On her blog VAMboozled, Audrey Beardsley reports that the Vergara machine–lawyers, PR firm, and big-time cash–is going on tour, planning to file lawsuits in several states, including New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, New Mexico, Idaho, and Kansas.
You really have to wonder why billionaires and millionaires take pride in attacking the job rights of teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think this is a glaring example of how money has taken control of our political institutions.
I wonder if we still have a republic or if in reality we now live in an oligarchy.
I was chilled when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had 1st amendment rights allowing them to give unlimited funds to political candidates.
Then the Vergara decision, even if it was only a state district court holding, seemed almost to be written by the big-money folks.
If the folks behind the Vergara case come to Ct., I will fight it even if I have to make a sign and picket in the street.
As an aside, it is interesting to watch our teacher’s union’s management reaction to all of this. The union management should be leading the protest against this hostile takeover of public education. Their silence, or at best weak words, are revealing. No help there.
The time has come, I think, to take back our country from the big-money folks.
“. . . how money has taken control of our political institutions.”
See my post below to see a prime example of that statement.
I think teachers need to start by taking control of our unions. This is the only way we can have money and leverage to fight back. My biggest regret while I was still teaching, I did not become more active in my association. These groups are only as strong and smart as the people who choose to serve.
Muskegon Heights was the MI district that was completely privatized:
“Muskegon Heights schools will not hire another for-profit charter company to run the district. Instead, the district plans to hire its own superintendent, a staffing company and the intermediate school district in Muskegon County to run schools for the next three years.”
The for-profit contractor couldn’t make any money so they pulled out, leaving the place in chaos again. This churn has been going on for 3 years.
“This time around, the board rejected proposals from two charter companies to run the school district; AccessPoint Educational HR and Innovative Educational Programs LLC. It also rejected a proposal from the state’s Education Achievement Authority and EAGLE Learning, a partnership run by a public school district in Metro Detroit.”
They still need approval of their emergency manager to become a public entity again, and they’ll still outsource some staffing to a contractor, but this is Michigan’s first wholly privatized district, so going back to (partially) public is, I think, a big deal.
Not that anyone outside of Michigan will ever hear about the results of this particular ed reform experiment 🙂
http://michiganradio.org/post/muskegon-heights-schools-rejects-profit-charter-bids-favor-some-local-control#.U6Avjn525pA.twitter
And can we help teachers and their reps in the targeted states starting RIGHT now?
Is there anything that LA teachers wish they had done sooner and more strategically? What about the lawsuit that will be filed in Los Angeles Superior Court next week. Anything there in the way of hindsight that could prove useful to others NOW?
“What about the lawsuit that will be filed in Los Angeles Superior Court next week.”
What’s this?
Leonard Isenberg reported that he is “in Superior Court in Los Angeles starting on 6/23/14 in a lawsuit against teachers union United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and their attorneys Trygstad, Schwab & Trygstad, without whose tacit complicit none of the witch hunt against teachers at the top of the salary scale could take place.”
Lenny@perdialy.com
“Vergara is not a final judgment. What remains is for CTA or other intervenors of right to apeal based on the gross misstatements of fact and law. To cede the issues in Vergara to those who brought this clearly collusive lawsuit is a big mistake.”
The assumptions and long inferential leaps made by the statisticians needed to be exposed as a total fraud. The Harvard economists are as eager to destroy teachers rights as the other members of the billionaires boys club. I wonder when they will target nurses, MDs, firefighters, football players, and so on.
Gotta pick off the easy targets first!
And the Obama Administration publicly endorsed and validated that trial court opinion.
Just appalling.
Here’s more information on the Starbucks/online for-profit college deal that was also endorsed and promoted by Secretary Duncan, so therefore the Obama Administration:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/starbucks-offers-employees-free-tuition-arizona-state-university-online?utm_content=buffer72bf5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
If the question is why kazillionaires are proud of taking the rights of teachers away, the answer is obvious. We are mere proles, most of the children we teach are mere proles and there is an opportunity to loot the public purse. We’d better have energy on our side because they certainly have the money and the will.
It’s not just teachers. It’s not even just public sector workers.
Workplace protections have eroded for non-union private sector workers every year of my adult life. In the private sector, they’ve gone from hiring “employees” to hiring “independent contractors” because employers have few legal duties re: contractors. They’re also changing the definition of “employee” in state law to benefit employers.
It’s a race to the bottom.
The few remaining workplace protections for front-line workers in the private sector simply aren’t enforced, at the state or federal level. Employers are fined for abuses and illegality and given a stern lecture on “best practices”. I think it’s because there’s a revolving door between government regulators and the industries they regulate at the top, management, not ordinary labor agency employees who probably want to do their job.
You’ve already reached the bottom – read Piketty – and it’s burying the bums in dirt. OTOH, tenure has stood many tests in the past, particularly if it’s dissociated with pensions and other expenses, since it reflects and affirms “independence” and academic integrity. As long as the unions ignore that premise, they’ll lose. If they pay attention to their roots, they’ll attack school systems co-opted by “creationists” and other ideologues, and embarrass naive billionaires like Gates. Too bad he didn’t finish college. hehehe
So while they are busy doing that, can those who want to save public schools focus on another area they are neglecting to kick and bolster it, so as to broadside them while their attention is elsewhere? I mean if it’s clear we are going to lose these battles, perhaps a new strategy is in order?
Like what if we just didn’t even fight it? Just let them do their tap dance while we focus on strengthening something else? Then later, when we are strong again (and public school will be), we can go back and fight it when it is winnable.
?
“I mean if it’s clear we are going to lose these battles”
That’s just it, it’s not clear!
We’ve got to get off the defensive and on the offensive, strategically. Think chess.
If it is true that the plaintiffs lacked standing, it is my hope that this case will be overturned at the next level, and that will be the end of that.
Standing will be one of the main arguments on appeal. I feel that the defendants have great arguments on standing, although the law on third-party standing in constitutional challenges is not intuitive, or even totally comprehensible.
You can bet on it that the fake education reformers hired top-tier analysts to discover the best judge/court (district) in each state to file the case for the best chance to win a verdict.
Each search may also reveal judges who—when they are not politically aligned—will take bribes or who can be blackmailed. The reason they are going with these states is because they found the judges they were looking there first just like they found the judge in LA.
Look deep enough into the closet of the judge in LA who ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and I’d best you are almost sure to find the skeleton the analysts found.
They are looking for judges/courts the same way jury analysts look for the best jurors during jury selection for a trial.
Lloyd, assuming there’s jurisdiction, plaintiffs can choose their court. But they generally can’t choose their judge.
I remember reading Harry Truman’s bio and in that book it mentions that when he was a judge on a panel of judges (I think there were three and he was one of them), he was the only one who was honest. The rest were corrupt and he witnessed their corruption.
We have no way of knowing what’s going on behind the scenes when these analysts pick a court to file in—who is manipulating the choice of the judge who will hear their case. If there is a process to select a judge and a human is pat of that process, then it is possible to find a way to bribe or blackmail your way in.
I suggest you do not think of the fake education reformers as people who will be honest and who play fair by the rules. They lie all the time, so why should they play fair when going to court?
This war has been waged since the 1970s when the Walton family first funded ballot initiatives for voucher programs in one state after another and failed repeatedly. It took time, but the fake education reformers—no matter their political/religious agenda— discovered they can’t win by going to the public so they have moved to getting people who will support their radical agendas elected to office starting at the school board level all the way to the White House and Congress. In addition, with the Vergara decision, it is obvious they have found a way to also find the right court and judge and use the legal process to get what they want.
The fake education reformers are now bypassing the democratic ballot process to change America into whatever they want it to be. If they succeed, somewhere down the line, the end result will be bloody, because the downtrodden will rebel once they have been shoved into a corner and have suffered too much.
I read that the U.S. now has an entire army division stationed permanently on US soil with one purpose: to deal with civil unrest, but when the military is used to slaughter and/or throw into prison anyone who takes their anger violently to the streets, the next step will be America’s own homegrown underground insurgency who will take the fight to the streets just like al Qaeda has done. And when these angry people discover they can’t get to the leaders behind the take over of democracy, out of anger, they will blow up people going out to eat or to see a film at a local theater or who are on the bus going to school or work—just like in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan or Baghdad.
Did you know that many top business leaders study Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and deception is mentioned as an important element of winning. Business is war. They spy on each other. They steal each others secrets. They sabotage each other. They run propaganda campaigns against competitors. They sell products at a loss to hurt competition and drive them out of business so they may monopolize a segment of the economy. If you haven’t already done so, you may want to read “The Bully Pulpit” by Doris Kearns Goodwin and you will discover exactly what I”m talking about.
Obama is not Teddy Roosevelt and I don’t think Hillary Clinton will be one either. Let’s not elect a minority or a women to the White House just because they are a minority or a woman. Let’s make sure we elect a person who has values and beliefs similar to those held by the progressive Teddy Roosevelt.
There’s an important difference between “hey, you never know, it’s possible” and “we can assume that this is happening right now.” I’m no Harry Truman, but I’ve been involved in civil litigations with billions of dollars at stake, on both the plaintiff and defendant side, and where the parties would have the highest conceivable motivation to game the process by which cases are assigned. They don’t do it because the rules don’t permit it. They don’t try to break those rules because the stakes are too high, and it would be such an outrageous thing to try to do, and the consequences of getting caught are too big. This is my experience litigating with reputable law firms in New York state and federal courts.
The judicial system is less corrupt than you might think, if “corruption” means things like blatant rule-breaking and cheating, and bribery or other quid-pro-quo exchanges between parties and judges. It certainly has gotten less corrupt over the years. (Same goes for the U.S. Attorneys’ offices and big-city district attorneys’ offices.) Also, contrary to what I perceive as the conventional wisdom that corruption is most prevalent at the top, the odds of encountering corruption of this nature decrease as cases get bigger or you move up the chain court prestige — you’re far, far more likely to encounter it in something like a family court (incidentally, Judge Treu used to be a family court judge) or back-water jurisdictions that don’t get a lot of sunlight.
This isn’t to say that judges don’t let their ideologies affect their decisions. They definitely do. But the assumption that large numbers of judges are taking bribes is paranoid. It may be an expression of the anxiety and powerlessness people feel about a complex, opaque system they don’t understand. It’s in the same class of thinking as the assumption that the education system is broken because teachers are incompetent or lazy or sexual predators and can’t be fired because they have a job for life.
Who said anything about “large numbers of judges”? I didn’t. In addition, I always find it interesting when someone passes judgement based on their own, limited personal experience in a diverse country of 316 million people.
If we use the same theory that this judge used to strip teachers of due process job protection, then one to three percent of judges could be not only incompetent but also corrupt.
What are the odds that one lawyer and the law firm he works for would run into one of those judges?
You may be interested in this site and the book it promotes: “Judges Gone Rogue”.
Pull quote: “Every year, several judges are prosecuted and convicted of various crimes by the Public Integrity Section of the United States Department of Justice or by state authorities. For instance, in the 1980s, the FBI mounted Operation Greylord, named after the curly wigs worn by British judges, which resulted in the indictment of 92 officials in Cook County, Illinois, including 17 judges, 48 lawyers, 8 policemen, 10 deputy sheriffs, 8 court officials, and one state legislator. Nearly all were convicted, including 15 judges, most of them pleading guilty.”
“Judges Gone Rogue shows, through a story of judicial conspiracy of unprecedented magnitude that spanned more than eight years, that judicial corruption and dishonesty are widespread in the United States.”
http://www.judgesgonerogue.org/
It’s my impression from the comment threads here that there are many people who believe the judge in this case was “bought off,” based entirely (I think) on their belief that the decision was very bad. Do you believe he was bribed?
Without evidence, what I think would be an assumption on my part. He may have been bribed, but I tend to lean toward the fact that he was biased and instead of being impartial and weighing the evidence fairly for a verdict, he’s the sort of individual who thinks it’s okay to use his power to achieve victories for the political/religious agendas he believes in.
Taking a bribe would be very risky because that might leave a paper trail of some kind that an FBI investigation might discover. But there has always been people at all levels of government who did it anyway. And I wouldn’t be surprised if his verdict triggered an investigation.
What this judge did is probably more inline with the ideology that’s the foundation of both neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, where it is okay to lie to fool the people and achieve the goals of the ideology.
If the United States can end up with two presidents in a row that promote these ideologies, I’m convinced that there are also judges, governors, members of Recognizes, state legislators—for instance the recent supreme court rulings that said corporations are the same as individual people—who are corrupt one way or another.
Why didn’t the teachers’ counsel argue on the basis of judicial tenure? It is/was much the same case for judges as for other public employees responsible to attend to facts and base decisions on hard data….
I have no answer for that. Maybe the leadership of the teachers union has been bought off and the union’s lawyers had their marching orders.
I live in California and have served on many juries over the years, in both criminal and civil cases. What is shocking to me with Vergara is not just the decision or outcome, but the reasoning. Up to this point I’ve had the utmost respect for judicial decisions and fairness in my state. With this finding, there is simply no connection between test performance in poorer districts with tenure and seniority. As I read the decision, it appeared to me the only way this judge could have argued as he did was he’d made up his mind in advance. Not only were his facts nonfactual, he used “reforminess’ expressions such as ‘grossly ineffective teachers’, which is highly suspicious. It was a statement of belief–a narrative, and speculative– not a reasoned argument.
Lloyd, I really enjoyed reading your response. If the Walton family is behind a lot of this, why don’t teachers stop shopping at Walmart? I have. I was a HUGE Walmart shopper – at least $200 per week – and I have withdrawn all of my business. I have also withdrawn all of my family prescriptions and transferred them to Krogers. When I shop, I now shop at Krogers and K-Mart.
If teachers collectively band together, we could make a dent in Walmart business. I look at it this way: If they mess with the livelihood of my profession, then I will mess with theirs. As retail people, the Walton family should not be sticking their noses into public school business. They should be worried about selling groceries.
I can’t do anything about Bill Gates…God will deal with his evils…but, I can do something about the Walton family. At least I know they no longer get my hard earned low paid teacher (they hate teachers) money. This gives me peace in my heart. (:
I enjoy reading your responses, Lloyd – and all of the responses written on Diane’s blog. The responses help me cope in “a profession gone bad.”
“I now shop at Krogers”
I thought the correct phrasing was “I now go Krogering.”
Ha..Ha.. You are funny! I now go KROGERING! It helps me cope with the downturn of my profession. The Walton family is not getting my low pay wages. I know I am only one person, but maybe if other teachers start to think about this – – – – -it could add up. Kroger has a much better meat and produce department anyways….Walmart offers a cheap product…just like they are trying to turn our teaching into. Let’s make our teaching a cheap Walmart product too. The Walton family has destroyed the downtown businesses around the square . . .so they think it’s time to destroy the neighborhood school too. It probably makes sense to them.
I shop at Costco, farmers markets, Trader Joe’s and Wholefoods.
You aren’t alone. Decades ago, I stopped shopping at Wall-Mart once I learned they were the enemy of teachers. They are their own brand of slime that is acidic and eats everything touched. They must be miserably. hateful people but they are old just like the Koch brothers and it will be there children and grandchildren that will pay the price for their crimes against humanity.
http://citywatchla.com/recent-posts-lead-stories/7051-vergara-decision-key-to-destroying-teachers-unions-and-in-time-all-unions
Above is a link to my take on this, published this week in City Watch.
I have been writing about the goal of the billionaires who pressed the Vergara lawsuit since last year, and civil rights and tenure is tangential to their plan to take down the union movement in America.
Ted Olson and his associates do not take simple cases…they fight to win. They represent the most powerful (wealthy) individuals and corporations in the nation. It is naive to think that they want to change public education by taking away teacher tenure. They want to help their clients goal of making all education part of the free market.
Again, ALEC works in unison toward this goal.
Where is Gerry Spence when we need him!
He would take Vergara apart is seconds.
“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” G. Spence
For more interesting quotes see” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerry_Spence
And in the Show Me State:
“A lawsuit brought Tuesday by public school teachers seeks to block a statewide vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit their tenure protections.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/17/lawsuit-challenges-missouri-teacher-tenure-limits/#ixzz350Wvyv9v
Good ol Billy the Gates wannabe Rex Sinquefield funded this constitutional amendment, yes constitutional amendment, to strip public school educators of due process.
\It seems that good education is no longer important to those who offer jobs. they tend to want cheap rather than efficient, endless rather than permanent. If they can take education out of the picture, they believe they can have a source of labor that won’t argue points such as livable wages, healthcare, or workers’ rights.
These guys (and almost all of them are white guys) own the world and believe they should also rule it. As to defending against the “Vergara” lies. Rereading as much as is available on the Vergara trial and decision, I think we all need to take the gloves off in exposing any “researcher” who does the kind of shoddy work that wowed Jude Treu. Even if the “researchers” are from Harvard, we should have provided the lawyers from our side with the materials to demolish those silly talking points, which were more like Michelle Rhee marketing claims than anything that could be vetted and peer reviewed.
As a longterm educational researcher, I totally agree, George. Shoddy is the least of it with these witnesses who finally admitted that much of their testimony was pure speculation. This alone should cause the higher court to reverse the decision, but if the case is again based in the politically Red area of California, it might then go on up the food chain.
Ninth District which is notoriusly rated as a liberal court, has been fighting their reputation by handing down some Right leaning decisions. It is a crap shoot right now but Welch will surely want the next court to view Vergara to be in Central inland California. That is why he filed a Los Angeles case with plaintiffs from LAUSD in the more conservative county. Ted Olson and his Gibson Dunn and Crutcher legal experts know all the ropes.
Did anyone see him and Bioes on Charlie Rose last night? It was a love fest. He kept mentioning his wife Lady, but people might have forgotten that his long time wife was killed on one of the planes that went down on 9/11.