Judge rules California has right to fire incompetent teachers

Wouldn't tenure and the inability to fire underperforming teachers play a role in good teachers not being able to find work?

 

Wow, you are so desperate in this one, you actually said something sort of in favor of journalists.

The last part is yet another awful comparison on your part. (Cue YF claiming it was only a joke).

 

Far from the only factor. I've spoken with administrators telling me that they are getting 200-plus resumes for leave replacement teaching jobs. It's going to take a hell of a lot of firing to improve the market in a state where schools are being stifled by dramatic cuts in funding and a tax levy cap.

Of course, you and YF are both focusing on that rather than the larger point, that the increased turnover in staff will actually hurt the education that kids are getting.

 

Tenure below the college level wouldn't be necessary if school administrators weren't, by and large, a bunch of fucking chickenshits who are more than willing to let idiot parents steamroll them when their little brats aren't handed easy A's.

 

So, that's the case with good jobs in all kinds of professions.

Firings are at a fraction of 1%. If you even fired the bottom 2% a year, there would be lots more openings, and fewer resumes per job.

Even if you're replacing bad teachers with better teachers? Besides, we're not talking about wholesale replacement of teachers. If you fired 5% of teachers, that would be a lot. That's 1 out of 20 teachers. That would "hurt" the education of kids? And, realistically, you'd probably be talking about 2% or less per year.

 

As a teacher in my state, I love it that a new group is calling out the bureaucrats. None of this will ever fly, but just the fact that it was published, is on record, and is circulating makes me happy.

Six tenets of ‘Not Bad Teachers’
1. No one will force, either directly or indirectly, a teacher to pass a student who has not learned the material in that class.
2. Students who chronically disrupt class and/or refuse to follow school rules shall be quickly removed to alternative schools.
3. Every elected official (governor, state and federal representatives, judges, city council members, school board members, mayors, etc.) shall substitute teach at least three days per year. At least two of these days shall be in the lowest performing schools in her/his district.
4. Every school official who is in a position that once required him/her to be a teacher (superintendents, principals, trainers, etc.) shall teach at least one class every three years.
5. Every teacher, regardless of length of service or tenure status, who is involuntarily terminated/not rehired shall have the opportunity to be heard in a due process hearing.
6. Every student in Tennessee public schools is expected to give his/her best effort.

I would love to see government assistance tied to your kids' academic performance. When you teach in a rural area (and the same is true probably for most inner city areas), the likelihood of a kid telling you their career goal is to - and I quote - "draw a check" or a parent telling you "Johnny don't need to know none of that stuff you talk about" is very real.

There are very bad teachers. That's a fact. There are very good teachers who can't actually educate because they are so beaten down to teaching to a test. If you want to fix education, the first two places to start are holding parents accountable as part of the equation along with students and teachers and get rid of standardized testing. One size does not fit all. We have students who are required by law to have all tests read to them, then on the new standardized tests, the same kid is expected to write a five paragraph constructed response. If the child doesn't meet some a certain score generated by an algorithm somewhere, it's 100 percent the teacher's fault.

Thank goodness our state legislature voted unanimously to override the governor and his push to tie licensure directly to standardized test scores.

 

I assume the same "school reformers" that are trumpeting this opinion will also be on board with the state providing all sorts of welfare-assistance programs to the poor given that poverty is a more important determinate in a child's education than the teacher who watches over them (and 25 other kids) for six to eight hours every day.

Also, without researching the issue, I would imagine tenure laws stemmed, in part, from the general professionalization of the civil service--and a desire to, in theory, minimize political patronize. This way every new administration isn't bringing in new teachers, police, etc., that supported them and firing ones that didn't.

 

I'm not sure I'd put it exactly this way, but yeah. As someone else mentioned earlier, tenure reduces the risk a parent (or group of parents) will streamroll some teacher out of Dodge because he or she didn't treat Muffy and Biff with the respect their breeding so richly deserves. As an aside, has anyone else noticed more stories about a complaining parent (or parents) succeeding in getting a high school coach fired for no apparent reason?

The INTENT of a more consumer-focused education system is to make it better by making it more accountable to interests such as parents. The reality, so far, with charter schools shows it's not working as intended, at least if you want to measure it by test scores. (Actually, it's working if you want to count it by more well-heeled or involved parents who didn't move out of the city because they feel like they're not stuck with the neighborhood school.)

Also, I'm going out a limb here, but I would imagine the reason poorer school districts have poorer teachers is not because the bad teachers created the bad school district. I would guess a lot of teachers don't want to work at a school they feel is dangerous, or chaotic, or otherwise has community conditions they feel will not be conducive to a good education or will burn them out quickly.

 

Job security provisions, which provide structure for instances in which companies decide to reduce staff, are an important part of almost all union contracts, including those in the newspaper industry. They are what keep companies in hundreds of industries from doing things like laying off all the top-scale employees and replacing them with bottom-scale employees.

However, there are no job security provisions in any contract of which I'm aware that prevent poor employees from being fired for cause, so we should probably stop conflating the two.

As for the "reformers," anyone want to know how well they're spending Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million in Newark? I'm guessing Chris Christie and Corey Booker, who apparently couldn't get out of Newark fast enough, probably don't want to talk about it much these days. Turns out "venture philanthropy" can be a very profitable game for the reformers.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?currentPage=all

Even Michele Rhee's husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, got caught up in a scandal (in addition to the one in which he paid $230,000 to settle a case in which he was accused of molesting a 15-year-old girl) with his St. Hope school that resulted in a half-million-dollar settlement for misappropriating federal funds.

The school reform movement is a sewer.

 

True, but contractually stipulated procedures for the demonstration of said "cause" can easily be made so onerous that, as a practical matter, dismissing someone "for cause" becomes an impossibility.

 

As so often happens, we end up left with two choices. One is that firing someone for cause is well-nigh impossible. The other is a potential revolving door based on the whims of reformers, administrators, the pushiest parents and profiteers. I'm not sure the latter system is any better than the former.

 

The answer is to negotiate fair evaluation systems with teachers who, believe it or not, are very much in favor of that.