Walt Gardner questions the validity of the Vergara decision. Like others, he notes the weak evidence on which the decision rests. A witness for the defense guessed that 1-3% of the state’s teachers were ineffective, and the judge cherry picked that offhand assertion as a fact.
Gardner believes the decision is a giant step toward busting unions and privatizing schools. Of course, this is exactly what the “reformers” want, although they prefer to hide their reactionary goals behind the false rhetoric of civil rights. Imagine how Dr. King would feel about a decision that attacked workers’ rights, using students as pawns. Exactly what will change for students if their teachers can be fired more easily? Is there a long line of superstar teachers waiting outside the doors of L.A.’s schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How to Put a Great Teacher in Every Classroom
1. Make teachers into contingent, at-will employees with no job security whatsoever.
2. Let them know that any number of years of service they put in will count for nothing.
3. Explain to them that any education they receive beyond the undergraduate level will count for nothing because their learning doesn’t matter.
4. Evaluate them based on their students’ scores on invalid summative standardized tests or, better yet, on the basis of the scores of other teachers’ students on invalid summative standardized tests; make the evaluation systems arcane and capricious so that the Teacher of the Year this carnival season can be an unsatisfactory loser the next.
5. Require all teachers to implement scripted lessons or, at a minimum, to use minutely scripted lesson plan templates and rubrics, with the ultimate goal of removing all autonomy and decision-making authority they might have had in their jobs because people always function better when they are not the locus of any control whatsoever in their own lives.
6. Make sure that each day they have written on their white boards what “standard” they are covering from the prescribed set of acceptable “standards” prepared by the noneducator from the national Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth–the one hailed, unlike said teachers, as “the most important figure in education today, perhaps in all of history.” This is necessary because people always function better when amateurs from outside their profession do their thinking for them.
7. Take away from them any input they have regarding the curriculum materials that they teach and the pedagogical strategies that they employ; teaching, there’s an app for that.
8. Require that they submit to continual “trainings” (Sit. Bark. Roll over. Good boy.), and make certain that what they are told in a given carnival season (“Do not provide prereading or background material before students read a text”; “Teach the five-paragraph theme.”) directly contradicts what they were told they had to do in the previous carnival season (“Provide prereading or background materials before students read a text.”; “Don’t teach the five-paragraph theme.”).
9. Increase their class sizes because “class size doesn’t matter,” and it’s cheaper that way, which frees up money to be paid to testing companies and funds for creating more state department and district-level administrative employees to micromanage teachers’ lives.
10. Require that they spend a third of the school year proctoring tests, giving pretests and posttests and benchmark tests, delivering test prep, attending data chats, and receiving training on testing and data, and being evaluated on their students’ test scores.
11. Turn them into proctors milling among students doing scripted worksheets on a screen from Pearson/Gates, Inc.
12. Bash them and their unions in the press continually (full-page ads in national newspapers and magazines showing them throwing kids into the trash will do quite nicely).
13. Turn their schools into charters run by a CEO who has no educational experience but who makes in a week what they do all year.
That should do the trick.
It’s extremely important that we implement ALL of the above so that all children can be taught by truly great teachers,
unlike the utter failures that we have in classrooms today.
If we fail to do these things, if a student encounters one teacher who is merely satisfactory, then that student will lose lifetime earnings equal to the combined fortunes of Bill Gates, the Walton family, Eli Broad, and the first emperor of China;
and our future workers, incapable of outgritting the Singaporeans, will have to watch as those, those FOREIGNERS buy up all our Walmarts and turn them into Singaemporiums.
Clearly, this is THE CIVIL RIGHT ISSUE (and the investment opportunity) OF OUR TIME.
This message (and all your media) brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us.”)
Love this!
Bob, much of this was beginning to happen in 2003 when I retired from a school district just east of Los Angeles. According to my teacher friends, most of this is complete now!
And of course, as a result, a great renaissance has occurred at your previous school. Great scholars are lined up around the block to put in applications to avail themselves of these many perks, correct?
Great summary of “reforminess” doctrine
Oh Bob you just described my school minus the union…
This is an excellent summary of what is happening. But, how do we get the message to the people outside the “church?” They’re doing this everywhere. There is no stopping this movement. What can be done?
How to ruin education (while getting ahead and making profit on public funding and donations)? Join TFA. Make TFA connections. “Serve” the children for 2 years. Get your loans paid off. Go through Jiffy-Lube makeshift certification programs; alternatively, go to Broad Supe’s Academy. Get APPOINTED Superintendent; then APPOINT some principals and administrators. Alternatively, get named to some “benevolent think tank” that only has at its heart altruistic causes” and change legislation via lobbying.
Puke.
Oh, open charters and rob the public blind.
Donna: as your friendly neighborhood KrazyTA, may I offer a small change in wording and word order?
“Oh, open charters and first blind the public so you can then rob the public blind.”
Just sayin’…
😎
This is a font 24 TAGO!
Yeeha! It worked, thanks Bob!
Walt is right and Bob Shepherd outlines the next steps. All of them are a Done Deal in thousands of once democratically-inspired public school across the USA.
Good guest editorial today in Minneapolis StarTrib by Minnesota employment attorney, Marshall Tanick, on dangers of Vergara: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/263102381.html
Thanks, loved this quote,
“If tenure for teachers is a bad idea, it is even more perverse to have lifetime appointment for the federal judiciary, regardless of competence — or senility — as sanctified in the U.S. Constitution.”
Kind of love “Is there a long line of superstar teachers waiting outside the doors of L.A.’s schools?” While I have no idea how many teachers in L.A. are ineffective, I know you can’t fix any school problem by removing teachers and thereby raising the number of students in each classroom.
But just go ask the GENIUSES at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, or Students First [sic]. Class size doesn’t matter. Gates’ numbers say so, so this must be right.
Corporations often follow the practice of laying off employees before they reach full retirement age. They save on pension costs while getting two young and impressionable employees at the same price as the older employee. The corporate “reformers” aren’t protecting the kids. They want to save money, probably so that school systems can then hire outside for-profit agencies. It’s all about the money
I think the Vergara decision could be (if basic human insight is to assert itself) a good thing. To make a decision so devoid of reason he had to be paid in some way… This has to obvious to people… Yes? What Money, Privilege or Power did that this judge surely receive…?
The largest newspaper in NJ has an editorial today recommending that a similar suit be filed here. No grass is growing under their feet.
So what is our next move? What can be done? I say Elizabeth Warren for
President and Diane for Sec. of Education…I know Elizabeth and Diane are are
not running but we need to back candidates that back us. And I for one do not
trust Hilary at this point to do better re education than Arne Duncan or President
Obama…
Vote 3rd party.
It will be interesting to see where Hilary comes down on this. She made some anti-NCLB rumblings a while back, but Bill was one of the progenitors of the whole standards-and-testing movement when he was head of the National Governor’s Association back during the first Bush administration.
I thought I remember Chelsea doing some reporting for NBC on the merits of charters.
The Clintons were founding members of the Education Deform movement. We’ll see whether Ms. Clinton has evolved on this. I hope that she has.
No reformers here…just DEFORMERS for $$$$$ using students and teachers.
In most large organizations, aren’t step scales and seniority the way it works? Have the figured out a way to measure factory workers, fireman, pilots, flight attendants, policeman by quality and rate them, so when it’s layoff time they can cull them by score? This is a ridiculous notion. It didn’t work at Microsoft, because turning workers against each other is a failed idea.
By the court’s reasoning, I could argue that CA is so large and inefficient, that breaking it up into several states is mandatory to protect equal rights, because the inefficiency disproportionally hurts the poor and minorities.
Or break up the LAUSD into smaller districts, or pay bus drivers less or more. Seems like an easy logic train to drive where one pleases.
How about one big fat charter school for the whole country?
Where is Eva when I need her?
Get in on this now, NJ, while the big money remains to be made!
How silly of me Bob!
It can be a virtual school in cyberspace.
No bricks and mortar for me.
Should I call Tepper? He is in NJ.
Or maybe I can find a virgin hedgefundie who will give his all to me?
Gotta go and draw up some business plans. Sorry, I mean nonprofit plans.
You need to found an organization, NJ, that purchases and equipment and then leases them to your school. You can call it something like the
Public-Private Results-Oriented Foundation for Incubating Transformational Educational Enrichment and Reform,
or P.R.O.F.I.T.E.E.R.
Then, appoint yourself administrator of the school, pay yourself half a million a year in salary, and lease your buildings from yourself.
LOL
I want to hire you for The Friends of American Charter School. You will oversee all purchasing and leasing. Please line up an attorney and an accountant by Monday.
NO problem NJ Teacher, we (if you wish) can start the new organizations Bookkeepers Speed- trained for America and Barristers Speed-Trained for America, after all, the public Universities will not be needed. We can charterize the professional schools.