In 2012, Governor Bobby Jindal rammed through the legislature his compleat program of privatization of public schools and dismantling the teaching profession.
But things have not gone well since then because of the judiciary.
The funding if the voucher program was held unconstitutional and so was the act that outraged teachers.
The latter was overturned a second time.
The courts continue to be the guardians of due process. They have a habit of sticking to the state and federal constitutions.
School officials in Guilford County, North Carolina, are balking about implementing a law that offers the “best” teachers a bonus of $500 to abandon their right to due process. Ironic, isn’t it, that it is the “best” teachers who are expected to give up their right to a fair hearing?
The local newspaper wrote:
“GREENSBORO — Guilford County school board members are pushing back against a law that would require offering four-year contracts and $500 bonuses to teachers in exchange for their tenure.
The group initially voted today to reject that part of the law. After some discussion, they tabled the vote until the Feb. 11 meeting, when all board members should be present…..
Under a law that goes into effect this year, school districts across the state would have to identify 25 percent of teachers – those who have at least three consecutive years of experience – and offer them four-year contracts and annual $500 bonuses if they surrender their tenure.
“But, as officials pointed out today, there are numerous concerns about the law including insufficient funding.
“They’re also concerned that retroactively rescinding tenure from vested teachers is a violation of property rights protected by the state and U.S. constitutions……”
It is amazing how many of the 1% are willing to spend millions to remove due process from teachers, most of whom work harder and earn less than said zillionaire’s secretary or chauffeur.
According to this article by Jennifer Medina in the “New York Times,” David F. Welch is a telecommunications executive who has spent millions to create a group called Students Matter to launch a lawsuit in California intended to strip teachers of due process rights.
John Deasy, the Los Angeles superintendent, testified that the union contract prevents him from firing as many teachers as he would like. Presumably, he would fire thousands of teachers if he could.
Will anyone introduce testimony to demonstrate the allegedly superior education available in states where teachers can be fired at will, as Deasy would prefer?
In many communities, the word “evolution” will not be mentioned in science classes. Books that challenge the mores of anyone in the community will not be taught. If due process ends, so will academic freedom.
Shame on the craven Mr. Welch and his all-star team of lawyers, gunning for teachers.
Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy testified in the trial of the lawsuit claiming that teacher tenure violates the civil rights of students.
The plaintiffs in the Vergara lawsuit want to eliminate due process so it is easier to fire teachers if their students have low test scores.
Most researchers acknowledge that family income and education play a larger role in student test scores than teachers. When the California Teachers Association lawyer Jim Finberg asked Deasy about the role of poverty, this was Deasy’s response:
“When Finberg asked Deasy if he agreed that other factors, such as family wealth and poverty, influence the success or failure of a student, Deasy said, “I believe the statistics correlate, but I don’t believe in causality (of poverty).”
Odd that the gap between haves and have-nots appears on every standardized test. Deasy doesn’t see that poverty might be a causal factor. Like hunger, poor health, homelessness, frequent moves, frequent absemces, economic insecurity, etc., just happen, but don’t cause lower test scores.
What a ridiculous claim!
In a court case in California, a bevy or flock or pride of teacher-bashing organizations argue that teacher tenure violates the civil rights of students. The bevy says that bad teachers hurt students and tenure protects bad teachers.
Maybe next they will sue to eliminate tenure in higher education so everyone is an adjunct.
In higher education, tenure is a guarantee of a lifetime job.
In K-12 education, tenure is a promise of a hearing before they fire you. If a student falsely claims you touched him or her, you are fired without a hearing. If the principal doesn’t like your race, your religion, your face, he or she can fire you without having to say why.
Here is Ted Olsen explaining to the Jeb Bush foundation of rightwing extremists how this case will be a civil rights landmark.
No, it will be one more nail in the coffin of the teaching profession, one more chance to reduce the status of teachers and to increase churn.
Here is what the teachers of the Bay Area say.
“Just when you think that some of the big moneyed, right wing reformers might back off from their unsound, unproven and unrealistic schemes, along comes another one!
“Did you know that because of five sections of the California Education Code YOU have just become the enemy and you are accused of depriving our neediest students of their education?
“Forget about the damage done by unnecessary high stakes testing and fly by night charter schools. Disregard poverty, racism, homelessness, neglect and malnutrition. So what if the schools in California are ranked at the bottom in per pupil funding, class sizes, number of librarians, counselors and nurses in our schools. Not to mention that we have lowered the number of educators by over 30,000, in the California in the last few years.
“Don’t even think about the hard work that you and your colleagues do every day to teach the children of San Francisco under difficult and challenging conditions.
“David F. Welch, CEO of INFINERA, a fiber optics communication company, is the founder of NewSchools Venture Fund. Previously, the fund has invested in charter schools in Boston and worked in “school reform” in New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Oakland. Now he has created “Students Matter,” and hired the law firm of Theodore B. Olsen, Theodore J. Boutrous and Marcellus Antonio Mc Rae, partners in the powerful law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, to sue the state of California.
“In their own words, “The lawsuit seeks to strike down five provisions of the education code that, separately and together, push some of out best teachers out of the classroom and entrench grossly ineffective teachers in our schools….”
“They allege that “California’s schools hire and retain grossly ineffective teachers at alarming rates.”
“In the lawsuit they attack the due process rights that are referred to when you achieve “tenure.” They attack procedures called for when you are accused of misbehavior by a student, a parent or an administrator. They attack seniority when there is a need for lay-offs. And they want “objective evidence of student growth” to be part of evaluations.
“No one in the profession wants educators who are not competent and not doing the job they have been hired to do. No one in the profession wants to see students harmed in any way.
“But, all that tenure really means is that a person must be made aware of the reason they may be in jeopardy of losing their job. Educators should not be “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of the administration. We do not want the careers of people ruined because they have been falsely accused of misbehavior. The unions seek to protect the rights of employees to know the charges made against them, and the right to defend oneself. That is what is meant by due process.
“The reformers have filed this lawsuit because they have failed to achieve their ends using the democratic political process. The Education Code of California was created by our elected representatives. If the public wants to make changes, there is a democratic process to do that. The people behind this effort have been unsuccessful in doing that and so they have resorted to going to court to push their anti-teacher, anti-union perspective.”
Conservative billionaire Rex Sinquefield does not believe that teaching should be a career. He doesn’t think that teachers should have any job security. He thinks that teachers should have short-term contracts and that their jobs should depend on the test scores of their students. He has contributed $750,000 to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment in Missouri to achieve his aims.
The campaign, in a style now associated with those who hope to dismantle the teaching profession, has the duplicitous name “teachgreat.org” to signify the opposite of its intent. The assumption is that the removal of any job security and any kind of due process for teachers will somehow mysteriously produce “great” teachers. This absurd idea is then called “reform.” This is the kind of thinking that typically comes from hedge fund managers, not human service professionals.
Sinquefield manages billions of dollars and is also the state’s biggest political contributor.
“The “Teachgreat.org” initiative would limit teacher contracts to no more than three years. It also requires “teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted, and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system,” according to the summary on the group’s website.
“The initiative also mandates that teachers be allowed to engage in collective bargaining for pay, benefits and working conditions, in an apparent move to appeal to teacher groups. So far, such organizations have been wary of the proposed constitutional amendment.
“Sinquefield gave $100,000 to Teachgreat.org this summer.
“Roughly 147,000-160,000 signatures from Missouri registered voters would be needed to get a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. The exact number depends on which six of the state’s eight congressional districts are used for signature collection.
“A similar ballot initiative – also backed by Sinquefield — was proposed for the 2012 ballot, but signature collection was never completed.
“This latest contribution sharply increases Sinquefield’s total 2013 donations to various Missouri causes and candidates to more than $2.5 million, according to the Ethics Commission’s tally.”
We have seen in state after state that conservative ideologues can buy politicians. But we will see whether they can also buy enough of the public, through advertising and public relations, to start the purge that Sinquefield believes is necessary.
I can’t help but be reminded of the time I spoke to the Missouri Education Association about three years ago. There were about 800 teachers there from across the state. Afterwards, when I signed books, I was struck by the number of people who said things like, “please sign this for my dad, he is a retired superintendent,” or “please sign this for me and my two sisters, we are a family of teachers.” So many of the teachers came from small towns where their family had been teachers for years. If Sinquefield has his way, who will replace them? Is there a long line of graduates from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton just itching to teach in Eureka and all the towns and hamlets of Missouri, to take the place of those who are fired? And who will replace them when they move on to their real careers?
Sinquefield despises public schools. In 2012, he had to apologize for a remark in which he said that the KU Klux Klan invented public schools to hurt African-American children.
Sinquefield founded a fund that now manages over $300 billion. He is also founder and president of the Show-Me Institute, a libertarian policy belief-tank.
In recent years, the Gates Foundation has funded AstroTurf “teacher-led groups” to advocate for policies that most teachers reject. One of these groups is called Educators for Excellence.
In this post, a guest blogger for EduShyster explains why he refused to join E4E. Among other things, he could not bring himself to sign the pledge:
“which states that they “pledge to support using value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.”
The Gates Foundation has shelled out a lot of money to create teacher groups, led by young teachers with limited classroom experience, to push its anti-teacher agenda. A very clever strategy.
Surprise! The school leadership of Charleston, South Carolina, has come up with some stale ideas and branded them as “reform.”
Nothing like copying what was tried and failed everywhere else!
The district calls it a “new” program of teacher evaluation, pay for performance, and reconfigured salary structure BRIDGE but in fact it is the status quo demanded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Every Broad-trained superintendent has the same ideas but is tasked with calling them “new” (when they are not), “evidence-based” (when they are not), and “reform” (when they are the status quo, paid for and sanctified by the U.S. Department of Education).
Patrick Hayes, a teacher in Charleston, has launched a campaign to expose the destructive plan of the district leaders, whose primary outcome will be to demoralize and drive away good teachers.
This blogger, the Charleston Area Community Voice for Education, recognizes that the new structure is not new, that it relies on “Junk Science,” and that it is “a Bridge to I Don’t Know Where.”
He writes:
BRIDGE brings into full play in Charleston many of the recent reform strategies and policies, including
It is important to note that these are the reforms of the last decade or so that have produced little improvement in schools as measured by the same testing and by the recently announce PISA results. These “reforms” are the status quo; in fact, they are not reform at all. As Hayes and others have pointed out, there is no credible evidence to support the effectiveness of these efforts, at least in terms of increased learning or even measuring teacher quality.
Further, the school district has built no case for why do BRIDGE in terms of what we want for our children, teachers, and classrooms. BRIDGE appears to be a large, well-funded ($23.7 million) solution to vague, and even non-existent problems. It is a solution the district apparently intends to impact every classroom and hence every student in Charleston public schools.
Here’s the thing. There are students in all schools who are not learning to their potential. There are also schools that have issues, academic and otherwise, that need addressing. There are also schools and students doing amazingly well.
The success of those students and schools cannot be attributed to evaluation (of teachers, schools, or even the students), nor is there any evidence that evaluation will fix the problems that do exist. Hint: we already know where the problems are. To base a massive restructuring of how schools, teachers, principals, and certainly students do business and spend their days is bogus, and the impacts of flawed, misdirected programs in education usually drive us to a cliff.
The bottom line is this: Charleston County School District has embarked on a very large experiment, called BRIDGE, with vaguely defined goals (except, perhaps raising test scores) with the plan of “let’s see if this works, because we have to do something”. Of course, in science, when you’re out there exploring the unknown, you don’t know what you’ll get.
Perhaps I’m missing the point here, so maybe I need to ask my six year old granddaughter and her teacher and principal, all of whom are doing quite well, thank you.
I would like to hear an answer from the school board and superintendent addressed to Grace (who understand quite a bit) to this question:
Why are you doing this BRIDGE thing?
Go ahead. I dare you.
The Board of Education in New Hanover County, North Carolina, passed a resolution opposing the state legislature’s plan to offer bonuses to 25% of teachers in exchange for their abandoning their due process rights. The board–in Wilmington, North Carolina–is Republican dominated. When the resolution passed, the audience at the board meeting–many of whom were teachers, wearing red–burst into applause.
The local Star-News Online reported that the board:
“…..unanimously passed a resolution against the N.C. General Assembly’s mandate requiring 25 percent of teachers in each district to receive a bonus and an early move to a four-year contract instead of tenure. The decision received loud applause from the dozens of red-clad teachers in the audience.
“The General Assembly voted during this year’s session to eliminate teacher tenure, moving teachers instead to one-, two- or four-year contracts. That will be put fully in place by the 2017-18 school year. But districts can select the top 25 percent of their teachers and offer them a $500 annual bonus to move off tenure this year. The legislature set aside $10 million statewide to pay those bonuses.
“Adopting the resolution was a largely symbolic move, Markley said, since the legislature reconvenes for its short session in May and selected teachers must choose whether to accept the bonus by the end of June. But board members said they still felt strongly about stating their displeasure with the plan.
“Give us wiggle room,” said board member Lisa Estep. “Give us the ability to be innovative.”
“Chairman Don Hayes said he hoped the board’s decision would motivate other boards to take a similar stand.”
Here is the Board’s resolution:
RESOLUTION BEFORE THE
NEW HANOVER COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION REGARDING CHANGES TO TEACHER EMPLOYMENT LAW
December 3rd, 2013
WHEREAS, the Appropriations Act of 2013 (SL 2013 36, SB 402, Sec. 9.6), includes legislation that requires school boards to offer four-year contracts and bonuses to 25 percent of its teachers (“25 percent contract”); and
WHEREAS, school districts are finding it difficult to select a method of determining who qualifies for the four-year contract offer; and
WHEREAS, school boards value their teachers and believe them to be deserving of adequate and equitable compensation; and
WHEREAS, teachers have received only a 1.12 percent state salary increase once out of the past five years, resulting in a greater need by school districts to increase recruitment and retention of teachers; and
WHEREAS, the Appropriations Act of 2013 cut funding for classroom teachers, teacher assistants, textbooks, instructional materials, and limited English proficiency, while continuing the elimination of funding for mentor pay and professional development.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the New Hanover County Board of Education requests that the General Assembly allow it to retain its prorated share of the $10 Million Dollars allocated for the 25 percent contract to be used for alternative pay or compensation for additional duties such as mentoring or leadership roles; and
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED FURTHER that the New Hanover County Board of Education urges the North Carolina General Assembly to repeal the 25 percent contract and develop a more effective long-term compensation plan for teachers tied to career paths with input from the education and business community.
NEW HANOVER COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION
By:_____________________________________ DONALD HAYES, Chairman
I wrote an earlier post about how the State Commissioner of Education in Missouri, Chris Nicastro, is working closely with a libertarian, free market group–funded by a billionaire hedge fund manager– to draft language for legislation to strip teachers of tenure. As a reader pointed out, it is actually worse than I wrote.
The goal is to put an initiative on the ballot to revise the state Constitution, not only to remove teachers’ right to due process, but to insert test-based accountability into the Constitution of Missouri and to make sure that teacher evaluation is not subject to collective bargaining in the future. This is horrific. It is not based on research or evidence but on ideology. It ties education in Missouri to the standardized testing industry.
Most scholars agree that test-based accountability is unstable and inaccurate. The teacher who gets a high rating one year may get a low rating the next year, because the ratings fluctuate depending on who is in the class, not teacher quality. The so-called “reformers” appear to be completely ignorant of or indifferent to the research documenting the unreliability of test-based accountability.
The reader from Missouri writes:
This is not draft legislation, but rather language for an initiative petition to change the state Constitution. The ballot language approved by the Secretary of State follows.
Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:
•require teachers to be evaluated by a standards based performance evaluation system for which each local school district must receive state approval to continue receiving state and local funding;
•require teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system;
•require teachers to enter into contracts of three years or fewer with public school districts; and
•prohibit teachers from organizing or collectively bargaining regarding the design and implementation of the teacher evaluation system
If enough signatures are gathered this could appear on the ballot in November of 2014.
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