Teacher Tenure Ends in California - Fantastic for the Gulch
Posted by scojohnson 10 years, 5 months ago to Government
The "Job for Life" ends.
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I would love to see tenure done away with, as well as a few other rules that protect bad teachers. The one rule that gets me is that administrators have to give a teacher 24 notice before coming in for an observation, basically ensuring a show and not everyday classroom activity.
It's a fun and challenging job though, and I want my tax dollars back so I'll keep going for a few more years.
Have fun!
They need a Jack Welsh approach.. every year, promote the top 10% of performers, and fire the bottom 10% (automatically).
Harvard Business Review actually advocates a very simple and effective method: make sure employees know what is expected of them and hold them responsible for carrying out those duties irrespective of what everyone else does. If they go above and beyond to bring something great to the company, reward them. If their performance is dragging other areas of the company down, fix it or let them move on. Most of all, make sure that both the employee and management are on the same page regarding employee responsibilities!
In order to "win" in California on stuff like that... you have to take an environmental justice, or income inequality approach. I don't agree with it as being the strategy, rather than just a simple "if you don't do your job, you are fired" justification... but its the strategy needed to win in a bleeding-heart state with retired bleeding hearts on the jury panel. Keep in mind, you don't see a lot of high-income / high-producers sitting on juries... (ever). Even if they make it through the initial selection process, you would never see them selected to be empaneled.
/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_District
The first time she was invited to a talk in a neighborhood like that, she had talked to NASA & aerospace leaders about getting old simulators for schools & such, and planned to do something like that, only to find out from the teachers that they don't really need anything like that - most of the kids come to school with lice, and few eat outside of the school cafeteria... anything she could help with in that area was welcome. She took up a collection from her friends and office coworkers for all the freebie shampoos & such on business travel and started giving it to them for their food shelf in the school where kids go and get what they need for home. I guess I can see the problem, hard to concentrate on math when you are scratching at the lice in your hair.
We always like to blame the unions & such, and I do at every opportunity myself, but we have some larger societal problems going on.
When I was in Dubai on business back in the 90's, I couldn't put my finger on it... but soon realized you can't make a "left turn" anywhere. You have to do 3 right turns around a block to go left. The reason being, there is so much regulation in their society, and the monarchy makes pretty much every decision, that people there are incapable of choosing for themselves at an intersection for example on the road. I think we're getting to that point now - the lack of personal freedoms is like a boiling pot with the mass shootings, outbreaks, etc. I think we need more rugged individualism, and more pioneering opportunities to let people go off on their own and explore like they did when we settled the new world. There are no new worlds, there are no more adventures... people that were loners by nature could really go off on their own.. now we're a little stuck with them.
You would be amazed at how stable their society would be when daily-survival is the primary duty rather than watching Kanye West & whatever.
I'm not sure Dr. Zubrin thought that concept through. He might perhaps have thought the one-third gravity would be more healthy because it would feel better. But eventually you want a colony where someone could stay for a synodic year (the time for Mars to come back to alignment with Earth) and then return without breaking his bones with every step on Earth.
I looked up the statistic for Arizona. In the last 3 years, state-wide, 0% of teachers (probationary or with seniority) have been fired. 0.
In comparison, 9.8% of teachers in a private school system are dismissed for cause or performance on an annual basis (nationally).
I agree, there's not much firing of teachers going on in public schools.
Also, the article mentioned 'the real problem with public schools" but they NEVER EVER discuss the REAL problems and no one seems to notice that that goes ignored. I'm so done with government schools...and all the people that work for them too.
The happiest moment in my career with them was when I made management and could tell the unions to take their "fair share" thievery and go pound sand. They "forgot" to take me of their rolls when I promoted... and made me fight like hell for almost a year to get my 5 months worth of stolen dues back from them.
Hell, they worked harder to keep their illegally gotten gains than they ever did when I was forced to give them part of my paycheck every month.
Break the union, and it breaks the liberal stronghold.
Second, appointment to office by a governor in California doesn't necessarily mean much. In the case of the judgeships, they would be presented as a short list to pick from from the Judicial Appointments Advisor and would probably have the endorsement of the AG, and letters of recommendation from law schools, etc. AG is an elected constitutional office, as is the Lt. Governor, and has no bearing on who the sitting Governor is.
The Governor's staff reviews the application and if acceptable, moves it to the State Bar judicial nominees evaluation committee... which is a pretty left-leaning group, if the candidate gets a high rating from the JNE, it moves back to the Governor for consideration for appointment.
In a state as large as California, there are not a lot of coattails appointments kinds of things I don't think... there are over 200 state agencies, and most managerial-level positions are appointments, with a work force of about 220,000 (not including teachers & law enforcement/fire obviously). A safe bet would be something like 10,000 appointments... but I looked & couldn't find the number. You wouldn't have coattails for all of that, so most are just grandfathered from the previous administration.
An interesting note, my wife's uncle is Cruz Reynoso, a previous Supreme Court Justice during the Reagan governorship. Interesting guy to talk to. Has some interesting stories about pre-Presidential Reagan and was fairly fond of him (despite being very liberal) until Reagan's people argued the ketchup case before the Supreme Court of California... (Reagan argued that a ketchup packet in school lunch met the "vegetable" requirement for school lunch nutritional requirements, Cruz laughed it out of the court room). We talked about the appointments process once, unlike the federal system, it's pretty hard to get nominated out of the blue - the vetting process is pretty long.
Realistically, California has a 12% income tax rate, we have "low" property taxes... but our values are gigantic, so 1% of $700,000 is still $7,000 a year in property taxes... around 9% sales tax... something like 50 cents on the gallon for gas tax... Capital Gains taxes... by most estimates, with federal and state, we're in it for about a 60-62% marginal tax rate at the upper end, there is no room to raise taxes to fix the education problem. Education already gets 50 cents on every tax dollar.. or well north of $50 billion a year and we spend more per-pupil than anyone. So to fix the problem, we need to start swapping out the people at every level.
The union fought deviously to keep this out of the court system, they knew what would happen if a reasonable person takes a look at this bullshit. I think this is the first of many decisions that don't go their way, actually.
Also, by most accounts, Schwarzenegger was better to unions than Jerry Brown is.. the public unions are presently rejecting anything he offers them versus Schwarzenegger was able to usually work out the differences and stay in budget. Jerry is just mandating by fiat, then ignoring the differences and sending it to the legislature. http://www.sacbee.com/2014/06/03/6454967...
Reality... they don't have a friend in the governor's office either I don't think. He's happy to take their money, but they didn't get what they thought they were paying for either, nor does he have the room in the budget to do anything.
Well, keep slugging. I'm sure you can beat them to the bottom if you just hang in there... :)