Sacramento Teacher of the Year Laid Off
The decline of Big Labor was highlighted recently at the Battle of Wisconsin, where powerful public worker unions failed to unseat Governor Scott Walker in spite of lavish support from a sympathetic media establishment and crowds of bussed-in activists from all over the country.
What happened in Sacramento, California shows why: In response to budget cuts, union rules forced the layoff of the “Teacher of the Year.” Quality of teaching doesn’t matter. Power to inspire students doesn’t matter. Good relationships with parents doesn’t matter. Only seniority matters.
What happened in Wisconsin isn’t about the benefit of Republicans’ big money, as the union leadership and their allies have been spinning it. No amount of money can convince voters to change their minds about fundamental things. And voters are increasingly viewing the damn-the-cost demands of union leaders and their self-serving work rules with resentment and even outright anger. These feelings are not “bought.” They are real. They are justified. And they are growing.
As sociologist Andrew Abbott has documented in his influential studies, the hallmark of a “profession” is the embrace of an ethic of service, a set of values that motivates members of the profession above and beyond the economics and “work rules” of a mere job. Teachers have long claimed to be “professionals” and many of them individually personify that status. They spend their own money to buy supplies for students who don’t have them. They spend long hours preparing and grading well after the school doors are closed and locked. They try endlessly to maintain a good learning environment amidst the pressures of social upheaval, poverty, misfortune, and the political pressures from interest groups from both left and right that want to use schools as forums for indoctrination rather than learning. They struggle amidst budget cuts that mysteriously leave union leadership and superintendents’ offices untouched even as classroom teachers are cut back. In short, there are many, many honorable and professional teachers laboring away in classrooms.
But teachers and their students are being betrayed by their union leadership, which is too often more interested in maintaining job security for deadbeats than encouraging good teaching. The current mindset of many teachers’ union leaders is, quite simply, unprofessional. It is an industrial era mindset that treats teachers are unskilled workers where only seniority (and the good will of the union leadership, of course) is what really matters.
As long as this mindset continues, the public backlash against public sector unions will not remain isolated to Wisconsin. Unions need to update their mindset and reform their work rules to identify and reward performance instead of mere seniority. If they don’t, they will ossify and die off, and they will deserve their fate.
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Somehow I see the GOP getting blamed for this in the end.
The GOP should have just given Sacramento more money.
Let’s see, every single article I could find on this issue says the seniority rule is a state law, not union work rules, though unions almost certainly had a say in the laws. The layoffs were because of $43 million in budget cuts, yet DG makes a snarky comment about more money. What the GOP does is push a deep, maybe even pathological hatred of unions. Just read this post and it’s obvious.
Jim, you don’t actually have to defend indefensible policies like this.
My problem is simply that Logan specifically stated that the reason for her losing her job was union work rules, not the state law. He was using it as a general attack on all public sector unions, a standard GOP meme being used as a wedge to attack all unions. I don’t defend what happened. But I recognize that deep budget cuts have more to do with it than the union, especially since absolutely no one has come up with a really effective method of measuring teacher effectiveness on a large scale.
Well, that’s a valid objection. But I share your suspicion that unions were the ones who got the state law on the books, so it’s a bit of a smoke screen.
And you’re right about the wedge. But it’s more than a political tactic; this sort of behavior is what causes conservatives to reflexively oppose all unions. This right here is one of a few wellsprings feeding the opposition to unions, to paying teachers more, and many other causes liberals fight for. Figure out how to fix this problem, and a wide swathe of liberal goals become more achievable.
Think of the current GOP as a multi-core CPU. One core is Christian Fundamentalism, the second is worship of business focused exclusively on the management side with hatred of unions as a corollary to it, the third is the hatred of government meme and the fourth unit in this quad core system is rabid personal hatred of the opposition – no exceptions allowed. Look at how both Clinton and Obama are reviled and accused of all manner of crimes. The modern GOP needs no reason to hate unions other than the fact that they stand up to management. Some unions just sometimes give them cause. Consider how even after the public sector unions in Wisconsin gave Walker every single fiscal concession asked for he still went after them and his compatriots in the GOP still attacked the unions as being greedy and unprincipled.
Look. As far as I am concerned the GOP has been cutting budgets and services for years. They do not want to support social programs nor fund teachers, police, firefighters, etc. The real “smoke screen” is that conservatives claim there is waste in government and we just need to keep on slashing budgets. They see government programs as a huge beast that needs to be starved so there is no waste. Almost every Republican member in Congress has signed Norquist’s “never raise taxes” pledge. How in the world do people expect the government to pay for essential services when there is no money? And how in the world can anyone be shocked when lack of money causes something like this?
So when layoffs happen people can blame the “law”. But it’s not the law that causes layoffs. It’s the conservatives not allowing money to be raised for essential services.
And this article is focused on this one teacher who was laid off. Let’s not forget that other teachers were laid off as well. If she wasn’t laid off, then someone else would have been fired and it might have been someone just as good or better.
I don’t know how to rank teacher performance and I agree that laying off poorly performing teachers would be ideal. But until we can have a good measurement then we have to use some criteria to determine who is fired.
We should also remember there can only be one “teacher of the year”. Not every teacher who is worthy of the title is ever recognized.
My outrage is aimed at the obstructionist Republicans who refuse to raise taxes for essential services.
We’ve seen many articles on the internet discussing service cuts. Remember the firefighters (in Kentucky, I think?) who were “private” and didn’t put out a house fire because the owners did not pay fees? With enough funding in taxes the firefighters would have been a “public” organization, supported by taxes and the issue never would have occurred.
What does it take to make people realize that services cost money and that we ALL need to pay our fair share to keep our communities educated, healthy and safe?
Republicans just need to stop playing with the well being of our communities and country, get off their asses and do some good for a change.
I already answered this, Stockboy. It takes, for starters, admitting when the money is being diverted from the purpose it was intended for, being willing to discuss how to prevent that in the future, and not trying to cloud the issue with legitimate but tangential complaints.
I’m going to wager that everyone here agrees that school policy and state law should favor keeping the best teachers, not necessarily the longest tenured. So Logan is raising an issue on which fundamentally EVERYONE AGREES. You and Jim are working hard to avoid agreeing with him and doing your best to redirect the topic to areas of disagreement.
I know it’s painful to admit that someone on the right has a legitimate point, but come on. You’re claiming that you want agreement on the value of public services, but if you can’t express agreement, that obviously can’t happen. If you want agreement, find a way to agree with the parts of the discussion that, deep down, you agree with.
First, how do you determine who the best are? Secondly, think how deep the cuts must be to cost someone who has been teaching for nine years her job.
Jim, when I refer to “redirecting the topic to areas of disagreement,” those are exactly the ones I mean. Measuring teacher performance is notoriously controversial. The depth of the cuts goes back to your earlier point about the GOP squeezing the budget. Both are tangential to Logan’s post about this particular layoff policy.
You sound like someone who’s trying to start (or at least escalate) a fight. Are you?
The point I was trying to make is that while it is true that we need to change from a seniority based system there is no equitable way to do so until we do have a consistent, reliable way to evaluate teacher competency. To use a faulty system as a reason to make a broad attack on unions irritates me.
I was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. We were evaluated by a reviewer and a senior reviewer. The senior one had to rate us vs other officers (and they got a profile so if they rated everyone as top then everyone was average). This was a poor system. The reviewers were consistently not bothering to rate us on our performance objectives. Never the less, this review determined who would get promoted and when.
What I mean to convey to you about this story is that any review system is better than none. I was rated poorly in spite of the fact that I was personally responsible for nearly everything in the battalion that went up–all the way to congress. I was also the only one in the division doing the stuff right.
It is both the problem that conservatives seem to believe that government (meaning community) organization of any activity is bad, and that liberals was something perfect in order to implement anything that caused this tragedy.
Thoughts from Franklin D. Roosevelt:
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.
But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
Don’t forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/franklin_d_roosevelt_2.html#KHcdqEUib28VDPDr.99
You shouldn’t blame Republicans for being what they are, it’s like blaming a snake for having fangs, it’s just what they are…
If you want to blame someone blame the idiots who either don’t bother to vote or whom despite not having a pot to piss in, vote republican…
Thank you for agreeing on the main point, Jim. That means a lot.
And I share RC’s concern that you’re putting the perfect ahead of the good. You’re also putting the interests of teachers ahead of those of students. Neither of these is good stewardship of what Stockboy points out is a vital public service. That undermines it as surely as underfunding it does.
Every other industry has figured out how to evaluate employees decently enough to get on with the job, so I don’t understand why education must be an exception. I’m struck by the contrast between teachers and salespeople. Salespeople are measured and paid based on how much they sell, which is pretty crude metric as people buying is something they actually have little control over. But because they’re willing to take on that risk and be held accountable for the results, the good ones make a ton of money. There’s a lesson for teachers here.
Oh, I have no patience in terms of waiting for perfection. But I see people wanting evaluations that ignore the simple truth that every child is an individual who has their own environment and their own reactions to those environments that affect how they learn. This is one of the problems with some proposed evaluation systems.