History repeats itself: First, as tragedy. Second, as farce. Third, as a Star-Ledger editorial.
New Jersey’s largest newspaper unsurprisingly endorsed the absurd finding of a California judge that employment protections for school employees cause school failure and constitute, therefore, a violation of the U.S. Constitution. It is a continuation of the newspaper’s jihad against public employees who have the audacity to assert their human rights in the face of management convictions that all workers are both expendable and interchangeable.
Inexplicably, the newspaper calls on the Education Law Center (ELC) to file such a suit, apparently unaware that a source of funding for the ELC is the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the state’s largest teachers’ union. Apparently, The Star-Ledger believes the union should commit an act of self-mutilation, if not suicide, in support of the bizarre idea that educational failure is caused, not by racial isolation, not by discrimination, not by poverty, not by neglect–but by employment protections. Thus:
“They’ve helped perpetuate a hierarchy in which the best teachers generally wind up at the most desirable schools, and some of the worst ones at high-poverty schools, where it can take years of bureaucracy and tens of thousands of dollars to get rid of them.”
Just what does “years of bureaucracy” mean, anyway?
But let’s pass over that and go to the heart of the matter. The Vergara case in California is the logical consequence of the failure of the political system to address the real causes of school failure. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to History repeats itself: First, as tragedy. Second, as farce. Third, as a Star-Ledger editorial. | Bob Braun's Ledger: