Let’s hear from all you boisterous opponents of judicial activism! Don’t all speak at once now!
I double-checked — and CNN.com is not a parody site. This is apparently real. A court declared teacher tenure rules unconstitutional — and the Education Secretary to a Democratic President welcomed the change as an opportunity to improve the system.
A California judge ruled as unconstitutional Tuesday the state’s teacher tenure, dismissal and layoff laws, saying they keep bad teachers in the classroom and force out the good ones, the plaintiffs said. [N.b.: The decision was stayed pending expected appeal.]
The ruling was hailed by the nation’s top education chief as bringing to California — and possibly the nation — an opportunity to build “a new framework for the teaching profession.” The decision represented “a mandate” to fix a broken teaching system, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.
…
“We are deeply disappointed, but not surprised, by this decision. Like the lawsuit itself, today’s ruling is deeply flawed. This lawsuit has nothing to do with what’s best for kids, but was manufactured by a Silicon Valley millionaire and a corporate PR firm to undermine the teaching profession and push their agenda on our schools,” CTA President Dean E. Vogel said in a statement.
The union described Students Matter as a group created by Silicon Valley multimillionaire David Welch and a private public relations firm and said the group is supported by former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor “Michelle Rhee and Students First, Parent Revolution Executive Director Ben Austin, billionaire and school privatizer Eli Broad, former lawmaker Gloria Romero, and other corporate education reformers with an interest in privatizing public education and attacking teachers’ unions.”
Let me imagine the “new framework for the teaching profession” proclaimed by Secretary Duncan from the perspective of my work as a plaintiff’s employment attorney”
OK, everyone who doesn’t agree with the school administrators, please go stand in that corner.
Everyone else, you still have jobs.
Would you get your teaching degree under these conditions? Would you want your children to do so? And, if you answer “no,” that’s good for students how?
Undoubtably there are bad teachers, and in a place the size of California there must be plenty, but the mechanics of figuring out who they are didn’t get any easier just because some judge said some stuff. The one measure everyone points to is student achievement, in that a good teacher should obviously be able to get good results out of whatever bunch of kids they find themselves teaching. It makes sense if you don’t think very hard. If you do start to think, particularly if you think about things which must not be thought, it makes less sense.
A major concern is that ‘bad’ teachers, meaning ones whose students do less well academically, tend to be over represented in poorer school districts – so bad schools are more likely to hire incompetent teachers and the poor children suffer this silent discrimination. But is that really what’s happening?
California has had a broken teacher system for three decades.
There are SO many causes for the problems it’s tough to know where to start: Overcrowding, Underfunding, Union interference (NOT JUST CTA), crumbling infistructure, immigration, poverty, broken families……………….
These all end up in the lap of schools.
Time to cut free lunch (and breakfast and summer snack) and get back to what schools were supposed to do.
This is a good example of why I often think that you are just here on this site to piss in the water and giggle. I can’t imagine that you’d say something this stupid under your own name.
Nameless do you know where the lunch money comes from?
The National School Lunch Program, it doesn’t come from local schools operating budgets and has significant restrictions attached to how it is handled.
Clearly you two have not spent time in California elementary schools in the last decade. Especially in underserved Districts like Cooks SAUSD.
The administratuon of these programs in a distraction. They are used NOT TO FEED children but gauge funding opportunity. I spent the better part of the 1990’s in the public school funding field. To quote my close friend Delaine Eastin “Give us well fed, well rested kids and we’ll do the rest”. The trouble is the staff has to do the feeding AND the teaching.
It’s attempts like yours to become DA that makes me think Moxley was right, you are nothing more than a self indulgent attention grabber. With no hopes of anything but reaching a level of popularity that has eluded you for a lifetime. If you would simply show a little humility people would’nt think so low of you. Real name or not.
You have NO idea the way elementary education works California.
Thank you for your brave commentary. I think that your assertion that school meal programs “are used NOT TO FEED children” more than justifies your choice of anonymity.
Whatever else justifies these programs, whatever other purposes they serve, I expect that to the children being fed (or, as you’s call it, “not fed”), it sure seems like the programs are being used to feed them.
Have your “close friend Delaine Eastin” drop by and let us know where her entirely appropriate statement about wanting “well-fed, well-rested kids” to teach means that we should, or should not, offer these meal programs.
As for the rest — oh dear, someone anonymous says that people don’t like me! Boo-hoo! Well, 77,472 people either liked me enough to vote for me or were sufficiently willing to overlook their dislike to vote against the incumbent DA, who would otherwise have cruised to another unopposed victory, so I’ll just take my solace in that.
Thank you for your participation in this public forum.
Your Welcome, anytime.
Really, nameless? Are you now posting under 70.209.204.48? I thought that your only IP address was — well, you know what it is….
Um… I’m trying to figure this out. Are you accusing nameless of being that anonymous commenter above? With not only a different IP address but also the sudden ability to spell good? And also nastier to you than nameless ever is? What is making you think it’s nameless?
His comment “Your welcome, Anytime,” which preceded mine. Read the whole thread, Chairman. I thought that that comment was him goofing around. But if he was goofing around, why should he care about my releasing someone else’s “one time use only” IP address?
How Chmilewinski of you!
I have three PC’s and an IPAD in the house. Plus, the SAT (too expensive to post on blog forums from though).
I couldn’t tell you how it works, but my network guy lives next door, I can ask if you want.
That IP address has never before appeared on OJB — I checked. Your posts consistently come from a single other IP address — I checked. I presumed that it was not really you who wrote that comment and that you were just goofing by taking credit for it. If it truly was you, then I’m sorry that I posted it — but the extra helping of nasty in its content led me to think that it wasn’t. If it was — then you gambled by adding a super-deluxe second layer of anonymity, and you lost.
Dan wants the IP address that you usually use. Giving it to him would have been “Chmielewski of me” — but I haven’t and don’t ever expect to, largely because it would please him and he doesn’t deserve that.
Hopefully teachers who need to be fired finally will.