The L.A. Weekly edition that's now out and online has a lengthy article on the employee teachers of the LAUSD that should not be teaching and should be fired. Most have remained for years beyond the point where a termination should have happened, but have managed to stay on in the face of showings, at minimum, of an inabiity to produce lessons for their classes to teach the students, with many also showing some intemperate personalities that are incompatible with being a teacher of children and, in many cases, small children. In other words, these people are long overdue for unloading and the "boss," for all the huge size and layers of administration you have, cannot manage to do it and haven't figured out how to learn. In the heart of a behemoth of a school district, nor have they figured out how to teach themselves how to deal with an expected part of their operations. No wonder the parent takeover movement is getting some momentum.
"LAUSD's Dance of the Lemons - Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible." By Beth Barrett, Thursday, Feb 11 2010, L.A. Weekly. http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the-lemons The District's attorneys don't seem to have been given resources over many years where they say they need that-and that's in just the cases where they WANT to accomplish termination of the employee- to properly address the problem. The option taken as an alternative to establishing a case doesn't sound right, but it probably saves some money in the long run and ends the case for some situations. It's simple enough to see- the District, in many cited cases, has made settlements of forty to fifty thousand dollars or more to go away because that is the only way it could happen.
I don't think it's the only way, but it's in the story and has been done. What would they actually have to do to follow the "process" properly? It might depend on which people in the story have been telling the correct version of the story since there just are so many things that don't happen right with what the LAUSD says and does. One thing is certain, and that is the difficulty that's been engineered into the firing process.
There's criticism of the District's claim of being mired in the process due to OTHER public agencies being incapable of handling all the cases. That's disputed by the agencies and who knows the accuracy of any claim since the LAUSD attorneys have not pushed these matters in all directions. From what I see, and that's just me, there is a direction from the top that creates limits for what's done at levels below. The top people COULD deal with the problem if it was considered to be a PRIORITY, that clearly it is not. It was simple enough to bury the problem and keep people on payroll meanwhile.
All this is what erodes the confidence, what little that may be, that the public might have in the LAUSD. The defense of course is that the teacher's have TENURE and are for most intents and purposes bulletproof when it comes to being fired for being poor teachers. Stories in the past have shown cases of IMPROPER behavior that stymied efforts of LAUSD to fire them.
Long Beach is a district that the story mentions that takes it's tenure decision very seriously in comparison with the LAUSD. The LAUSD usually gives the go-ahead to tenure at the two-year mark without much fanfare and by the word of many, even without the expected individual level of attention to each teacher's performance.
To me, THAT is the whole problem. Since this is some near-permanent appointment that I don't see is really called for to have a responsive teaching component at the K-12 levels, the State should consider if it is even called for at all, considering the function served. College and University level teachers or professors, if you will, might need a higher level of job security to protect some of the areas of teaching that may not be within popular views, but that still are being conducted in an academic setting like non-controversial subjects. That is, they are teaching, but it might not be what people like. At this post-secondary level, who do you have for students? it's the legal adults, 18 or older, for the majority of students that are being taught, and you don't have any situation like public schools with a mandatory nature. So changing that might be something to do. It would be unpopular and opposed by teacher unions, of course, but you already see what we have now and there is an argument or two to be made to change this condition.
Read the story and consider what you think would fix things and identify those levels where there's not a real effort made to fix things.
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