As I read the story in the New York Times about the overturning of the infamous Vergara decision, I realized that the article presented an opportunity for “close reading” and for critical thinking. Unlike the Common Core standards, which asks the reader to stick to the four corners of the text, I expect readers to draw upon their background knowledge to interpret the text, authors’ intentions, and missing information or context. In the end, however, we must recognized that it is a newspaper article, and space is limited. Nonetheless, what is written and what is omitted is left out matters, because the Times is a national newspaper, read by the public and the media, few of whom will ever read the decision or understand the background.
Why do philanthropists want to end teachers’ job protections? Why do billionaires like Eli Broad and the Walton family want to get rid of job protections? Did the plaintiffs prove that the children’s teachers were ineffective? Or did they just use test scores as “evidence”? Which states allow teachers to have due process rights? Which do not? Does the latter group of states–which have no job protections–have better schools than the former group? What is the Partnership for Educational Justice? What is its goal? Does a district attract better teachers when it does not have job protections? Why has recruitment of new teachers plummeted in recent years?
These are just a few questions that come to mind. What are yours?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would add that so many backers of Vergara also support a Right Wing political agenda in other areas of their ideology.
I want to remind those Neo-liberal Democrats who support Vergara and other tenants of the Education Reform Agenda why their counterparts who fight against LGBT rights and minimum wage hikes and restrictive abortion and contraception laws and foreign war entanglements and tax breaks for the rich are also so enlightened in what public schools need.
Your bedfellows are revolting and if you are also lamenting Anton Scalia’s loss on the Supreme Court because of what support Scalia would have given you in your school reform crusades, then, well, the hell with you.
Sitting here laughing…love you, Geronimo.
And in reply to Diane…the NY Times tips their hand in the first two paragraphs by calling the first Vergara lawsuit a “landmark” case. It would possibly be a landmark case if it were left standing. As of today, both California and No. Carolina have ruled against doing away with due process for teachers.
Then the biased NY Times chooses to interview a low level Associate Prof of Ed, Strunk, who stunk, and at USC, not at the public U of C….and she bad mouthed the decision. I suggest they contact prominent education Prof Rogers at UCLA and get his read on all this
Since they seem to only interview private university personnel, I hope they would contact the venerable and famous ed prof emeritus, Steve Kashen who is always trustworthy in his insights.
Now it’s time to educate the California State Legislature which is about to be subjected to a lobbying blitz by the billionaires to change the law.
That was my close reading, Diane. They’re targeting state legislatures now.
Effective means test scores count for everything, especially when spun by Chetty who counts on the prestige of Harvard to help give credibility to his deeply flawed number crunching. Unfortunately the appeals process will be well financed because the people producing this and related lawsuits intend to kill teacher unions by any means no matter the cost.
Yes, Laura….Considering how many duds have come out of Harvard, including Baby Georgie Bush and loudmouth Larry Summers, it is no surprise that Chetty has zero creds…and in fairness, also the other “expert” from Arizona who gave minimalist testimony at the Vergara debacle should be in the dog house.
The distorted Chetty testimony upon which Treu based his irrational and biased decision, should prove to all the legal eagles not to use Chetty again to prove any case. And the pathetic Judge Treu needs to taken a Golden Handshake and hide out in perpetuity in Martinez.
So I reiterate…this is far from a “landmark case” since it has been denied by the Appeal Court. And yes, we can be assured that Eli and his gang will keep trying to kill off the unions, and the teachers, and our public schools.
Isn’t George W Bush a Yalie?
Chetty (who is no longer at Harvard) is seriously deluded if he is counting on the “prestige” of the Harvard econ department because that department has none (zilch, zero, nada, zip) remaining after the garbage that they have produced in recent years (by the likes of Summers, Mankiw, Rheinhart, Rogoff and Chetty).
But maybe he is counting on the prestige of legitimate departments like physics rather than departments filled with cranks?
Agree dear Poet…forgot about those other charlatans and their theories..Rheinhart and Rogen…..the public gobbles up the Harvard brand despite so many failures who have emerged from their dreary halls.
Bush the Younger did his undergrad at Yale…but somehow also got an MBA from Harvard. Red marks on both institutions.
I once had the distinct misfortune of working at a high tech firm for precisely two months with a Harvard MBA. I was in an R&D group of scientists and engineers and the MBA sat in on our weekly meetings.
They had absolutely no clue what we were doing and simply made vacuous comments that had no relevance whatsoever.
My boss (a PhD physicist) just rolled his eyes at the meetings every time the person said anything.
The person was eventually “let go” (aka fired, basically because they were incompetent.
So it was no surprise to me that George W. Bush was also a Harvard MBA. As far as i can tell, Harvard business school is a just joke and has no problem graduating complete idiots.
In case it was not clear above, the Harvard MBA was fired after just two months (the two months I had to work with them) which must be some kind of record, certainly among Haaavid MBA’s.
I often wondered how they represented that on their resume’. They probably claimed they “had accomplished what they had set out to do in the two months’ or some other such BS. or, more likely, they probably simply never mentioned it.
If CA has a statewide teacher shortage, last in first out is about as relevant as water rights on Mars.
I would like to thank Dianne. As we age, some of us begin to see a larger picture (probably because we lose more and more cranial neurons and are forced to make new connections). Dianne perfectly criticizes this document from an ‘analytical’ viewpoint.
When I was taking courses in Graduate School to satisfy certification requirements, I signed up for a course in ‘linguistic analyses’. I already had degrees in science (astronomy, physics) and I was lucky to be able to take almost all of my certification classes at that level (and free, since I worked at the University). The class was small, as all were in the Graduate School of Education.
The course turned out to be an introduction to analytic philosophy. I chafed, finding the approach too constrictive, and fought against the model in class. The prof. was delighted to fight back. I dutifully wrote papers in the style and gave the appropriate answers on the mid-term exam to prove that I understood as much as was required, but when the Final came along, I rebelled and spelled out my criticisms and what I thought were the limitations of the material I had been taught.
I expected a lousy grade on the exam, but instead not only got a glowing grade, but an invitation to work under the prof. toward a PhD. I almost wish I had done so, however at the time I could see no reason to spend another two or three years getting a degree which would only have made my employment as a High School teacher more difficult, so I turned him down.
BUT, within several years, I began to digest what I had been taught, and realize how important that class had been. It colors my thinking to this day. Why isn’t a course in semantics taught in High School?
Isn’t it great when you get a real teacher who can respect critical thinking on the part of their students even when it doesn’t agree with theirs?
Chetty’s basic premise was that good teachers translate into huge future financial benefits for students.
Based on that, the logical thing to do is spend more money to increase teacher salaries in CA by 25% and lure more talent from technology or wherever the smart people work into teaching.
Chetty said there are phenomenal returns on investment for better teachers. If Chetty’s research is correct, CA would be foolhardy NOT to spend billions more on education.
TC…please reread all the Chetty testimony and look for his contrived stats upon which Judge Treu, based his decision. This was the key to the first court’s verdict.
This case was purposely filed in the small backwater area in mid-California by Welch and Broad lawyers, and if it had been filed in Los Angeles, where the defendants were supposedly destroying education for inner city students e.g. Vergara, it probably would have died a rapid and deserved death.
Chetty’s claims rely completely on blatant chetty picking.
His work is garbage. Moshe Adler pointed out the very serious chetty-picking, but no one who has anything to do with policy seems to have paid the least bit of attention to Adler.
And the economics profession completely ignored Adler’s critiques and instead continues to hold Chetty up as some sort of data guru, able to work magic on large databases — which may actually be true: “magic” is all that it is.
Hopefully the testimony will fade into the obscure babel and lack of a cohesive argument it was.
Aside from that, I will take humor in watching Bill Gates spend 50 million dollars to pursue MET, measuring teacher effectiveness, 50 million to put an objective scientific measure on something which is hard to measure at best, but at least an attempt.
Then this case, and the measure of a teacher reverts back to the dark ages. Completely bypassing test score evaluation, administrator evaluation, the measure of the teachers in this case was determined by the professional opinion of an 8th grader. My teacher didn’t teach me nothin’.
Why did Gates spend 50 million, just pick one kid in the class, buy them a pizza, and ask them what they think of their teacher, done.
No one I trust trusts the New York Times. In this case, unlike most other fairy tales in the Times, it is easy to find out: namely the court decision.
Since the “New York Times” supports “reform” and crushing workers’ rights, they have a vested interest in treating the decision in a superficial way.
Although the LA Times report was longer, and led by Blume but with two other journalists input, it damned with faint praise. If first told the long tale of how the case was filed and rendered…with a positive slant IMO, before finally getting to the point…that it was ill defined and very flawed and was summarily tossed by the three judges of the Appeals Court.
“VAMmit All”
VAMmit all, we’ve had enough
From inside Gates of Hell
Enough of sciency sounding stuff
And Common Core as well
Enough of Chetty-picking
To make Vergara cases
Enough of statistricking
The public, with no basis
Enough of VAMmy charts
That mimic random scatter
Reformers hurling darts
To tell us “what’s the matter”
Enough of rating teachers
For things they cannot sway
The outside world has features
For which the teachers pay
Enough of teacher-shaming
And firing based on bunk
We really should be blaming
The ones who push this junk
Enough of VAMmy horrors
Like teacher suicide
From teacher-bashing chorus
We simply shan’t abide
VAMmit all, the VAMs are DAMs
Devalue’s what they add
The DAM reforms are battering rams
And plain and simple bad
The essential point that needs to be made to the general public nationwide about tenure is that it’s key purpose is to protect our nation from falling victim of the kind of official lies that led to fascism and Nazism. Already we’ve had so-called “history” textbooks pushed by Texas education authorities that tell students that slavery in our nation never happened, that all those black people who were brought here to work the plantations under inhuman conditions were “guest workers.” Only teachers who have the protection of tenure can stand up against such deception by authorities and refuse to teach it. Before tenure, what was taught in our schools changed each time there was a political change in local, county, or state governments. Tenure stopped that and enabled children to learn genuine truth, instead being force fed the fictional political ideology of those in power at the moment. Tenure protects the roots of our nation’s freedoms.
Good points…the Cheney women have their hand in revising history in the Texas texts…and also Neal Bush who publishes text books.
The troglodytes at the Los Angeles School Report (LASR) titled their announcement thusly: “Just in: Landmark Vergara ruling is overturned”. I sent them the following.
* * *
Note to the Betsy DeVos partisans at LASR:
It’s not a “landmark ruling” when the Appeals Court unanimously reverses the case, and the opinion chastises the trial court for misapplication of facts, misunderstanding of law, and for misinterpretation of evidence. The word LASR is looking for is “dubious,” not landmark.
Vergara case a “landmark”?
Hahahahaha.
It’s a “Blackmark” not a “Landmark”, but they are too dumb or ideological to see it.
Thanks for setting them straight.
I think that what they would like is for all of us to become slaves. Walmart certainly treats my son-in-law as such. As a store assistant manager, he’s supposed to work 4-12 hour days and four days off. He works more like six 16 hour days. He often gets called to work early or required to stay late. He is often called in on his day off. I have seen them schedule him for back to back shifts. He worked for 24 hours the day before Christmas last year. Because he is salaried we’re not sure if he has any workers rights at all. The frustrating thing about this is that he is a father of four and really needs his income. I am tired of hearing that our current laws protect workers and therefore we don’t need unions anymore. I want to scream, open your eyes!
For me, the ‘close reading’ raised questions about who the authors are and what is their prior experience. The article, per se, felt as though it was written in a hurried deadline by summer interns (sorry about that interns). It turns out that Rich is the ‘national k12 education reporter’ for the NY Times, and her co-author is based in LA. Given the tenor of the article, it appears as though they had not read the Circuit Courts’ printed opinion, but rather took a shallow analysis and made some phone calls to get responses.
If this is such a ‘landmark’ case, I wonder why they were not better prepared.
A landmark case is one that literally changes the law across the nation. A landmark case doesn’t get overruled. The decision by Judge Treu was sloppy and ideological. The evidence was slim. He jumped to a conclusion that was merited by neither the facts nor the law. It was called a “landmark” by the PR machine for the billionaire boys club. It was a bad decision from the get-go
It’s the NYT . . . What do you expect?
How much money do the privatizers have to give to the teacher unions so that they can effectively play both sides of the street? In other words, the CTA ignores the attacks on teacher job security that are used to get rid of older teachers in California while spending huge sums of money on fighting this in the courts. How much does CTA get from the Broad, Gates, Walton foundations to look the other way? $2.5 million per year to CTA at least.
Tenure and seniority are often attacked by people of good will.
As a former principal of several schools I embrace it. The culture of CPE and MH depended on both, even if there were occasions when I wished otherwise. I’m not alone, as a principal, in this view.
Te kind of noncompetitive shared “ownership” over the school that the staff and faculty displayed over and over and over again rested in large measure on their not having to balance their personal self-interest and their devotion to the school. There is nothing evil in our desire to have a steady paycheck, to feel secure even if you irritate those “in charge”, and to want to be able to plan ones life ahead. These are healthy qualities that human beings should not be ashamed of. As FDR once noted, “freedom from fear” is one of the basics that democracy rests one—fear makes for bad practice of teaching and democracy..
My capacity to provide leadership where needed, and build a strong staff rested n the fact that there were some rules of the game we couldn’t change, and were not available to our temporary biases. I could be strong and as persuasive as I could be without fear of intimidating others to follow my lead, or silence even young and inexperienced staff from venturing forth with their opinions—as long as I did not have the power to wreak havoc on their lives—and cut off the lively ideas that might otherwise inconvenience me. Experience close to home reminds me that even tenured teachers can lose their jobs if they annoy the principal too much in settings where staff cohesion is weak. Only such “irritation” is sufficient to get many principals to take the trouble to “get rid” of a staff member—and cause can always be dug up when the desire is strong enough.
Finally, it’s hard to believe that some woulden’t be influenced by having to pay senior teachers so uch more than first year teachers, thus creating a tendency to punish experienced teachers who have to constantly outperform newer and younger colleagues. If we want people to stay we need to offer them a good shot at making decent pay as they get older. Given that most newbies leave within the first 5 years—perhaps inevitable—it makes sense to pay them less as they learn the craft, and while they have fewer adult responsibilities. But once again, as with tenure, if decisions about pay are made by one’s principal there is a never-ending tendency to “please the boss”. When someone should not be teaching there should be peer reviews, with th principal being apart of the process, for weeding out those who, at the present time, do not see read to be teachers.
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