The board fails to pass the proposal, instead creating a task force to study the issue." By Howard Blume April 29, 2009, L.A. Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lausd29-2009apr29,0,425306.story
Galatzin was interviewed on the radio Wednesday afternoon, expressed thorough frustration with the Board's outcome, choosing to conduct "a study of the issue" instead. She acknowledged that this particular action was effectively, no action.A proposal to make it faster and easier to fire ineffective, unprofessional or abusive teachers failed to pass at Tuesday's meeting of the Los Angeles Board of Education. A slim majority instead voted 4 to 3 to establish a task force to study the issue.
The resolution had been presented by board members Tamar Galatzan and Marlene Canter, who said she had pushed the issue behind the scenes since last fall.
The influence of the teachers union on the issue is obvously pretty heavy. There is always the thought that one's job can be endangered by the subjective judgement of a few superiors. This is the usual reason for rejection of anything that would weaken teacher's job security, but also results in throwing up a formidable firewall for the teachers with tenure.
The hardest part of making this thing work is finding a way that removes as much subjectivity as possible from the evaluation process. If student improvement is a measure of teacher performance, then how is that going to be assessed? If a student is a high performer, how much higher a gain would be possible? If the student is a poor performer, what amount of that behavior do you attribute to the teacher and what part is the responsibility of the student? And there you see a few of the problems. For issues not including student performance, the evaluation might be made more objectively. But the presence of a lot of vindictive and some simply ignorant superiors looms over the situation, and will remain an obstacle acceptance of this change happening."Let's all sit at the table," said board member Richard Vladovic, echoing calls
from leaders of the teachers union. "Let's slow it down and do it right."The successful amended motion to establish a task force was offered by Vladovic,
Yolie Flores Aguilar and board President Monica Garcia.
You have administrators who are in their positions and still don't know basic concepts of law where retaliation is a legally barred practice, but it gets done anyway. The actions actually constitute legal violations, whether the interpretationj by the actor conforms to the view that a violation has been committed. In a school situation, you have the irony present where there are many actions taken to "preserve" rights of students, and then the same people will do things violative of employment laws and other laws and common sense when it comes to dealing with the adults on the school site.
The other offensive basis that makes me wonder how anything would be carried out comes from seeing how a school can be managed or mismanaged in various forms or areas. There have been general and specific observations that I knew of where certain supportive personnel were not properly supervised, causing delays for teachers getting materials and equipment in operation in a timely fashion. The practice was generally acknowledge by many teachers but they were stuck with the condition, lest it be made worse by complaining. A lot of that is in the past at some sites as administrators change, but the practices result in a subpar level of support for teachers and others, ultimately impacting on delivery of services (teaching) to the students. So who do you trust to judge teachers?
I am a skeptical of fairness easily assured. Galatzin appears to be the most pragmatic member since David Tokofsky was on the Board. She's accessible to the media and her presentations don't sound contrived with a lot of platitudes and mumbo-jumbo that's supposed to sound legalistic and serve as a response to a question, like others on the Board. You might look to the local area for examples. Board President Monica Garcia sidetracked the plans and for any "study" to be done, you know that if it's an LAUSD project, it's going to be a huge WASTE OF MONEY - a prediction that so much of the Board's track record will support.
But some situations don't need that- where students have been hurt and a pattern and practice is found with these problems, you should act to terminate; but that would make the school liable, too, based on the inevitably long lead time allowed to fester by the District before any action is taken. Again, it's often a case of the personnel (including management levels, or especially management levels, I should say) absolutely ignorant of the impact of the laws (and for some, either just ignorant of law altogther or acting in spite of the law), in which case training is essential (and often missing or inadequate) if that exposure to more liability is going to be stopped. It's' a big problem and a having such a huge district does not make for a condition conducive for solutions to happen. Even small districts have their own large problems, but they can get to them sooner, in my opinion. If there was a whistle-blower provision in LAUSD for internal ills, I am not aware of it, but you would expect it to either need lots of extensions to take calls, or just an answering machine for lack of faith in the system acting and not retaliating against a caller for his or her trouble.
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