Although it’s legal to record police in Philadelphia, things like this are still happening when ordinary citizens dare to exercise their right to take videos on their cellphones: TAMERA MEDLEY begged the police officer to stop slamming her head – over and over – into the hood of a police cruiser. Thinking they were helping, […]
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I’m outsourcing this post to Sean O’Neal, who says it all so well: Never one to go quietly, Steven Seagal is fighting back against recent allegations that he had a hand in killing the family dog of an Arizona man while filming a segment for his Steven Seagal: Lawman reality show. As you may recall, […]
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Fellow Forbes blogger, Tim Lee, makes some very smart points about trains, planes, and automobiles: In the decades after World War II, urban planners across the country pursued a variety of aggressive “get people into their cars” policies. They used the power of eminent domain to push freeways through the heart of urban areas, destroying […]
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Long-time charter school opponent and union head of the Los Angeles chapter of the California Teacher Association has had a remarkable change of heart now that he heads a charter school instead of a teacher’s union:
The longtime anti-charter crusader wants to make it harder for teachers to earn tenure protections and wants to lengthen that process. He even wants to require teachers to demonstrate that they remain effective in the classroom if they want to keep their tenure protections.
And if a tenured teacher becomes ineffective, he wants to streamline dismissals. The process now in place can stretch out for several years, even with substantial evidence of gross misconduct. Some union leaders, notably Duffy, have defended this "due process" as a necessary protection against administrative abuses.
"I would make it 10 days if I could," Duffy now says of the length of the dismissal process….
Duffy will have a unionized school, preferably with his former union, but not at the expense of sacrificing his vision for how a school should operate, he said.
Skeptics, who criticized Duffy’s management of the union, now question his qualifications to run schools. Charter school advocates responded cautiously, but were generally positive.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had called the union under Duffy "one unwavering roadblock to reform." The mayor had no comment, but Patrick Sinclair, a spokesman for a group of schools overseen by the mayor, said, "We’re glad he’s pursuing a lot of the changes and reforms that we and the mayor would like to see."
Of course, there’s no reason at all that unions should support easy tenure requirements or oppose reform to hiring and firing practices. So long as good teachers can be protected to a degree by the union and the union can help negotiate working conditions, wages, and so forth, that’s all that matters. Nothing is set in stone: not tenure, not last in first out, not slowly climbing wages that favor seniority, or policies that make it impossible to fire really bad teachers.
The fact is, unions can do a lot without sticking blindly to old ideas that may not work as well now as they used to. It just requires a change of vision. I don’t think you need to be pro or anti-teachers unions to realize that they can and should reform alongside the education system as a whole. As far as I’m concerned, protecting good teachers and getting rid of bad teachers aren’t mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary.
(h/t Nick Gillespie)
Radley Balko has a good piece up on the fabricated testimony and forensic evidence that ‘expert’ and bite mark specialist, Michael West, has used to help convict countless people in the South: On Aug. 9, The Huffington Post reported on the case of Leigh Stubbs, a Mississippi woman serving a 44-year sentence for assault and […]
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Tim Murphy digs into the big business of the private prison industry over at Mother Jones. He zeroes in on Rick Perry who took steps to help close the state’s $27 billion deficit last year by pushing for the privatization of the Texas prison healthcare network: Private prisons are a big business in Texas, where […]
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