UTLA, Contracts, Layoffs and Best Teachers- Steve Lopez writes.

Steve Lopez of the L.A. Times gets to the topic of the UTLA union contract and the teacher layoffs with a prominent factor that neither item addresses, comparative excellence in any teachers.
"Seniority, not quality, counts most at United Teachers Los Angeles," Steve Lopez, L.A. Times, March 25, 2009 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez25-2009mar25,0,4942695.column

The story compares UTLA's contract (347 pages) with Green Dot Public Schools contract (33 pages). Some of the same things I have seen before and mentioned in the postings are also pointed out in his article as important considerations, and that main one is that the layoffs are going by seniority that is a provison agreed to by the union. One teacher, Robert Rubisa, a third-grade teacher whose wife, a less senior teacher of 4th grade, is being laid off, had talked about his experience with the union positon,

Rubisa said he went to his union rep and suggested that teachers give back
some of their sick days to help balance the budget and avoid some layoffs.

"The union rep said we should not balance the budget on teachers' backs," Rubisa
said.

The tentative contract announced yesterday highlights that furloughs will not happen this year. I wondered when I read that whether more teacher jobs could be saved by using that to some extent, spreading around some of the loss instead of complete elimination of teacher's jobs. The response stated above is what I had heard before as furloughs had been discussed and apparently that's out as well as a partial measure to save jobs.

Lopez, as usual, brings out some views with his positioning of comments, facts and scenarios. A lot of what I have observed matches the view of Lopez not because we are both so smart but because the identifcation of the issues is so obvious an inescapable. Lopez goes further with comparing the younger operation by Green Dot, the charter school organization, and the way they seem to use more pragmatic approaches to the job. UTLA is shown to be burdened by its contract with an accumulation of assorted boilerplate provisions to the extent that it becomes undecipherable to him in seeking answers to actual situations. The UTLA is undeniably an organization with a particular interest and sometimes it does not operate for the best outcomes of everyone, even though it serves good purposes in other situations.