Not since the days when local school boards fired male teachers for dating and female teachers for getting married, have teachers been under such serious assault from both the Left and the Right. by Lew Cypher
(libertarian)
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Less than a century ago, local school boards felt empowered to infringe on not only the civil rights but the essential human rights of public school teachers. Schools regularly told teachers when or whether they could date or marry, what businesses they could frequent and what additional, non-teaching duties might be expected of them for free. Beyond this, school children received widely differential treatment in the schools according the social and economic status of their parents. Children of the wealthy and powerful were not disciplined, not failed for missing or substandard work or even spoken to in less than regal levels of respect. Children of the working poor were at fault in all situations by just being present when wealthy children misbehaved. Thus, early tenure laws in the 1920's not only sought to restore American civil and human rights to teachers, they also sought to ensure that teachers were free and independent enough to treat all children equally and to be exactingly fair in grading student work.
Tenure for public school teachers worked reasonably well through to the early 1970's when changes in educational law brought about collective bargaining in the schools. As teacher unions sought and obtained exclusive bargaining rights for public school teachers, the unions started pressuring state legislatures to expand the rights of teachers under tenure laws. However, the unions also expanded their role in "protecting" the rights of teachers with regards to tenure and teacher dismissal. Eventually, what was once a simple hearing before the local school board to defend teachers against unwarranted dismissal morphed in time to full judicial hearings before an admininstrative law judge with attorneys for both the school and the teacher at tremendous cost to all parties.
As a footnote to anyone who actually understands teacher tenure, tenure is not granted by the county, the state or the federal government. It is granted by the local school district. It ends when the teacher stops working in that one school district. If the teacher is hired in a different school district, the teacher must earn tenure all over. Some states have a shorter path to tenure for "veteran teachers" transferring districts than for beginning teachers at their first job, but most do not. Furthermore, in California and some other states, school districts with less than ten teachers do not have to grant tenure due to regular annual fluctuations in student population. Obviously, in large urban areas, such as Los Angeles or New York, the reality is that few tenured teachers ever leave their jobs in that one mega school district. Therefore, the notion of a "job for life" bantered about on Fox News, for example, is misleading at best and just plain poor reporting at worst.
Now that teacher unions have the power over teachers and over schools in general, the unions no longer really value either teacher tenure or teacher seniority. The process to fire a teacher is so complex, convoluted and fraught with legal requirements that actual tenure or the granting of tenure is almost irrelevent. The mere presence of a national teachers union and membership therein ensures that the union and not the school will determine which teachers are valued as competent and which are not. Teachers who do not tow the union line miraculously get disciplined and/or dismissed with surprising speed, even with the many twists to education law caused by the unions. Union members in good standing (which means they are in complete political and philosophical lockstep with the union) are virtually impossible to fire.
Thus, conservative education reformers play right into the hands of statists, liberals and the unions by attacking the one tool left to teachers to not only do their job but to resist the unions: tenure. Teachers still fear losing basic human rights or the right to indendently measure student work and fairly grade it. Tenure as originally created ensure those basic rights. Unions do not want teachers to continue with that original independence any more than conservatives do, but for different reasons. Unions want absolute power over the teachers and over education. Strong, independent teachers are a real threat. Why would teachers really need unions in their schools if they have tenure and schools that value their hard work? Unions need weak, defenseless teachers to manage and "defend".
That is why the unions give only passing resistance to the parts of Obama's Race To The Top initiative that weaken teacher tenure and seniority. Liberals and statists want teachers that have to tow the party line on curriculum and political policy. Tenure, it seems, is now in the way of those liberal and statist "goals" for our children. Abolishing teacher tenure will not serve the students or the schools, but rather the same unions that turned it into the monster it is today. For some reason, you do not get more or better milk by killing the milk cow, but it does keep the butcher shop in business.
References:
Gigot, Paul (March 6, 2010) The Politics of Teacher Tenure. Video. Fox News Channel.
The views expressed
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Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2010-03-13 11:45:14
Well, the suggestion that tenure isn't part of the problem is misleading. For instance, see the article in the Sacramento Bee about tenured teachers who were laid off and then sued the district because the most senior teachers weren't rehired ahead of other candidates. I doubt very much that the senior teachers aren't tenured, and I also doubt that the ones hired instead of the senior teachers were tenured, either,
The issue of tenure is entirely irrelevent in the case sited in Walt Thiessen's response. What is relevent is who the union chooses to back and who the union does not. Here is an example [Appeal-Democrat]Â of seniority becoming an issue in teacher lay offs due to budget cuts. Initially, the California Teachers Association (CTA) backed the dismissal of the older teachers who did not qualify under new regulations to teach English Language Learners (ELL).
However, because these teachers have older credentials that are comprehensive in nature, they do not have to certify for the newer methods of ELL instruction to retain their credentials. Therefore, using ELL authorization as a criteria for dismissal was ultimately deemed improper. The older teachers were all more socially conservative and less likely to march lockstep with the union and were therefore deemed expendable by the union, until those teachers petitioned the court for separate representation from the CTA-appointed lawyers.
In the end, CTA had to provide lawyers for both sets of teachers and ended up costing the district a small fortune. Those legal costs will then, in turn, no doubt cause more lay offs of teachers this year. Tenure was never the issue, since all of the affected teachers had it. The union wanted to be able to pick and choose for the district and got spanked, but the district got hurt financially in the process. CTA played and the school, school teachers and school children paid.
Under current California tenure laws for public school teachers, the only two relevent criteria for deciding who is retained and who is laid off during budget related Reductions In Force (RIF) are seniority and credential qualification. Teacher unions often try to confuse the legal weight of the two issues in administrative hearings to favor the teachers the unions want to keep. Other relevant issues can only be used as "tie-breakers" when two teachers at risk of dismissal have the same hiring date. Even then, a high number of credential authorizations trump all other tie-breakers. While the unions have to legally represent all union members in a hearing, in the end the union bosses choose to press active cases for favored teachers and then do nothing for less favored teachers, even when the favored teacher is the least qualified and has the least seniority.
Conversely, once teachers have been laid off, credential qualification and not seniority becomes the all important issue. Individual teacher evaluation scores also come into play when considering which of two laid off teachers to rehire. Seniority only triumphs when all other considerations are equal, which is usually not the case. That reality does not prevent teacher unions from wasting teacher dues and school budget money on lawsuits. If schools lay off the "wrong" teachers over union objections they can almost count on getting sued, regardless of the merits of the lawsuit filed.
All of these sour grapes lawsuits are about raw union power, not teacher tenure. The unions will punish districts who lay off the "wrong" teachers and force the school to lay off even more teachers due to legal fees robbing the general fund of the schools. A good number of the teachers who will lose their jobs in 2010 can thank the teacher unions for costing them their jobs through almost endless lawsuits against the schools.
It's official, teacher tenure and teacher seniority are toast. Why? because the wife of a veteran school teacher I know blame those teacher protections for a bad teacher in the classroom. Never mind that parents do not make written complaints about the woman. Never mind that the principal does not visit the classroom to follow up on verbal complaints. Even if tenure and seniority did not exist, the only way to get rid of the bad teachers is still the same process. It takes written complaints based in fact not hysteria and an administrator with enough spine to face up to the union.
in our local high school, a teacher laid off last year for budget cuts has two union-backed lawsuits against the high school, both of which have cost the district enough to force the district to lay off two more teachers this year. That's right, The teachers union will cause two teachers to get laid off because they want to force the school to rehire one of their favored teachers. The case itself has no legal merit. The union is simply taking money away from kids, hoping to so sap the school that the school stops fighting them due to loss of funds. None of that has to do with "tenure" or "seniority". It has to do with union power. But tenure and seniority, and not the union itself, are being blamed.
Suggest that when you refer to 'tow the line' that you use the correct word - the phrase is 'toe the line'
"Toe the line"
Meaning
To conform to an established standard or political program.
Origin
There is some confusion between 'toe the line' and the frequently seen misspelling 'tow the line'. The 'tow' version is no doubt encouraged by the fact that ropes or cables on ships are often called lines and that 'tow lines' are commonplace nautical items.
The earlier meaning of 'to toe the line' was to position one's toes next to a marked line in order to be ready to start a race, or some other undertaking.
Thanks for the lesson in the History of the English Language, but both terms are correct, depending on the context, not just one or the other. "Tow the line" refers to doing other people's bidding, which is what happened when sailors towed ship lines, a very common metaphor in a past era. Whereas "Toe the line" refers to challenging authority and/or breaking the rules, which does not fit the context of my remarks. Lefties often think they are "toeing the lines" of society as self-described "free-thinkers" when, in fact, they are just "towing the line" for the Democratic establishment.
So, while your attempt to invalidate my remarks with a usage correction is a good try, you get no cigar on substance. Before trying to employ the tired invalidation tactics of the political left, at least do a better job on your "research". You'll have less egg to wipe off your face.Â
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