OT: Teacher Tenure Ruled Unconstitutional in CA

[svelte]

How can this not be a good thing?

I see no reason teacher’s jobs should be more protected than anyone else. If you do a poor job, you should be out of there.

And as far as parents forcing an unfair firing – I’m sure it has happened, but I doubt it has happened often. During my entire education and my kid’s education, I can’t think of a single parent uprising for or against a teacher.

And normal employment law will protect teachers in those cases – just like normal employment law protects other professions.

My wife and I, we hope this ruling sticks.

[livinincali]

[quote=bearishgurl]
How this plays out in the real world is that the teachers with the most seniority are often found teaching in the schools where they perceive to be the easiest to teach in. These are the schools where nearly every child has eaten breakfast at home and completed their homework the night before. In other words, schools where most of the students have stable homes with parent/guardians in residence who can regularly afford to buy a variety of groceries and have the time to see to it that their kids complete the work required of them.
[/quote]

Isn’t this part of the problem. In the private sector your best and brightest employees are assigned to the most difficult problems. They’re the most qualified and gifted to figure out how to solve that problem. In public education the best and longest tenured teachers get assigned to the easiest problems. It might be enjoyable to have a room full of kids ready and eager to learn. It might be really easy and problem free but you’re one of the best and highest paid teachers and you’re dealing with the easiest problem. It’s an ineffective use of money from a goal of trying to educate every student. It’s great for the teachers but it’s terrible from a taxpayer perspective.

[quote=bearishgurl]
I don’t see this decision holding up under appeal as the “facts” cited here (if they are truly part of the ruling) don’t comport with CA education law as it applies to the intricacies of how seniority is dealt with in collective bargaining agreements.[/quote]

It was ruled unconstitutional. So the fact that it violates CA education law doesn’t really matter. The question is does it violate the constitution or not. If those education laws are in conflict with this ruling than those education laws could be found unconstitutional as well.

In general rights are valued more contract law. For example we could draft a contractual agreement that I’m your slave, but if that was brought to court the contract would be found null and void because it isn’t constitutional.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I could certainly see it being overturned and getting appealed to the supreme court. I could see CA supreme court overturning it and the US Supreme court not taking it. That’s probably the best case scenario for the union. With the current make up of the US Supreme court I could see them keeping this ruling but you never know. It’s definitely a tricky one to decide.

[livinincali]

[quote=CA renter]
The problem is that I’ve seen other teachers who were terrorized by administrators and wrongfully terminated (and won lawsuits as a result). I’ve seen parents in the vocal minority who were hell-bent on trying to oust a particular teacher just because she was older, or didn’t do things exactly the way this particular group liked. I can’t think of any other profession (other than politics) that is so scrutinized and so beholden to such a large number of people who have no education, experience, or knowledge about the profession.[/quote]

I honestly don’t think having tenure or not having tenure changes this. If someone is truly wrongly terminated they still have the courts to reconcile that action without tenure. If administrator ends up in court more than once on wrongful terminations then fire the administrator. You have cause at that point.

I think everybody can agree that between tenure and union rules it was incredibly difficult to fire a teacher with cause. It was such a process that administrators didn’t want to go through the time and effort of doing it, even if it was the right thing to do. I don’t even know if being an ineffective teacher was actually cause. Usually it’s something far worse, like sleeping with students.

[joec]

Maybe this is too simple, but if it’s true that great teachers go to the easiest districts, then maybe all you need to do is double/triple their pay and that would definitely encourage some of the male/tougher teachers to try to improve lower income areas. Heck, work 1 year and make 3 times what I do now? Sign me up…or at least let me try it and see if it’s worth my while/time.

To balance it out in terms of funding, you now take 1/4 or 1/2 pay for a teacher in the good area and lower everyone’s pay since these “kids” are easy to teach and EVERYONE wants to work in this school district. This is already done in corporate life where jobs in Hawaii pay typically lower than some other places. Doctor jobs in CA is hard to find so most doctors have to move to other areas since everyone wants to work/stay in CA.

Again, saying a law that tries to ban bad teachers is going to lead to 100% vindictive parents or admins is a stretch. If people had to openly say, VOTE a bad teacher out, you can have everyone else in the class publicly also VOTE to keep the teacher in and maybe it’s just 1 bad parent or 1 bad admin who is sleeping with the teacher’s rival…

None of this anonymous stuff since someone’s livelihood is on the line here. This works out in most normal communities and the old Internet of old when people didn’t have something to find behind.

[NotCranky]

I don’t believe “tough males” can help just by being teachers. The best teacher would not be much more effective than the average teacher when placed in the inner city, so why would anyone want to suffer for nothing? They would not have broad support of administrations and parents. If they did , then there wouldn’t be these seriously terrible schools to work at. The classroom is just a symptom. A woman or average man could do the job better at normal pay, if she/he didn’t have to take care of juvenile delinquents who were just doing time and have to have seriously offensive students with no hope of correcting or removing them.

So , tenure is not helping or failing inner city schools because teachers are not G-d.

[bearishgurl]

Just to clarify, a school “district” is the employer of teachers and administrators. The majority of teachers work for ONE district for the entirety of their teaching career. WITHIN that district (especially if a large urban district) student performance benchmarks in any given school can vary year to year and decade to decade. Already employed teachers don’t bid to work in a particular district …. they’re already employed there. Each school district in CA has school sites with varying student performance data, often wildly varying. If teachers want to change their school assignment within their district (their employer’s worksites), they attempt to bid for a new worksite (school) in the spring before the new academic year begins. Those bids are granted on the basis of number of openings in the bid-upon school and in order of seniority of the bidder (teacher).

OTOH, public school “principals” are unrepresented (CAR, correct me if I’m wrong here). They can and will be transferred from school site to school site at the whim of their employing district. Principals, although “supervisors” of a school site, have very little (if any) decision making capacity as it relates to curriculum or facilities. For instance they CAN decide which direction and how parent traffic should flow in the mornings and afternoons in the front parking lot of their site and issue a parent bulletin to that effect but they CAN’T decide if a local scout group will be allowed to use the school cafeteria after school for regular meetings. Principals can’t use ANY stationary for parent announcements/bulletins which does not identify both their school site AND the district to which that school site belongs.

Practically speaking, “public schools” are NOT entities in and of themselves. They are “worksites” and “learning sites” within a particular district. Public school districts are “subdivisions” within the State of CA, just as cities and counties are. When I see Piggs here complaining about particular school sites, they often should be complaining about District decisions. The vast majority of complaints parents have about a particular school should be taken to their District superintendent’s office. Yes, CA public school administrators’ and teachers’ hands really ARE tied and there are very good reasons for that.

I can’t understand where the complaints in the article re: union rules keeping “bad teachers” in the lowest performing schools are coming from when a good portion of the teachers in those schools don’t even have tenure yet! These newbies have to start somewhere. As soon as they are able to successfully bid on a slightly better-performing school assignment, some will transfer out. Some will stay on longer to obtain student-loan forgiveness on their remaining balance before attempting to move on.

see: http://www.tcli.ed.gov/CBSWebApp/tcli/TCLIPubSchoolSearch.jsp

Any long-tenured teachers teaching in underperforming schools are doing it primarily because they want to give back to their community and make a difference in their student’s lives. Very often, they themselves graduated from the same or nearby school in the same district, have a lot of family living in the immediate area, have residential rentals in the immediate area or all three. Their (now “underperforming”) school assignment has always been “home” to them. They know their way around and “know” from whence their students came and what their daily lives are like.

You can’t blame these teachers for low student performance. Most of them taught at that same (or nearby) school when the student performance at that school was much higher. Public school teachers have no control over the following:

– a school attendance area slowly changing from a primarily SFR area to multifamily area (ex: North Park SD);

– hundreds of new construction units in a school attendance area set aside for low-income tenants; (ex: any number of newer areas in both North and South SD County);

– a proliferation of social services for homeless families moving into a school attendance area (ex: Southcrest SD [from dtn and East Village]);

– the exit of large corporations and defense contractors in a school district attendance areas leaving many previously well-employed parents unemployed; (ex: Solar Turbines, Gen Dyn, Rohr, etc)

– the construction of high property-tax subdivisions (w/ HOA/MR) in an established school district attendance area, overloading the schools and causing the parents of the newer students to realize they must work several jobs between them to pay 3-10 times the property tax (incl HOA) than the parents of students residing in the established areas.

– soaring property values in a school attendance area, causing families with children to either move in with well-established relatives or to a nearby rental apartment in order to remain in the area, where in past decades, parents of minor children were buying single family homes in the area. (ex: Pt Loma HS and feeder schools)

– the construction or conversion of hundreds of units of military housing in a given attendance area, causing some schools to have disproportionate numbers of “temporary” students of ~2 years attendance duration who are often enrolling and withdrawing at different times of the school year in groups and who may not be present for the CAHSEES and other academic performance measuring testing after attending a particular school most of the school year as a “stat.”

I could go on here, but suffice to say, many public HS’s in SD County which were considered “excellent” in 1974, 1984, 1994 or 2004 and are now considered just “average” or “mediocre” in 2014 may end up again to be “high performing” in 2024, all depending upon the whims of local politicians and military decisions from on high.

Public school teachers must work with the raw material that is before them and that “raw material” is each student along with whatever “baggage” they can’t help but bring to the classroom every day. We can’t blame public school teachers just because certain groups of students do better than others and there are currently less of those better-performing groups in attendance at their school assignment.

[livinincali]

[quote=bearishgurl]
I can’t understand where the complaints in the article re: union rules keeping “bad teachers” in the lowest performing schools are coming from when a good portion of the teachers in those schools don’t even have tenure yet! These newbies have to start somewhere. As soon as they are able to successfully bid on a slightly better-performing school assignment, some will transfer out. Some will stay on longer to obtain student-loan forgiveness on their remaining balance before attempting to move on.
[/quote]

BG, you do a great job at describing the status quo and the challenges they face, but many people feel the status quo isn’t working.

Think about this particular paragraph where you write the newbies have to start somewhere. That indeed is true, but why would you assign your newbies to one of the hardest challenges and tasks in your company. Qualcomm isn’t assigning their most difficult and hard to solve engineering problem to a bunch of right out of school new hires. They are going to assign those new hires to teams working on easier tasks. They are going to put their best and brightest on those hard to solve challenges.

That’s why I think the public education system is failing. Rather then the most experienced and brightest working on fixing under performing schools for variety of reasons they let those teachers choose to get away from the problem. You are right there are a few gems that give back to the community and try to make a difference, but there’s not enough. Maybe it’s time that you run a school district like a business rather than based on feeling and emotions. Now I would agree that if you’re gong to go down this path you need to give the teachers a lot more flexibility on getting rid of the disruptive students.

[bearishgurl]

[quote=livinincali] . . . Maybe it’s time that you run a school district like a business rather than based on feeling and emotions. Now I would agree that if you’re gong to go down this path you need to give the teachers a lot more flexibility on getting rid of the disruptive students.[/quote]

Every single student whose parents are sending them to public school is entitled to a “free public education.” If a student is disruptive in the classroom repeatedly, they will get suspended. After getting suspended a certain number of times, they are subject to getting expelled. After getting expelled, they can ask the district if they can attend another school. They are often given ONE chance at another district school and if they are suspended and/or expelled from that school, they will likely be expelled from that district for a certain number of years. Then the parents have to move out of the district, apply for an interdistrict transfer with their child’s school record in hand, send their child to private school or out of county/state to live with relatives and attend school there. There is a District hearing process in every step of this disciplinary process to legally protect both the district and the student.

“Teachers” can’t get rid of a disruptive student. Only the District can.

Even teachers in private school can’t get rid of a disruptive student. They can put their complaints into the school administration who will decide what to do with the offending student.

Let me ask you something, livinincali. Are you, by chance, an “engineer” yourself? What if your employer told you that you would have job protection for life with incremental pay raises (+/-3% every 3-5 yrs) if you took a long-term post (10-20 yrs) working at a worksite which was lined with shopping carts of the homeless just outside the entrance and perhaps surrounded by garish billboards, 2 tattoo parlors and streets patrolled by the city vice squad. Would YOU take your employer up on the offer? And would YOU spend your time and money trying to get a Masters degree or Ph.D in your field whilst working in this environment, in order to “better yourself” to contribute more fully to the problems of your newly-adopted worksite??

What’s good enough for the goose is good enough for the gander.

[bearishgurl]

Isn’t the expectation of an employee in corporate America that they will eventually be able to apply to one of those “corner office jobs with a view” if they perform well and better themselves through more education in their field while working?

Although teachers don’t typically have such posh working conditions, why should it be any different for them, since they’re not less educated than corporate employees and often better educated? I think teachers deserve to have a clear ladder to better working conditions just like all other employees.

[joec]

[quote=Blogstar]I don’t believe “tough males” can help just by being teachers. The best teacher would not be much more effective than the average teacher when placed in the inner city, so why would anyone want to suffer for nothing? They would not have broad support of administrations and parents. If they did , then there wouldn’t be these seriously terrible schools to work at. The classroom is just a symptom. A woman or average man could do the job better at normal pay, if she/he didn’t have to take care of juvenile delinquents who were just doing time and have to have seriously offensive students with no hope of correcting or removing them.

So , tenure is not helping or failing inner city schools because teachers are not G-d.[/quote]

Ahh, good points…And this goes back to my earlier comment somewhere else that we shouldn’t even “force” teenagers or people who simply don’t want to go to school, be in school.

These are all the disruptive, delinquent and kids possibly in the inner city. If it means shutting down tons of schools where the kids don’t even want to be there, then so be it. I think we spend like over 10k for these kids per year to be in school…Maybe they can start welfare early and just stay out of trouble and collect say 3k a year .

Heck, we have a family person who never even graduated from HS and dropped out, why force them to go when they aren’t going to use the time there productively? Even if they are forced to graduate, they won’t be using their HS degree for anything.

Again, these aren’t the people going to go to college anyways.

The point I keep saying is let’s try something. We all know the current system is broke and why housing areas with better school districts do so much better for this reason.

[ucodegen]

[quote=bearishgurl]

…. Further, Judge Treu said, the least effective teachers are disproportionately assigned to schools filled with low-income and minority students. The situation violates those students’ constitutional right to an equal education, he determined….

(emphasis added)

This is SO not the way the union rules are written folks. The teachers with the most seniority get their bids for their next school assignments considered first by order of length of tenure. School assignments year to year have nothing to do with “perceived competency.”[/quote]
From someone who had a parent in LAUSD, and heard, and knows many of the underbody of that system as well as someone who went through a school where a tenured teacher lasted less than a year (school is currently one of top 10 in CA, and was in 1970 as well).. your statement is not completely accurate. The Unions do allow moving tenured teachers to other schools should there be issues. This way Unions can support tenure at the same time prevent problems that would have ended the tenure system instantly. Also note that it is a ‘bid’ by the teacher to teach in that district/school. ‘Award’ is not guaranteed. The choices of location are not entirely the teachers choice and not entirely on seniority. Seniority and Tenure aids in the teachers ability to select. The poor performing tenured teachers end up on the low-income schools because the parents on those schools are seen to be less likely to lawyer up and fight the school district. (And yes, I can come up with names in LAUSD of such teachers, but won’t for legal reasons)

NOTE: The ‘movement’ of tenured teachers can be seen if you follow those with ‘questionable’ behavior, up until the time convicted. The tenure made it hard for the district to get rid of them, but areas with parents that were better off were able to force the teachers ‘movement’ to another school, or even district.

[CA renter]

[quote=livinincali][quote=CA renter]
The problem is that I’ve seen other teachers who were terrorized by administrators and wrongfully terminated (and won lawsuits as a result). I’ve seen parents in the vocal minority who were hell-bent on trying to oust a particular teacher just because she was older, or didn’t do things exactly the way this particular group liked. I can’t think of any other profession (other than politics) that is so scrutinized and so beholden to such a large number of people who have no education, experience, or knowledge about the profession.[/quote]

I honestly don’t think having tenure or not having tenure changes this. If someone is truly wrongly terminated they still have the courts to reconcile that action without tenure. If administrator ends up in court more than once on wrongful terminations then fire the administrator. You have cause at that point.

I think everybody can agree that between tenure and union rules it was incredibly difficult to fire a teacher with cause. It was such a process that administrators didn’t want to go through the time and effort of doing it, even if it was the right thing to do. I don’t even know if being an ineffective teacher was actually cause. Usually it’s something far worse, like sleeping with students.[/quote]

Without the unions and tenure, many teachers will be fired without legitimate cause. The administrators/parents will always be able to drum up some kind of excuse to justify it: inappropriate clothing showing cleavage, too friendly with students, to strict with students, benched students during recess (yes, some parents have threatened to sue because of this), test results didn’t improve enough (even though the students might have been a particularly tough lot), etc.

Also, how do you think the teachers are going to pay for the legal expenses to fight these unjustified terminations? The unions are the ones who put up all the money and spend all the time on these cases. If you get rid of tenure, and get rid of all of the other perks for teachers, there will be no union…that is the ultimate goal of the Privatization Movement.

If there is any job in the world that needs tenure, it’s teaching. That being said, I do agree that getting rid of truly bad teachers (and public employees, generally) needs to be easier.

[CA renter]

[quote=bearishgurl]

OTOH, public school “principals” are unrepresented (CAR, correct me if I’m wrong here). They can and will be transferred from school site to school site at the whim of their employing district. Principals, although “supervisors” of a school site, have very little (if any) decision making capacity as it relates to curriculum or facilities. For instance they CAN decide which direction and how parent traffic should flow in the mornings and afternoons in the front parking lot of their site and issue a parent bulletin to that effect but they CAN’T decide if a local scout group will be allowed to use the school cafeteria after school for regular meetings. Principals can’t use ANY stationary for parent announcements/bulletins which does not identify both their school site AND the district to which that school site belongs.

…

Any long-tenured teachers teaching in underperforming schools are doing it primarily because they want to give back to their community and make a difference in their student’s lives. Very often, they themselves graduated from the same or nearby school in the same district, have a lot of family living in the immediate area, have residential rentals in the immediate area or all three. Their (now “underperforming”) school assignment has always been “home” to them. They know their way around and “know” from whence their students came and what their daily lives are like.

You can’t blame these teachers for low student performance. Most of them taught at that same (or nearby) school when the student performance at that school was much higher. Public school teachers have no control over the following:

– a school attendance area slowly changing from a primarily SFR area to multifamily area (ex: North Park SD);

– hundreds of new construction units in a school attendance area set aside for low-income tenants; (ex: any number of newer areas in both North and South SD County);

– a proliferation of social services for homeless families moving into a school attendance area (ex: Southcrest SD [from dtn and East Village]);

– the exit of large corporations and defense contractors in a school district attendance areas leaving many previously well-employed parents unemployed; (ex: Solar Turbines, Gen Dyn, Rohr, etc)

– the construction of high property-tax subdivisions (w/ HOA/MR) in an established school district attendance area, overloading the schools and causing the parents of the newer students to realize they must work several jobs between them to pay 3-10 times the property tax (incl HOA) than the parents of students residing in the established areas.

– soaring property values in a school attendance area, causing families with children to either move in with well-established relatives or to a nearby rental apartment in order to remain in the area, where in past decades, parents of minor children were buying single family homes in the area. (ex: Pt Loma HS and feeder schools)

– the construction or conversion of hundreds of units of military housing in a given attendance area, causing some schools to have disproportionate numbers of “temporary” students of ~2 years attendance duration who are often enrolling and withdrawing at different times of the school year in groups and who may not be present for the CAHSEES and other academic performance measuring testing after attending a particular school most of the school year as a “stat.”

I could go on here, but suffice to say, many public HS’s in SD County which were considered “excellent” in 1974, 1984, 1994 or 2004 and are now considered just “average” or “mediocre” in 2014 may end up again to be “high performing” in 2024, all depending upon the whims of local politicians and military decisions from on high.

Public school teachers must work with the raw material that is before them and that “raw material” is each student along with whatever “baggage” they can’t help but bring to the classroom every day. We can’t blame public school teachers just because certain groups of students do better than others and there are currently less of those better-performing groups in attendance at their school assignment.[/quote]

Another good post, BG. While many managers in a public/municipal setting are not represented, principals in a given district might be represented by ACSA. I think it might vary from one district to another, so can’t say anything definitive.

http://www.acsa.org/#

Principals do have some say — even a lot of say — in curriculum decisions and facilities management, depending on the district and/or the school site. They manage the site budget, write grants proposals, make sure the school is in compliance with state and federal laws regarding funding (like Title I and Chapter 1 funding) and other programs, manage the overall school environment and teacher/student morale, arrange for the funding and sourcing of special programs and activities, handle discipline and interactions with students and parents, etc.

The second part about many tenured teachers staying in poorly performing schools is true, too. I’ve known many teachers who really loved working with disadvantaged students and would never choose to go to an “easy” school, no matter their seniority/tenure status.

[no_such_reality]

LOL, I’ll pull this quote from the prior thread on this topic.

[quote=CA renter][quote=AN][quote=CA renter]I’ve known a couple of teachers who were anti-union, but they are few and far between because the union is the only thing protecting teachers from some very dangerous, power-hungry, and domineering administrators and parents.[/quote]It’s called life.[/quote]

Not in schools, it’s not. Nor should it be. Some administrators come in with a major agenda. I’ve known of principals who were totally opposed to the teaching of phonics in any way. In one case, if the principal happened to walk past a classroom and the teacher was working on letter sounds, the teacher would be written up. Enough write-ups, and the teacher could lose his/her job. This was at an elementary school…with over 90% ESL students, no less!

Needless to say, the union had its work cut out with that one.

Teachers need to have protection from administrators and parents who want to push their own agendas. I can’t think of any other job (other than politics) where a person has more wannabe bosses and where everyone from the POTUS to the local mom who never graduated from high school (and everyone in between) wants to dictate exactly how they need to do their job.[/quote]

Basically your comment exemplifies why this ruling is needed.

You see, no one is actually in charge. The administration is, but only as long as the union and teahers agree.

That’s dysfunctional. Sure, some insane heavy handed administrators will make a mess in places, but just like most teachers are good, most administrators are good.

The problem is the dysfunctional relationship between the two and with union protections insures there is no accountability.

Meanwhile, LAUSD is moving a couple hundred ‘teachers’ to their own homes because having them show up to ‘teaching jail’ is too costly.

Res ipsa loquitur, it’s is broken.

And yes, I will say thank you for the years of service you have done in the schools. But honestly CAR, you come across as extremely burned out by your years of teaching.

[paramount]

I think there’s no question that public employee unions need to be neutered in California; but I’m still trying to figure out exactly which article&section of the state constitution was violated.

[Author]

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