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Smart List: 60 People Shaping the Future of K-12 Education
This is great news for me and the change I’ve been waiting for. I wrote to Mr. Duffy about two years ago suggesting that teachers themselves start charter schools. This would allow them to make almost all professional decisions and mark the beginning of a true profession for teachers.
As for tenure, it’s revealing that you suggest that he would do away with it when in fact he wants a longer period before teachers are granted job permanence. Many people, including myself, agree with that. Only ”
This is a good time to remind people that granting tenure after so short a time was an action taken by many state legislatures to attract and retain teachers during times when it was difficult to find enough teachers, especially for urban classrooms. Yes, unions had a part in this but tenure laws had to be enacted by elected officials.
History tells us that during bad economic times, such as the Great Depression and the recent recession, teaching jobs become scarce and coveted by many well-educated people who would not accept these jobs during good economic times. So how this all ends depends much on the economy. If it improves, I predict a huge teacher shortage as baby boomers retire and women go into many fields. If it does not improve, teachers will lose many of the benefits they worked so hard to obtain over the last sixty years. In the meantime I hope the idea of the teacher-run charters spread across the country. This is one way to ensure that teachers are in charge of their own profession. It’s time!
***”In the meantime I hope the idea of the teacher-run charters spread across the country.”
Implying this isn’t already happening…
***”As for tenure, it’s revealing that you suggest that he would do away with it when in fact he wants a longer period before teachers are granted job permanence.”
It’s much more than that:
* “[he] wants to make it harder for teachers to earn tenure protections and wants to lengthen that process”
* “He even wants to require teachers to demonstrate that they remain effective in the classroom if they want to keep their tenure protections”
* “And if a tenured teacher becomes ineffective, he wants to streamline dismissals… [10 days]”
I didn’t get the pig f*er reference, and if I had I would have wished I hadn’t. Call me the style police, but this is poor taste. One of the first lessons of a blogger should be how to filter themselves. It’s not even an effective article title, so there is absolutely no reason to use it.
“I hope the idea of the teacher-run charters spread across the country. This is one way to ensure that teachers are in charge of their own profession.”
Great point, Linda.
Thanks, Jon.
Yes, Chris. You got it right. That’s the way it was reported in the Los Angeles Times and I agree with it.
Thanks Linda, so I don’t know why “LA teachers union head A.J. Duffy is opening a charter school and basically dumping tenure rules” made you imply that that’s not what’s actually happening.
Why would making teachers work for a few more years before getting tenure be “basically dumping tenure rules?” When I started teaching, it took five years to get tenure and that makes sense to me.
Then you must have agreed with me because you didn’t read my entire comment. He’s not just increasing the work involved to get tenure, but also changing what “job permanence” effectively means. The article keys in to the reality here:
“These are not viewpoints ever advanced, condoned or accepted by United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers and other professionals in the nation’s second-largest school system.”
I don’t understand what you are saying. I just reread the article which says that Duffy wants to extend the period leading to tenure. Maybe United Teachers of Los Angles does not agree with that but I do. The important fact is this: Duffy does NOT intend to do away with tenure.
Yes, very good, but that’s part of it. He also wants to make it much easier and quicker to get rid of ineffective tenured teachers (10-day turnaround), thus changing what “job permanence” effectively means. I don’t think any union has ever agreed to that level of accountability.