Bill to Undermine Teacher Due Process Revived in California State Legislature

California state senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) has reintroduced legislation that is supposed to speed up the dismissal of teachers for gross misconduct, the Los Angeles Times reported this week. The new legislation, SB 10, will be very similar to a failed bill advanced last year by Padilla. The text of the bill was not available as of Monday.

In the wake of LAUSD’s sex abuse scandal (see here, here and here), it is understandable that the public would want a more efficient and effective process for removing child molesters from the schools. However, the problems in LAUSD were not the result of ineffective disciplinary rules. Rather, the school district was asleep at the wheel, routinely ignoring parental complaints, losing personnel records, and not doing the necessary investigative work when it did respond to complaints. Several parents are currently suing the district for its incompetence in handling the Miramonte case.

According to an audit released last week, LAUSD frequently failed to report teacher misconduct to state Commission on Teacher Credentialing authorities and took too long to investigate abuse allegations. In one case, a principal took eight months to notify an employee after it had concluded its investigation. Overall, the audit found that LAUSD failed to promptly notify state authorities about 144 misconduct cases. Some of the cases were report as much as three years after the allegations were first made.

Padilla’s previous attempt at “improving” the disciplinary process would have done nothing to make school districts more accountable, more effective at record keeping or better at their internal investigations. It would, however, have significantly reduced due process for teachers, by taking the final disciplinary decisions away from an objective state body and placing them in the hands of local school districts, which are often biased against their own teachers and which have a strong stake in controlling public perception, even at the expense of teachers’ due process rights. LAUSD demonstrated this last year when it fired the entire staff at Miramonte Elementary, even though only two of its teachers had been accused of abuse.

The state audit concluded that the lengthy and expensive dismissal process for teachers in California contributes to districts making settlement agreements with them instead of fully investigating and disciplining them. This is because certificated employees (i.e., teachers) who appeal their dismissals are currently entitled to a hearing before the Commission of Professional Competence (CPC). One of the goals of the Padilla legislation is to reduce settlements by speeding up the dismissal process, in part by ending teachers’ rights to a hearing before the CPC.

While it is certainly desirable to get molesters out of the classroom as quickly as possible, the right to an appeal is a necessary due process right, as innocent teachers are sometimes arbitrarily or vindictively accused of misconduct by administrators, parents and students. Ending this right will do nothing to protect children, as districts already have the right, as well as the legal obligation, to immediately remove accused abusers from the classroom, even while investigations are pending. While the new legislation would do nothing to expedite the removal of molesters from the classroom, it would reduce the amount of time it takes from the end of the investigation until a teacher is dismissed, thereby saving districts money that would have been spent housing teachers in “rubber” rooms or paying them salaries during the appeals process.

LAUSD Sabotages Harassment Settlement, Imposes Abuser’s Name on School

A settlement with an employee who accused formed LAUSD Sup. Ramon Cortines of sexual harassment may be coming apart at the seams over both the disputed terms of the agreement and the disclosure of the victim’s name by LAUSD without his consent, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday. The proposed settlement would have required the accuser to resign from his post in exchange for $200,000 and lifetime benefits.

The settlement proposal was announced by LAUSD before the victim had a chance to sign it. One point of contention was the value of the lifetime benefits, which the victim believes was agreed to be $300,000, whereas the district publicly announced a value of $250,000.

It was not clear from the Times article whether the victim has agreed to resign. State law prohibits an employer from firing an employee because he has filed sexual harassment charges against his employer, but they can tie a voluntary settlement to his resignation. However, considering that his yearly salary (not including benefits) was $150,000, it would not be surprising if he was unwilling to accept this conditon.

In related news, a delegation from the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts met with Board of Education President Monica Garcia to request a name change for the school. While it is completely reasonable to not want one’s school named after an accused harasser, the controversy over the naming of this school has a longer and more sordid history. According to the Times, Garcia and her colleagues overrode an earlier pledge to give students, parents and teachers a say in the naming of their school, and then imposed the Cortines name on them. Now Garcia is ignoring parent’s and teacher’s claims that the stigma of the name is harming student and teacher morale, arguing that the school’s name is a good one since Cortines promoted the arts and played a key role in the development of the school.

It is disturbing and ironic that LAUSD fired the entire staff at one school because of the sexual misconduct of two teachers, yet just a few years earlier had actively covered up the sexual misconduct allegations against its own superintendent and then allowed him to retire with benefits (see here).

Anti-Teacher Bill Passes California State Senate

SB 1530 was passed in the California State Senate this week. The bill eliminates timelines for notifying teachers of impending disciplinary action and allows districts to send out dismissal notices during the summer, when many teachers are on vacation and not even in town to receive and act upon the notice.

The bill would also allow districts to use old and unrelated information from a teacher’s past to prosecute current misconduct cases, which is like using a past speeding ticket as evidence that someone later ran a stop sign. The legislation is that it will eliminate teachers from the Committee on Professional Competence. 

End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

One of the most vitriolic and idiotic elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their more senior colleagues) out of jobs.

But what about administrators who lack the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty of criminal misconduct.

Should we end due process, seniority and tenure for administrators?

Oh yeah, they don’t have these protections. They have something better: status and power.

Consider the case of Ramon Cortines, former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth $250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset management, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines, like other high powered abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.

While the out-of-court settlement precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his professional or social wellbeing.

San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt, Inept and Abusive Administrators

Not long after Cortines left San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw the misallocation (and theft) of millions of dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years, while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,” she said about her SFUSD staff and teachers.  Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.

Ackerman then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to install surveillance cameras despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.  She then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.

Cheaters Prosper

In Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating scandal. In both cases the administrators threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in test scores.

Rather than relying on independent outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education also recommended that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.

Rhee was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit, Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes for children. What is most important to them is improved business opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.

Hall, who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution 4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District, with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.

Michelle Rhee’s $1 Billion Union-Busting Superpac

According to the Ed Deform movement, teachers unions are the main impediment to student success. All they care about is protecting incompetent or perverted teachers, keeping working hours short and salaries high and blocking real and meaningful reforms like private charter schools, abolition of due process rights, increased high stakes tests, and dumbed down Common Core Standards.

Education reformers should thus be excited to hear that Students First, former Washington D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group, has dumped $2 million into a Superpac created to counter the corrupting influence of teachers unions in upcoming California legislative races, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Rhee hopes the new Superpac, called “Parents and Teachers for Putting Students First,” will ultimately raise over $1 billion in its fight against the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. One of their first campaigns has been to back Democrat Brian Johnson, a charter school executive running for the 46^th assembly district in Southern California, pumping over $400,000 into his campaign.

Just Another Superpac to Benefit Corporate Interests

Unions, especially teachers unions, have been increasingly relying on political campaign funding as their primary tool for promoting the interests of their members. From the standpoint of workers this has been disastrous as it has taken resources, time and energy away from organizing and the promotion of direct actions like strikes and working to rule and focused them on the very indirect and fickle beneficence of political leaders whose interests lie primarily with business, not workers. The consequence has been a continuing downward spiral in workers’ wages, working conditions and living standards, with legislation increasingly favoring the interests of bosses over those of workers.

The most explicit recent example of the bankruptcy of this strategy is the teachers’ unions’ continued support for President Obama despite the fact that Obama has promoted numerous programs that are terrible for students and teachers (e.g., private charter schools, Race to the Top, Common Core Standards, evaluation reform, etc.). It is irrelevant that Romney might be even worse for teachers. A union is supposed to promote the interests of its workers and therefore should never endorse a political leader with a demonstrated track record of attacking those interests. They should especially not waste their members’ dues on that campaign, when those resources would be much more effectively spent resisting the candidate’s anti-worker policies.

From the perspective of the ruling elite, however, this strategy by unions has been much more of a frustration than a disaster. It has not stopped them from consolidating political power and increasing their wealth to levels unseen in nearly a century. Yet unions are one of the few remaining entities with bankrolls large enough to mount even a modicum of resistance and contest the wealthy in the political arena. Hence, destroying unions outright, or at least their ability to make campaign donations, has become one of the main priorities of the ruling elite. (An example is the Payroll Deception initiative being proposed in California).

MAD Madness

Amassing a stockpile of nuclear weapons large enough to annihilate the world several times over was a cold war strategy that proponents argued would make us safer by deterring the Russians or Chinese from using their huge stockpiles against us. If you nuke me, I’ll nuke you and the planet will be destroyed—Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

This arms race contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union by redirecting limited resources away from human needs and increasing their public’s disgust with their regime. However, according to many historians, it was the drawn out proxy war in Afghanistan between the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen and the Soviet-backed communist government that really blew their wad and brought down the U.S.S.R.

There has been an ongoing political arms race between wealthy individuals and the corporations versus unions and liberal nonprofits. It has always been an unequal race with the wealthy almost always outspending their opposition, often by a ratio of ten to one (or more). With the Citizens United ruling and the super spending by the Superpacs, this has only become more extreme and it threatens to do the same thing to the unions that military spending did to the Soviet Union.

It may not happen immediately. Unions will continue their copious spending in a desperate attempt to elect the lesser evils and block the most onerous legislation, all the while resisting strikes and other direct actions, discouraging their members from fighting back and continuing to give away more and more concessions to the bosses.

In the end, how different is this from withdrawing completely from political campaigns? In either case, the workers lose out. However, by withdrawing from the political game, unions at least retain their war chests, which can be used to organize and mobilize their members to directly pressure the politicians and the bosses, make their lives uncomfortable, cut into their profits, and make some real gains instead of always fighting just to make the losses less bad.

New Astroturf Group Calls Tenure, Seniority Unconstitutional

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

A right-wing astroturf group, Students Matter, has escalated the war on California’s teachers with a lawsuit seeking to overturn five state laws related to teacher tenure, seniority and the dismissal process.

The law suit, which was filed on May 14 in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of eight students, argued that "A handful of outdated laws passed by the California Legislature are preventing school administrators from maintaining or improving the quality of our public educational system," the Los Angeles Times wrote this week.

The suit is full of logical inconsistencies. For example, it argues that teachers can earn tenure too easily (in two years), well before their actual skill in the classroom can be determined. If successful, this would make it much harder for teachers to earn tenure and the right not to be fired without cause. Yet at the same time the suit aims to abolish seniority rules that protect experienced veteran teachers (i.e., those who have demonstrated skill in the classroom) during layoffs. This would make it much easier to fire veteran teachers with a proven track record, exactly the teachers districts should want to protect assuming they were really interested in providing the best teachers possible for students.

The suit cynically claims to be fighting for the rights of low income students under the equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. It argues that the current law protects ineffective teachers and “creates arbitrary and unjustifiable inequality among students,” according to Thoughts on Public Education. In short, the suit is saying that tenure, seniority and due process violate the state’s constitution, a claim that would be laughable if there wasn’t a powerful national movement behind it.

While it is true that low income schools tend to have higher percentages of younger teachers, it is not because of seniority, tenure and due process. Rather, these are the toughest schools to teach at and require teachers to work much harder than at more affluent schools, but for the same pay. In districts like LAUSD, where student test score data are used to evaluate teachers and where teachers’ Value Added (VAM) scores are publicly posted, there is a significant disincentive to teach at these schools.

One should also question why we have an Apartheid system in which some schools are filled predominantly with low-income students, while others within the same district (and sometimes only a few miles away) are predominantly affluent. Likewise, California continues to have among the lowest per pupil rates of K-12 funding in the nation. These are the real stories of educational inequality and they have nothing at all to do with the teachers or their job protections.

In reality, abolishing tenure, seniority and due process rights has nothing to do with protecting children or making their schools better. It is really about three things: union-busting, increasing administrators’ power, and cutting salary costs so they can be reallocated to other things, like administrators’ salaries or irrational and unproven reform efforts.

The lawsuit would provide administrators with much greater flexibility in getting rid of higher paid veteran teachers, as wells as union activists and vocal advocates for student and teacher rights. By stacking schools with rookies and novices who must keep their mouths shut and suck up to their bosses longer in order to avoid being laid off, administrators can more easily push through “reforms” like increased class sizes and teacher evaluations based on student test scores and student surveys that are detrimental (see here, here and here) to both students and teachers.

This suit could have monumentally negative consequences for students and schools. Making it easier to get rid of experienced teachers could result in a large influx of novices who not only lack the experience to teach well, but who also have a much higher attrition rate than veteran teachers, thus increasing the turnover of teaching staffs. It could also accelerate the exodus of experienced teachers from teaching to other professions. And while it could save schools money by allowing them to replace relatively expensive veterans with much cheaper rookies, it would hurt K-12 education in the long run through its tacit acceptance of educational defunding by the state.

Students Matter, which is a relative newcomer to the teacher bashing game, was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and, not surprisingly, has received much of its funding from Ed Deform Czar Eli Broad. Its advisory committee includes Students First, Michelle Rhee’s fake student advocacy group; teacher-bashing former state senator Gloria Romeo; and the Parent Trigger charter school front group, Parent Revolution.

The Thoughts on Public Education (Toped) blog says that California’s dismissal law can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per teacher to fire a teacher for unsatisfactory performance, thus compelling districts to find workarounds, like shunting teachers from school to school [or filing trumped up disciplinary charges against the teacher].

This really misses the point. If a teacher is truly doing a bad job of teaching, but really wants to continue teaching, he should be provided professional development, mentoring and other support at the district’s expense. This would be far cheaper than going through the 10-step dismissal process and all the accompanying legal costs.

It also glosses over the important question of what really constitutes bad teaching and how is this being assessed? In my 15 years of teaching I have seen very few truly rotten teachers and only a handful of mediocre ones. This may be coincidental; however, I think the whole bad teacher hysteria is really a red herring, something intended to rally the public to support union-busting in the guise of children’s innocence and safety.

Indeed, Toped notes that while the suit claims 8 students suffered because of ineffective teachers, it did not cite any evidence of any specific teachers having a negative impact on the plaintiffs. Rather, if focused on research by the National Council On Teacher Quality and Eric Hanushek. The latter concluded that by dismissing the weakest 6-10% of teachers, students’ academic success and earnings as adults would increase.

“Weakest,” however, does not necessarily mean bad, inadequate or worthy of throwing into the unemployment line. As in any profession there is a spectrum of different skill levels and this is not necessarily detrimental. For example, I may not be able to see the same physician who treats the 49ers, but that doesn’t mean my orthopedist is doing a bad job or should be banned from practicing.

Furthermore, there is no accurate method for determining who the weakest 10% of teachers are. Even if there was such a method, we could find that 100% of teachers were effective, but there would still be a bottom 10% who would be fired just to fill Hanushek’s quota and mollify the Ed Deform wolves.