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Without tenure, any teacher could be fired at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.   An untenured teacher can have his/her license revoked at the whim of the principal and there is no viable appeal.  Tenure is the only status that gives a NYC teacher the right to due process.   That management wants administrators to have  the power of arbitrary dismissal without accountability, is no surprise.  The cheating scandals in Atlanta et al should show that administration often has goals at odds with the education of students.

“I’m a person who wants to make sure we have a system that is honest”
Well dang, he should have been Chancellor when the contract with Murdoch’s testing company was let.  Maybe he would have stopped a no-bid, buddy to buddy contract,
As it is, he was the Deputy Mayor when Bloomberg let the contract for CityTime out.  Who was paying attention to the whistle blowers then?

I don’t think the Goodwin-Walcott thing was about cheating.  It was about teachers who are pressured to pass their failing students (along with with other credit-inflating scams), a topic that Gotham Schools, as you know, still refuses to write about.

Of course Walcott is trying to bury this.  He knows he inherited a house of cards.  His first response was to refer these cases to investigators, but we have no idea what this means.  As far as I know, all  of these allegations involve actions that were perfectly legal, which is probably why Condon’s office refused to investigate and referred them elsewhere.  Has Walcott pledged to fire any principal found to have presssured teachers, changed grades, or given ridiculously easy credit recovery packages?  Hell no!  And who can blame him.  The result would chaos.

BOTTOM LINE: Bloomie tried to get rid of LIFO and he did not succeed. He is now trying to get rid of tenure. He will not succeed with this new goal either. These two civil service rules are the backbone of state/city employment and have been in place for so long that he is really just blowing wind. Sorry Mike, it ain’t gonna happen.

What is this lackey saying here?  I can’t figure out if he’s saying don’t turn in your Principal, just turn in your Assistant Principal.  Does that mean the Principals have nothing to do with the cheating, only the Assistant Principals.
 
As far as what the Emperor said about tenure, it’s a waste of time to even bother with him.  Luckily for the teachers, there’s little chance the State Legislature will go along with his sickening preachings.  Every time he opens his mouth, it becomes more and more obvious how sick a man he is.

I have no idea what Walcott’s gobbledygook means.  Is he a doubletalk artist, or what?

King Mike does what he wants and we all stand by and allow it.  People should have been on the streets the moment he wanted Mayoral control.  Then when he assigned Klein, we should have been out on the streets and outraged.  I am tired of being told my job by people who don’t have a clue.

I know, negotiating is hard when you’re not negotiating with your friends.

Bloomberg is a criminal parasite, who bought and greased his way to an illegal third term after an appalling first two,  who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the wall, and doesnt care! He is wrecking our school system, firing teachers, eliminating schools and programs, and endangering the lives and education of millions of children in order to funnel public school funds to his billionaire Wall Street buddies bent on privatizing public education. The private sector has failed us massively. They created the current financial crisis that is destroying our way of life, and then the were given trillions of our dollars, stolen from us by our criminal congress and executive, wholly owned by the masters of the  corporate necronomy.

“Bloomberg is a criminal parasite, who bought and greased his way to an illegal third term after an appalling first two”

thank you for rendering the words “criminal” and “illegal” meaningless. hopefully we won’t have any need to use those terms anymore.  

“Without tenure, any teacher could be fired at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all.”

unless the reason is the teacher’s age, race, religious beliefs, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or marital status, for starters.

Mayoral control MUST come to an end.

Mayoral control is antidemocratic.  The mayor appoints his chancellor of schools and they appoint the schoolboard.  The citizens of the community have zero democratic say in the process and in how their neighborhood schools are fun with tax monies.

1. call an employment discrimination attorney and ask the same questions that non-teachers ask.

2. the attorney will tell you that you don’t need to prove your case in a complaint. you only need to allege it.  

3. how does the teacher know the reason was discrimination?  there’s a fairly good reason that evidence is necessary.

4. evidence need not be a smoking gun. it can be circumstantial. ask the employment discrimination attorney about this. 

5. do you think teachers are the victims of discrimination more often than other workers? 

This is an increasingly popular talking-point response to the misleading assertion that tenure means a “job for life.”  ”Not true,” the response goes, “tenure is nothing more than due process.”

Well, ok. But people who are unfamiliar with that process should know what that means. And as the tenure debate continues, you can expect that a more nuanced critique of tenure, which responds to the “due process” argument, will develop and settle in among the other talking points of the anti-tenure crowd.First, “due process” in this context shouldn’t be confused with constitutional due process.  The process that’s “due” before a tenured NYC teacher can be terminated comes from NY state law, enacted by heavily lobbied NY state legislators.  Due process, in most cases, is full-blown litigation.  It culminates with an evidentiary hearing before a panel of arbitrators with a court reporter present.  Before you get to that point, you have subpoenas, requests for document production, depositions, full motion practice — the works.  If, after all of this, the panel rules against a teacher, the teacher can appeal the decision in NY state court. This process can take years in some cases.  I’ve read that the average case takes about one year, and costs about $200,000 (a taxpayer expense).  I don’t know firsthand, but I’m an attorney familiar with arbitration and that timeframe seems about right to me.  Quantifying costs can be difficult when you’re dealing with salaried attorneys rather than outside counsel who bill, and there’s certainly some analysis that was done to derive the $200k figure, but that doesn’t mean the analysis is necessarily unreliable.  So is tenure a “guaranteed job for life”?  Certainly not.Is it difficult to fire a tenured teacher?  Depends what planet you’re living on.   

Burned:  

Any intelligent debate about tenure (not saying that most debates about tenure are intelligent) comes down to weighing the costs and benefits of procedural protections for teachers.  I’m not in a profession that uses tenure.  In my profession, people get “let go” all the time, and in my experience they’re fired for one of two reasons:  (1) performance or (2) economics.  That said, do I wish there were rules that made it more difficult to fire me, even for performance/economics reasons?  Heck yes, I would.  Why? Because it benefits me, and I tend to accept things that benefit me, as long as I’m not hurting somebody else.  The awful truth, though, is that in those situations, I’m probably not the best judge of whether I’m hurting somebody else.  And given that money, resources, jobs, etc. are not infinite, a benefit received by Peter is a benefit that can’t be received by Paul.  If Paul’s an honest, hardworking, nice guy, should that matter?  If Paul’s a corporation with publicly traded shares, should that matter? Does the answer end the analysis, or does it just make it more complicated?  It usually isn’t clear, which is why it’s debatable. So I accept that the procedural protections of tenure make it more likely that a teacher facing termination will be treated fairly than would be the case without tenure.  I also accept that tenure protections are good for teachers.  But are they good in general?  Are they good for children?  Sometimes things that seem good in isolation aren’t good in practice because the costs they would impose are too high.  One example economists like to give is automobile safety.  Most people would agree with the statement that one death from auto accidents is too many deaths. And car manufacturers could make dramatically safer cars, and legislatures could enact dramatically lower speed limits, and law enforcement could enforce them with dramatically higher penalties.  But nobody wants to pay $200,000 for a budget sedan, and nobody wants a speed limit of 10 mph.  So we’re willing to accept tens of thousands (or more, I have no idea) of deaths on the highway.So a discussion about tenure should start at the point of analyzing costs versus benefits.  It can’t just be about vague invocations of fairness.  If fairness didn’t cost anything, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. 

“You are going on the assumption that administrators and supervisors act in the best interests of students’ education, and if they are given greater powers they will use it to the greater benefit of students’ learning.”

Not making that assumption at all, Burned.  I’m asking the very preliminary question of what the costs of tenure are.  The next question is whether it’s worth those costs.  Part of that question probably implicates what you’re saying about management.

Sinaps:  Public university jobs are increasingly being done by adject faculty. From the NY Times:
“The shift from a tenured faculty results from financial pressures, administrators’ desire for more flexibility in hiring, firing and changing course offerings, and the growth of community colleges and regional public universities focused on teaching basics and preparing students for jobs.  It has become so extreme, however, that some universities are pulling back, concerned about the effect on educational quality.
Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private. “   Getting rid of tenure at strictly public universities would have prevented distinguished faculty such as C. N. Yang at SUNY Stony Brook and the accompanying loss of grant money that these “stars” attract as well as alumni contributions due to the staure and pride in their alma mater and exemplary university applicants.   

I’d like to see the methodology; 70% seems high on a gut level.  It’s possible that I’m underestimating the number of positions at community colleges, but I wonder how much of this is connected to the explosive growth in “online learning.” 

It’s hard to see any alternative to this trend in light of the number of students that colleges and universities enroll each year.  Over-enrollment (or under-employment professors, if you prefer) has colleges and universities addicted to the indentured servants known as “graduate students.”  Most of them (at least in the humanities fields) are happy to get one of those adjunct jobs.