What’s the Future of Unions?
The recent ruling in the Vergara v. California lawsuit, in which Judge Rolf Treu struck a body blow against the power of teachers’ unions by declaring that five of California’s laws protecting teacher tenure, firing and seniority were in violation of the state constitution’s guarantee of equal education to all children, has implications so broad I don’t think we can even fully comprehend them yet.
I’ve written in earlier posts that though I absolutely think that bad teachers should be fired—and that last in, first out policies should be re-thought—they are not the core problem in the fight for equal education. I’m troubled by the witch-hunt zeal, the purge mentality, of this lawsuit, which implies that the layoffs that caused so many eager young teachers to be fired in the first place were some kind of natural disaster inflicted upon us by the gods that we should have diverted onto the heads of bad teachers.
But let’s be honest, California: those layoffs occurred because of budget cuts—and those budget cuts were our collective decision. And they were so radical that even if we had first fired the small percentage of bad teachers, we would still have been laying off a large number of excellent teachers.
We, as a state, were willing to accept that though we are home to the largest number of wealthy citizens in America, as well as the largest number of children in poverty, we would continue to slash education funding until students in low-income communities were packed 50 to a classroom while we turned a blind eye, fingers in our ears, humming and pretending to be shocked, shocked that experienced teachers often did not choose to teach in those conditions. Yes, it’s a disgrace that good young teachers were laid off. They were laid off because we decided that we’d rather slash education funding than raise What’s the Future of Unions? | Gatsby In L.A.: