Judge rules California has right to fire incompetent teachers

Boo hoo.

The whole idea of tenure is a big part of why teachers don't change jobs often.

Take it away, and hopefully bad teachers get drummed out of the business.

And, the good teacher who gets let go for the same reasons other professionals get let go every day, will find employment.

It's supposed to be about the kids, not the teachers.

Edit: this post was not in response to docquant's post, as I was tying it while he was typing his.

 

Teaching is very different from most other professions, in that you don't just have the employer who cuts your check to answer to, but 20-25 parents per class that you have to please, any one of whom could make your life miserable and threaten your job for no other reason than they may not like the color of your hair (or the color of your skin).

That said, there does need to be some mechanism for weeding out truly bad teachers.

 

Teacher training programs that are terrible, and teachers getting tenure before you realize they are terrible.

 

LOL.

Yeah, that's different from every other profession where employees deal with customers, or vendors, or anyone else.

 

It's not as different as teachers/professors would have you believe.

 

Thus proving you aren't even bothering to read the posts that disagree with you. Heaven forbid you actually learn something about education before your next anti-teacher rant.

When that good teacher is let go, even if he or she finds employment, the students suffer. Stability in the staff is a good thing for the students as well as the teachers. Again, you aren't even trying to understand the subject you are rambling about.

This notion that a good teacher will automatically find another good job after being unjustly let go is comical. The market varies from state to state, but New York is an example where it is a very difficult job market for educators. Not that I would expect you to know that.

 

You are not taking into account how irrational parents can be in defending their children. I'm not even blaming them. I know how I feel in any situation when I have to stand up for my child.

 

Because they never fire bad teachers!

Of course it's hard to get a job when their are no openings created by firing the worst performers.

 

Yeah. No one else ever has to deliver bad news to anyone, who might take it poorly.

Heck, I guess camp counselors should get tenure. Get hired at 14, and have a job for life.

 

Full disclosure: My wife is a special education teacher's aide.

With that out of the way, the most interesting aspect of this case (from the AP story):

This was a big part of the "Waiting for Superman" documentary (which caused great debate between my wife, parents, and I as we watched it).

It is a huge problem that many sub-par teachers end up in districts with many poor or minority students. I'm not sure tenure is the main reason for that, or if getting rid of tenure solves the underlying problems.

Our country wants a public education system that provides equal opportunity for all children. But they're not coming from "equal" family situations, however you want to measure it.

 

From an earlier article:

California has more than 1,000 school districts and 300,000 teachers, yet only 667 dismissal cases were filed with the Office of Administrative Hearings between January 2003 and March 2012, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District's chief labor and employment counsel, Alex Molina. Only 130 of those actually got to the hearing stage, and 82 resulted in dismissals -- fewer than 10 a year.

So out of 300,000 teachers, 10 a year get canned.

Damn, California does a great job of employment screening. They should license that formula and sell it to every company in the world.

 

Over 10 years, there would have been greater than 300,000 teachers.

And, they only even tried to fire 0.2% of the teachers.

How many bed teachers do they not even try to fire, because the process makes it not worth the time and effort?