{"id":123844,"date":"2014-06-11T18:19:15","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T18:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=123844"},"modified":"2014-06-11T18:19:15","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T18:19:15","slug":"dangerous-court-rulling-latest-attempt-blame-teachers-weaken-public-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/dangerous-court-rulling-latest-attempt-blame-teachers-weaken-public-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous Court Rulling Is Latest Attempt to Blame Teachers and Weaken Public Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diane Ravitch<\/em><\/p>\n

Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case\u00a0, declared<\/a>\u00a0that he was shocked, shocked to learn from\u00a0Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane<\/a>\u00a0of Harvard about the enormous harm that one \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher can do to a child\u2019s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains.<\/p>\n

How did he define \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher? He didn\u2019t. How did these dreadful teachers get tenure? Clearly, some grossly incompetent principal must have granted it to them. What was the basis\u2014factual or theoretical\u2014that the students would have had high scores if their teachers did not have the right to due process? He didn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n

The theory behind the case\u2014as I see it\u2014is that low test scores are caused by bad teachers. Get rid of the bad teachers, replace them with average teachers, and all students will get high test scores. You might call it the judicial version of No Child Left Behind\u2014that is, pull the right policy levers\u2014say, testing and accountability\u2014and every single child in America will be proficient by 2014. Congress should hang its collective head in shame for having passed that ridiculous law, yet it still sits on the books as the scorned, ineffective, toxic law of the land.<\/p>\n

You might also say that Judge Treu was regurgitating the unproven claims behind Race to the Top, specifically that using test scores to evaluate teachers will make it possible to weed out \u201cbad teachers,\u201d recruit and reward top teachers, and test scores will rise to the top. Given this theory, a concept like tenure (due process) slows down the effort to fire those \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teachers and delays the day when every student is proficient.<\/p>\n

Relying on Chetty and Kane, Judge Treu is quite certain that the theory of universal proficiency is correct. Thus, in his thinking, it becomes a matter of urgency to eliminate tenure, seniority, and any other legal protection for teachers, leaving principals free to fire them promptly, without delay or hindrance.<\/p>\n

Set aside for the moment that this decision lacks any evidentiary basis. Another judge might have heard the same parade of witnesses and reached a different conclusion.<\/p>\n

Bear in mind that the case will be appealed to a higher court, and will continue to be appealed until there is no higher court.<\/p>\n

It is not unreasonable to believe that the California Teachers Association might negotiate a different tenure process with the Legislature, perhaps a requirement of three years probationary status instead of two.<\/p>\n

The one thing that does seem certain is that, contrary to the victory claims of hedge fund managers and rightwing editorial writers, no student will gain anything as a result of this decision. Millions more dollars will be spent to litigate the issues in California and elsewhere, but what will students gain? Nothing. The poorest, neediest students will still be in schools that lack the resources to meet their needs. They will still be in schools where classes are too large. They will still be in buildings that need repairs. They will still be in schools where the arts program and nurses and counselors were eliminated by budget cuts.<\/p>\n

If their principals fire all or most or some of their teachers, who will take their places? There is no long line of superb teachers waiting for a chance to teach in inner-city schools. Chetty and Kane blithely assume that those who are fired will be replaced by better teachers. How do they know that?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear. No \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher should ever get tenure. Only a \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d principal would give tenure to a \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher. Teachers do not give tenure to themselves.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the Vergara decision is the latest example of the blame-shifting strategy of the privatization movement. Instead of acknowledging that test scores are highly correlated with family income, they prefer to blame teachers and the very idea of public education. If they were truly interested in supporting the needs of the children, the backers of this case would be advocating for smaller classes, for arts programs, for well-equipped and up-to-date schools, for after-school programs, for health clinics, for librarians and counselors, and for inducements to attract and retain a stable corps of experienced teachers in the schools attended by Beatriz Vergara and her co-plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

Let us hope that a wiser judicial panel speedily overturns this bad decision and seeks a path of school reform that actually helps the plaintiffs without inflicting harm on their teachers.<\/p>\n

Originally published here<\/a>\u00a0under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diane Ravitch Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case\u00a0, declared\u00a0that he was shocked, shocked to learn from\u00a0Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane\u00a0of Harvard about the enormous harm that one \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher can do to a child\u2019s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains. How did he define \u201cgrossly ineffective\u201d teacher? He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-123844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}