Posted on 06/11/2014 5:21:56 AM PDT by expat1000
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday that tenure, seniority and other job protections for teachers have created unequal conditions in public schools and deprive poor children of the best teachers.
In a case that could have national implications for the future of teacher tenure, Judge Rolf Treu sided with a Silicon Valley mogul against some of the most powerful labor unions in the country.
In a 16-page ruling, in the case of Vergara v. California, Treu struck down three state laws as unconstitutional. The laws grant tenure to teachers after two years, require layoffs by seniority, and call for a complex and lengthy process before a teacher can be fired.
(Excerpt) Read more at legalinsurrection.com ...
Two leftwing articles of faith are competing here: Equal Protection vs. Unionization. HAHAHAHAHA!!! I think Equal Protection is going to lose this one in the end. The issue has long been framed as one of “anything that hurts the union, hurts the children”.
The education unions will appeal this to the SCOTUS a hundred times if they need to.
My guess is that they’ll find a left-wing judge who will overturn it on the next appeal.
At that point, it will instantly become “settled law.”
Fun to watch the CA chaos but I don’t understand this lib judge’s reasoning.
The white public schools in CA don’t have the same policies?
They don’t have teachers unions?
Actually there are at least three Article of Faith competing here and tripping over each other.
Besides those you mention there is the Article that there is no difference between the students and the cultures that create “low-effectiveness” schools in and of themselves.
A thought experiment: take two schools, one low-performance and the other high-performance, and leave them exactly the same except for switching the student bodies.
Within six months the low-performing school will have greatly increased its performance, the high-performing school will have fallen off the charts.
I firmly believe many of the individual students from the low-performing schools have the potential to perform at high levels. But only if you remove them from the culture that perpetuates the problem. IOW, schools can perform in the ghetto only if they create an anti-ghetto subculture within that school.
Which requires the ability to remove students unwilling to abandon their previous culture. But that conflicts with yet another Article of Faith, which is that schools must serve all students.
The problem with that A of F is that even a small minority of the thug wannabees make learning and teaching quite impossible for everybody else, and will of course by definition not be learning anything themselves. Insisting that they be included is the single biggest problem facing these schools, and one that if not addressed will prevent any other reforms from having any effect.
IOW, the problems of these schools are cultural far more than financial or even produced by the unions. They will not be solved until the glorification of gangsta culture as “authentically black” is thrown under the bus and run over repeatedly. Of which there is no prospect.
+1
notwithstanding the tenure problems, it is a cultural problem.
In certain cultures, cities, neighborhoods, and homes, education is not valued. Such individuals who do not learn to value education ruin the schools.
Despite the various movies to the contrary, put the best teacher in the world into a ghetto school, and he’s going to be generally ineffective.
Along those lines... your thought experiment...
A thought experiment: take two schools, one low-performance and the other high-performance, and leave them exactly the same except for switching the student bodies.
How about moving all the teachers?
Put all the teachers from the wealthier, parent-caring, self-sufficiency/achievement culture, high performing school into the mostly thuggier, single parent, victimhood/dependence culture low performing school.
Irrespective of outcome [which I think can be easily predicted] there would be a lot learned.
when did public school teachers begin receiving tenure? My wife taught through the 80’s and there was no such thing - never a discussed issue.
Colleges, yes - secondary and below, no.
I agree, of course.
My point is that any school is dominated by its students, at least if the administrators allow them to.
Turning around bad schools in the ghetto would require FIRST the imposition of discipline. This is impossible in a world where coming down like a ton of bricks on black students, regardless of their behavior, is politically unacceptable.
I suspect, without actual facts to back me up, that <5% of thug students will demoralize an entire school. In many ghetto schools, I suspect the percentage may be above 50%, though a good many of those are salvageable, only imitating the real thugs.
To turn these schools around, the school would first have to idenfity and expel the real thugs, then concentrate on instilling discipline and middle-class values in the remainder, and then teaching MIGHT become possible.
Since every single one of these steps is non-PC, it will never happen. We will go on pretending the issue is money or the building or the teachers. And it just isn’t.
Didn’t the attorney general decree that there is not equality in punishment among the races and now whites have to be punished at the same rate as blacks?
Not exactly, but close enough for government work.
This is, of course, precisely the reverse approach of what is needed. But since what is needed is quite unthinkable, I don’t spend much time promoting it.
The first step in turning ghetto schools around would be a determination that “authentic black culture,” as it has developed over the last few decades, is largely though perhaps not exclusively destructive and negative.
It needs drastic reformation in the direction of what are, or used to be, “white norms.”
Such an idea is unthinkable, much less speakable. So it won’t happen, and these poor children will continue to be boiled in the stew of wickedness liberalism has created for them.
It’s very sad.
That's hard to change. Kid by kid teachers will have to provide consequences to kids. But in schools where teachers aren't allowed to give consequences, that will not happen of course. We need some courageous, heroic teachers to stand up to the pc and help the kids.
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