Guest Editorial
BY BERNARD L. WILLIAMS | JUNE 18, 2014
California’s Superior Court Teacher Tenure Decision
I must say something about California’s Superior Court Teacher Tenure Decision because it seems to be being interpreted as teachers being wrong, incompetent, and the source of the problems with our education system. This is absolutely NOT true, and if we allowed this perception to take hold, everyone who truly knows better will eat the lunch of our children and our young adults while they are spending a lot of time being reordered into something with another ten year life cycle before it can be discovered that it still is not the answer.
Quickly….California has for a long-long-long time been telling its Asian population to go away from the doors of its public universities. They have had to put a lower quota on Asian students because their scores would cause their universities to become about 60 percent or more Asian for the foreseeable future. The Asian students come from that same block of teachers. This reality cannot exist if it is the teachers that are the problem with our schools.
Everyone think for a moment….have you ever known a teacher that did not appreciate a student, or in other words, any of us who truly tried? Those students, or in other words, any of us who did their homework and practiced using the extra support study materials that make it possible for students to understand what the teacher is saying. This perception within you proves that the number of teachers who cannot teach after teaching school is a tiny fraction of the total number of teachers. It also proves that teachers have to be protected from children who socially have been allowed to work only as much as they want, and only on what they want. Teachers also have to be protected from the administration of law that has shifted scapegoat status to them for things that have to come from parents and society.
We cannot let our “CHILDREN” and our young adults (purists about doing, purists about not doing, and purists about kind of doing) become confused about what is truly before them. Our school system got into the trouble it currently is in by way of the same type of Chicken Little class franticness reflected in the current un-corrected words and decisions that imply that teachers are to be blamed.
Any teacher will have difficulties teaching coarse material or from books that are actually presenting the ideas in a way that promotes guessing as a skill, and does not build the knowledge appropriately. A studious person or someone who wants to know, even with such material, will assemble what they can, which will allow that type of person to hear the specific key to the understanding that they need.
Please….do not let our teachers become the blame. Asians students and others know this in their bones. We use to know this in our bones.
Finally….this is what California Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu said in the Case #BC484642 Teacher Tenure decision.
The court ONLY said that California’s method of implementing teacher tenure was unconstitutional. It did not say that teacher tenure was unconstitutional. In fact, by omission which is a decision process in this particular case, it said there is nothing wrong with teacher tenure. Judge Rolf M. Treu’s decision ONLY said California’s teacher tenure system becomes active too soon in a teacher’s career, and that it had no useable and timely way to remove the statistically projected number of grossly ineffective teachers. The actual number of grossly ineffective California teachers who had been listed for removal by principles and similar authority was 350 -even though the statistical analysis based claim of a system saturated with grossly ineffective teachers said there are as many as 8,250 out of 275,000 active teachers who met the criteria of grossly ineffective. Probability is a truly important, useful, and accurate concept and process, but if it is improperly applied not even the word “Maze” can describe what you will face. If I am not mistaken, improperly applied probability was the source of the very first need to say, “Help Meee!”
The details of the court’s decision said that California’s tenure mechanism did not have enough safeguards on the public need for redress. Had teacher testing existed as part of California’s teacher tenure mechanism, the judge could not have ruled the way he did. His ruling was completely based upon a statistical projection that there are grossly ineffective teachers, and that they actually could NOT be removed in less than 2-10 years of legal proceedings for each teacher to be removed, and for no less than $50,000 - $450,000 for each teacher to be removed. I agree that those conditions are not a real world mechanism for the public’s required ability to adjust.
But, almost ALL of the news commentary about the constitutionality of teacher tenure implies/says that teachers are the wrong, incompetent, and the source of the problems with our education system. Thereby, causing us and our children, and our young adults to believe and blame teachers as the real problem with our inability to perceive what we must perceive. We cannot allow this incorrect portrayal to become a societal conviction. Especially since teachers mostly see to it that the information in our text books is understood. It is impossible to state a conclusion about teachers that has not been corrected for text book appropriateness. You will see the exact same outcomes from our children and young adults if the text books that they use don’t build knowledge properly. I have personally perceived that “Guessing” as a form of understanding is built into the coarse material or the books for our children and young adults.
The fact that the so called new independent or enhanced schools require those who they choose to take some form of an actual personal pledge, or to imply before everyone that they know it is up to them to do it pledge, means that no matter how good your teachers are, they can never be the sole source of why children and young adults learn.
If we do not locate the right points to adjust, our children, and our young adults will be easily hustled out of humanity’s greatest achievement, “Our Society!” And they will not even know when, where, and how it happened.
