Scott Walker's Real record in Wisconsin

Educate for Democracy: Walker’s Budget Undermines Public Education, with ...: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is expected to do two things in the next few days: Formally announce his candidacy for President and sign W...

When we abandon our public schools, we not only abandon democracy, we abandon our children's future.

Gov. Walker has the most far-reaching budget veto powers of any governor, and can literally change the budget line by line. How he uses that veto pen will foretell his national plans as he enters the Republican presidential primary.

In Wisconsin, where we have four years of experience with Walker, we expect him to continue his policies of abandoning public institutions and undermining the middle class. Hopefully, national observers will see through Walker's rhetoric and analyze the realities of his state budget.

[Bob Peterson is a founder of Rethinking Schools magazine and former president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association.]

We Need the Representative Democracies of Unions in our Schools

 October 16, 2014

Leo Casey of the Albert Shanker Institute replies to Deborah Meier again today.

Deb: To practice genuine democracy in our schools, our unions, and our communities, we need a different understanding of what it means to be political.

When I taught at Bard High School Early College in New York City, one of my favorite questions on my mid-year exam was: What did Aristotle mean when he wrote that "man is a political animal?"

For most Americans, the term "political animal" would invoke the worst of American political culture: the paranoid ranting of talk radio, the political television shows modeled after wrestling entertainment, the election campaigns dominated by negative attack ads, and the gridlock of a Congress where narrow partisan advantage is everything. No wonder so many Americans run in the opposite direction when they hear "political."

Ego, Money and False Promises: Michelle Rhee’s Big Secret and the Collapse of Education “Reform”

Jeff Bryant

Maybe it’s time to stick a fork in education reform, and get set for what the new ed-tech industrialists are going to bring us.

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When Michelle Rhee left the center stage of the movement known as “education reform,” inquiring minds wanted to know why.

Was it because “she didn’t play well in the sandbox.” Was it to solidify her and her husband’s image as “the next Bill and Hillary Clinton?”

But here’s one theory that no one seemed to consider: It was a good business decision.

Regardless of how you feel about Michelle Rhee, you have to admit she has been an adroit business person – tapping into a growing market demand, using a clever publicity campaign to reach celebrity recognition, outmaneuver her competitors (such as teachers unions), and amassing significant amounts of capital to roll out a formidable new “product,” her organization StudentsFirst.

So it’s not beyond reasonable to wonder if Rhee got out of the business of “education reform” while the gettin’ was good and left StudentsFirst at a time when it has likely peaked in influence and may even be in decline.

If that’s indeed the case, is Rhee’s exit the first sign of a larger exodus from the reform movement soon to follow? Is the whole enterprise known as education reform starting to go south? And if so, where is all the big money behind it going to go to next?

Becoming the Bickersons

Perhaps Rhee realized, just in time, the reform venture was turning into a money pit, as forces and personalities dragged the effort down with inefficiency, contention and lack of productivity.

The Myth of Teacher Tenure

by Diana D'Amico — July 23, 2014

In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. California may be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to. Using history as a lens, this commentary explores the origination of tenure policies and the debates that surrounded them. This commentary argues that embedded in the tenure debates is a much larger problem that should concern us all.

In 1917, the president of New York City’s Board of Education told a reporter that the schools are “burdened and clogged with many teachers who are unfit” because of their “permanent tenure.”¹ For nearly a century, critics have blasted tenure for putting the needs of adults above those of children. In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. Californiamay be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to.  

We Won't Give Up- Attacks on Teachers

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel is angry at people who would treat our children as commodities in order to yield profits, attack educators and create conflict rather than actually work to improve public education for all our students. Watch and hear what he has to say.

Tenure important for teachers

Due Process Prevents Capricious Firings: Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, is the author of several books, including "The Great School Wars," a history of the New York City public schools.

A century ago, teaching was one of the few white-collar jobs open to women. Classes were large, salaries were low, and working conditions were poor. Supervisors and school boards, male-dominated, made many rules governing teachers' lives. In some cities, for example, school boards fired teachers if they married, or if they were allowed to marry, they were fired if they became pregnant.

In the early days of the formation of teachers' unions, teachers cared most about two issues: tenure and pensions. Teachers wanted some guarantee that they would not retire to a life of poverty. And they wanted assurance that they could not be fired for arbitrary and capricious reasons. They wanted to be sure that they could not be fired by a school board that wanted to hire a colleague's daughter or sister, or fired by a principal who didn't like their looks or their religion.

The Vergara decision in California strikes at one of the issues that matters most to teachers today. Unlike tenure in higher education, public school tenure is not a guarantee of a lifetime job. In elementary and secondary education, tenure is a guarantee that a teacher can be fired only for just cause, with due process.

Vergara Lawsuit would take away teacher rights

"It would be very scary to me, if this lawsuit succeeds, to think that I might not have a job next year, not for anything I'd done in the classroom, but because my principal didn't like me, or my clothing, or something I'd said." —Laura Lacar, Gahr High School, ABC Unified School District

Last year a group calling itself “Students Matter,” funded by David Welch, a conservative Silicon Valley millionaire, filed a lawsuit, Vergara v. the State of California. The lawsuit challenges a number of constitutional rights for California’s teachers, including “tenure,” due process rights, and seniority rights during layoffs. The suit, hiding behind a group of students, alleges that these teacher workplace rights infringe the constitutional right of students to an equal education. [See what Gary Ravani has to say about the civil rights rhetoric used by Students Matter; and see CFT president Joshua Pechthalt's op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News] CFT and CTA joined the defense last year, challenging Vergara as a “…meritless lawsuit by corporate special interests attacking teacher professional rights.”

The trial opened on Monday, January 27.

The lawsuit ignores the real problems of public education

Education Code rules to protect teacher rights from administrative mismanagement are not "unfair" to either students or new teachers. What harms students? Economic inequality, poverty, their parents' joblessness, and underfunding are unfair to students. But this lawsuit ignores these barriers to educational success. The premise of "Vergara" is that public schools are failing, and bad teachers are the reason why. Get rid of the “bad teachers,” and the schools will succeed. This simplistic idea is wrong in a number of ways. Most public schools are successes, by most reasonable measures; and while the role of the teacher is always an important in-school factor, external factors like poverty and underfunding have the greatest impact.

Someone sues the schools to abolish teacher tenure ?

By Duane Campbell

Julie Watson of The Associated Press reports today in the Sacramento Bee that  nine public school students are suing the state over laws on teacher tenure and seniority which really means that the usual anti union corporate machine has launched a new front in the war on teachers.  See  https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/

These students ( or their parents)  want to invalidate a series of current laws which protect teachers from political interference. Their campaign foci just happen to co-inside with campaigns of a variety of the usual corporate suspects from Michellle Rhee, the Waltons, Students First, Democrats for Educational Reform, and other well financed political action committees.

However, as we learned in the campaign against bi-lingual education ( Prop.227), parent and student front groups can provide an effective campaign strategy. A law suite designed for publicity was an important element in the abolition of bilingual education for the children of California.  It will be difficult to get past the framing of the AP article to real issues.

For example, one of the parents is listed as saying that her child did not learn to read until 3^rd. grade.  Something we would all be concerned about, but it is not clearly connected to teacher tenure and seniority.

More likely, the child was disadvantaged by large classroom sizes,  California’s over crowded classrooms,  and the budget cuts of the recent economic crisis.   Or, it may have been because the child did not respond well to the tightly organized scripted reading lessons now required in most classrooms. Reading resource teachers prepared to assist children falling behind were eliminated from most California classrooms in a long series of budget cuts.

Florida votes to end teacher tenure

From the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Wednesday, March 24, 2010. See http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/education/fl-teacher-tenure-bill-032310-20100322,0,3262837.story  --  

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Florida Senate kills teacher tenure pay system; raises tied to student success

By Josh Hafenbrack

TALLAHASSEE - In a major shift, the salaries of Florida's 167,000 teachers could soon be tied to student test scores, rather than seniority and education level.

The state Senate on Wednesday approved a controversial bill by a 21-17 vote to dismantle teacher tenure, a decades-old system in which educators' pay is based on years of experience and whether they earn upper-level degrees.

New teachers hired after July 1 would work on one-year contracts and face dismissal if their students did not show learning gains on end-of-year exams for two years in any five-year period. For them, job security would be based soley on two factors: standardized scores and job reviews by principals. Existing teachers would have future pay raises tied to student scores and reviews but would keep their current job security.

"It takes a sledgehammer to the teaching profession," Sen. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said Wednesday.

Bill sponsor Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, said the bill means teachers who earn high marks will get higher salaries and it "will help put a good teacher in every single classroom."

Despite President Obama pushing merit pay on the federal level, Florida Senate Democrats were unified against the proposal -- and joined by four Republicans in opposition. Still, Republicans, who have a 26-14 majority in the state Senate, had a comfortable margin to push the bill through, which now must be considered by the Republican-controlled House.

Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, indicated he likely would sign the bill into law if it passes the Legislature, as expected.

"Generally, I support that," he said Tuesday. "That's how it is for most of us -- you do well, you keep your job. It seems to me that wouldn't be a bad idea in the area of education, too."

Well, as described, this is not really tenure. It is the pay system.