry meetings when we can. Retired teacher, Linda Johnson, is the most amazing letter writer I know, and her letters, and those of her colleagues seem to get publised often by the LA Times.
If folks will sign up with me at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
I will be in touch with anyone who wants to doing speaking gigs, either on public radio or in the community. A few months ago I was on KPFK with Dr. Steve Kashen and two LAUSD teachers, and I think that show is still posted on the KPFK archives. This is the kind of thing many of us can be doing to get the word out to the public.
Ellen Lubic, Director
Joining Forces for Education
Also drown the BoE members with your letters. They do read them.
If you fear for your job, then do not sign your name, but have your friends and relatives email your words.
Some of the best inside info I get is from teachers…but I never use their names if they ask me not to…however, I do publish their info far and wide. Suggest that you write articles for many educational blogs such as Schools Matter, Chalkface, Hemlock on the Rocks, K12 News Network….all these focus on California and LAUSD. There are others I am probably forgetting that publish guest writers.
Anthony Cody’s blog site is great too…so please let us all know who else will publish guest articles. The LA Times won’t.
Ellen
It is not two faces of John but one face the face of Greed, How much do you deposit in your bank account to sell out children, teachers, communities.
This case isn’t really about winning for Deasy, at this point in time. He’s been completely bought and his bank account’s future will be secure no matter what happens.
It is the most effective PR campaign he could ever run for himself…with strategists and lawyers all clamoring to be part of his camp.
It is a thoroughly calculated and rehearsed scheme to resurrect his image AND to exact revenge on anyone challenging him. It is effective in its incredible degree of spin, using [stereotypically] bleeding heart terms like “discrimination” and “civil rights.” (Notice how certain political groups are learning the power of ideological brand recognition and loyalty?)
Surely, everyone is looking to CA to see how it pans out and use it as a precedent in any future lawsuits across the nation. They are basically writing the playbook and all the exorbitant fees are covered by technocrats looking to open a whole new market.
But then, it could be about winning–not this battle–but the war. It is all too obvious revenge Deasy-style is total and complete annihilation of dissenters. Heinously brilliant and twisted.
Exactly P or B….California is always the canary in the mine. Waltons, Broad, and Ben Austin did this with the Parent Empowerment Act of 2010…and now we, first in the nation, are stuck with the manipulative parent trigger messes. Deasy has access and uses all the best of the law firms and PR firms that the billionaires buy for him.
Ellen