The Tenure/LIFO Court Decision
“Sh*t, Sh*t, Sh*t!!!”
I wasn’t present when AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis van Roekel heard about “Vergara vs California,” but it’s easy to imagine them uttering an expletive (or two or three).
Understand, I’m not talking about their reaction to the judge’s decision earlier this week. I’m imagining how they might have reacted when the lawsuit challenging California’s tenure and seniority rules wasfiled in May 2012, more than two years ago.
Why might they have cursed when the lawsuit was filed? Because, I suspect, they knew that the three California rules were indefensible. These rules are not based on anything remotely connected to pedagogy or the needs of students but were political decisions made by the state legislature, heavily influenced by the powerful California Teachers Association, the CTA[1].
Consider the three provisions:
1) Tenure after TWO years? How can any organization, let alone something as complex as a school function that way? And by the way, the ‘two year’ rule actually means that a school principal has to make that ‘lifetime’ decision about halfway through the teacher’s second year on the job, after he or she has been in charge of a classroom for perhaps 14-15 months at most.
2) Slavish devotion to “Last Hired, First Fired,” as if the profession of teaching were labor’s equivalent of sanitation workers or pipefitters. 100% seniority! Nothing else matters, not a principal’s judgement, not student performance, not the teacher’s contributions to the school, and not student evaluation. Just years on the job!
3) A convoluted and complex process to remove inadequate teachers that reportedly involves about 70 discrete steps, takes years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2) Slavish devotion to “Last Hired, First Fired,” as if the profession of teaching were labor’s equivalent of sanitation workers or pipefitters. 100% seniority! Nothing else matters, not a principal’s judgement, not student performance, not the teacher’s contributions to the school, and not student evaluation. Just years on the job!
3) A convoluted and complex process to remove inadequate teachers that reportedly involves about 70 discrete steps, takes years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The case against those three provisions, “Vergara[2] vs. California,” was decided this week: “A California judge ruled [3] Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprived students of their right to an education under The Tenure/LIFO Court Decision | Taking Note:
