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Editorial: Teacher protections that hurt students are indefensible – unless you’re state’s top education official
Published: Thursday, Sep. 4, 2014 - 12:00 am
The practice of protecting the benefits of public school teachers to the point where it actually harms the most vulnerable students in California is indefensible.
Unless, it turns out, that you are the state’s chief education official.
Defending teacher tenure and other hiring and firing rules is exactly what State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson called for last week when he said he was asking for an appeal of Vergara v. California. He said “this ruling lays the failings of our education system at their feet.”
It did no such thing.
In his June ruling, Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu took issue with rules that have been adopted over the decades by legislators and implemented by school boards. These protections, Treu said, have “direct, real, appreciable and negative” impact on students and violate their constitutional right to an equal education.
Teachers as a group were not harmed in the making of that ruling. In fact, many teachers probably agree. The younger ones, especially, because rules protect a terrible teacher over a wonderful one if the former happens to have been employed longer than the latter. That’s not laying blame at the feet of teachers. It’s throwing students under the school bus.
Torlakson, a former teacher, surely knows that. But Torlakson also knows that without support of well-funded teachers unions, he may lose his re-election campaign to Marshall Tuck, the reformer from L.A. As is their job, union leaders fight vociferously for protection for their members to the exclusion of all else. It’s up to elected officials to balance unions’ desires with students’ needs. Torlakson shows he’s incapable of that.
Tuck said that if he wins, on Day 1 he would drop his office’s support for an appeal of Vergara and urge the governor to do the same.
Gov. Jerry Brown gave his blessing to the appeal, though apparently not for the ideological reasons cited by Torlakson. According to the governor, the issue must be settled by an appellate court. The California Constitution doesn’t authorize school districts to throw out state statutes on their own,Editorial: Teacher protections that hurt students are indefensible – unless you’re state’s top education official - Editorials - The Sacramento Bee:
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