By Carl Campanile
September 22, 2014

“The parents of two Queens students who say they were abused by their science teacher have joined a lawsuit to overturn New York’s tenure laws.
Laurie Townsend and Christine Gendreau — whose kids attend PS 101 in Forest Hills — became plaintiffs after the Department of Education sent Richard Parlini back to the school despite investigators finding he used corporal punishment.
“It’s an outrage,” said Townsend, whose son, Nakia, is a sixth-grader. “He’s afraid of [Parlini].”
She said that when Nakia was in second grade, Parlini pushed him.
“It’s crazy that he could get away with this and still teach,” she said.”

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By Max Ehrenfreund | Washington Post

David Boies is an accomplished civil rights attorney who is probably best known for his Supreme Court cases, in which he has represented Al Gore and Californian gay couples seeking to marry. Now he is working on behalf of kids in urban schools, but his approach is a controversial one. He argues that teacher tenure denies students their right to an equal education, guaranteed in Brown v. Board of Education and many state constitutions.

Boies is chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, the group started by former news anchor Campbell Brown that has organized a lawsuit to eliminate tenure in New York. The group is planning more cases in other states. A similar effort succeeded in California earlier this year, and Gov. Jerry Brown is appealing that case.

Last week, Wonkblog talked about teacher tenure with Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who supports teacher tenure. Rothstein’s research has shown that without teacher tenure, recruiting and retaining talented teachers would be even more difficult than it already is. On Monday, Wonkblog met with Boies to talk about teacher tenure — specifically what it means for education to be a civil right and whether state and federal governments should provide equal funding to districts in wealthy and poor cities.

The debate over tenure, Boies said, might be a distraction from other, larger issues in the public schools where progress might be possible. “Everybody needs to step back and understand that this is part of a broader problem,” Boies said. “I think both sides can probably find areas of agreement.”

An edited transcript of the interview is below.

~~~

I wanted to start with Brown v. Board of Education. It’s been 60 years. What do you see as the legacy of Brown vs. Board?

We are continuing to segregate our schools. While people now will say that segregation is based on economics, the history of this country has deprived many African American families of the same economic opportunities that other people have enjoyed. We segregate our schools in a way that is not only undesirable, but fundamentally at odds with the basic principles of our country.

Our basic principles in this country are that everybody deserves an opening shot. If you don’t have an equal education, if you don’t have equal home environment, you can’t have that. You have many inner-city schools that are serving students whose lives are already severely challenged because of the economic and social circumstances of their families. Not only are they not getting the extra help that they need and deserve, they’re not getting help that is remotely comparable to the educational opportunities that are given to children in upper income suburbs.

Teacher tenure is an important issue, but it’s only one part of a much, much larger problem. Because teacher tenure is such a flash point, people are focusing on that issue, separate from the broader issue of how we provide educational equality to our students. Everybody needs to step back and understand that this is part of a broader problem. It would be desirable if both sides could get together on the issues that they agree on. I think both sides can probably find areas of agreement.

So what are some of those areas of agreement?

I think one of the areas of agreement is the need to increase educational budgets. I think another area is the need to move towards fiscal equality. Really just for historical reasons, we’ve evolved a funding mechanism for schools that was neighborhood based. As our neighborhoods have become increasingly unbalanced in terms of economic and social characteristics, that method of funding is increasingly untenable.

What the federal government can do is to help in terms of equalizing funding. There is a national obligation and a national imperative to improve our education system.

States can do that as well. There are state constitutions that compel that. The state constitutions in various places including California, including Florida, talk about the right to an education. They don’t talk about the right to an education provided by Miami-Dade or Los Angeles. It is an obligation of the state of Florida, the state of California.

The issue of equal funding for schools across a state — that might be another case.

Absolutely.

We’re talking about not just tenure, we’re talking about financing of the education system — what else? Are there are other areas where you think people who are looking to improve the education system in this country could use the courts and the precedent of Brown vs. Board?

If you had fiscal equality, and you had promotion and retention on the merits, and you had some family choice, those three things would go a very long ways toward radically improving our education system. I believe we will have initiatives in other states before the New York case is over with. The decision has not been made.

I talked to Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley last week. He made two arguments about tenure that I’m hoping you can respond to. He pointed out that staffing in urban schools is often very difficult for reasons unconnected to tenure. Principals may have teachers they don’t like very much, but they’re worried about dismissing them, because they know that it’s an unattractive job. It’s emotional stressful. The pay is low compared to what people with a college education make elsewhere.

If the point is eliminating teacher tenure will not solve all the problems of inner city schools, he’s 100 percent right about that. If he’s saying that he thinks the improvement would be a relatively small improvement, I think that doesn’t fit with the experience of educators.

Rothstein also argued that teacher tenure is attractive to people considering the profession, that people who are in other lines of work where their compensation is based in large part on how they perform, like finance, for example, are paid much better, and that if teachers were no longer protected by tenure, they’d have to be paid more in order to attract the same number of applicants and applicants of the same quality to the profession.

As a matter of theoretical economics, everything that affects a person’s job can theoretically affect how much money they’re going to want for it. But remember, teacher tenure helps the people that are already there and hurts the people that are coming in. You may feel that you would be a really great teacher, and the district would want to keep you, but if they have to lay people off, you’re going to get laid off no matter how good you are. When you come to work for my law firm and you do a really good job, we’re not going to lay you off. It is not at all clear to me that teacher tenure is a draw to bring new people into the system.

Second, I think that very rarely do the people who want to become teachers, who are going to be really good teachers, base that decision on whether they will get tenure. While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that — in part by paying them more money — I don’t think there’s any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.

The strategy you outlined earlier — working through different states, looking at different states constitutions, to pursue educational equality in many respects is an ambition one, I think many people would feel that the courts are not the right venue for this discussion. They would feel that these problems need to be solved through elected representatives, legislators, governors, people like that. What do you feel about that?

This problem has to be addressed at every level. It has to be addressed by governors. It has to be addressed by legislators. It has to be addressed by school boards. But when you’re talking about constitutional rights, the courts are the place that you go to vindicate those rights. The reason that we have written constitutions is because we believe they are certain rights that people ought to have even if the legislators don’t provide for them. It would have been a tragedy if the United States Supreme Court, 60 years ago, had said, “Well, go to the legislature in Kansas, ask them for this relief.”

We went through this in the marriage equality battle, where there were some people who said, “Stick to the legislators.” If we had stuck to the legislators, we would not have marriage equality in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Oklahoma or Utah, any of these states. We wouldn’t even have it in California. There’s a limit to how far you can go legislatively.

Finally, can you talk to us about your parents, who were teachers?

Yes, both public school teachers. They taught in Illinois and California. My father was a high school American history teacher, which is what I would have done if I hadn’t become a lawyer. My mother was an elementary school teacher. They taught in the Illinois schools until I was 13, and then they moved out to California.

My father had been in the Army and had gone through southern California on his way to the Pacific in World War II in December and January. Coming from northern Illinois, he thought he had found paradise. He came home, and for the the next five or six years, talked about California. When I was 13 — I was the oldest — he sold his house, put his furniture in storage, loaded my mother and their four children into the station wagon and drove to southern California. This was 1954. He didn’t have a house. He didn’t have a job, but by September he had both, because California was growing. The baby boom generation was coming to school. There was a lot of need for teachers. He taught first in Lynwood, and then the Fullerton high school district in Orange County.

I still run into people, when I go back to California, who were taught by my father, and say that it was one of the best experiences they had. He was a great teacher. They were both dedicated teachers, strongly in favor of public education.

And how do you think they would have felt about these issues? Did they talk about them at all?

They did. This was an era in which the National Education Association was much less of a union than it became, and my father was very strongly of the view that teaching was a profession and he didn’t want to see it “unionized.” My mother was a particularly strong Democrat and pro-union generally, but she also believed that education was a profession. I think that they would oppose the way teacher tenure has developed.

I talk to a lot of teachers who feel the same way about teaching being a profession. That seems to be one of the major areas in which there ought to be agreement but there isn’t. Teachers feel that efforts to change the way classes are taught, the way schools are administered, are an imposition on their autonomy as professionals. Do you think there’s some kind of reconciliation to be had here?

As I say, I think there are areas of common ground, but fundamentally, there is an issue as to whether teachers ought to be evaluated on the merits or not. Every other professional is. No professional likes to be. I don’t like my clients evaluating me. Doctors hate it when boards begin to view their work. No professional likes it, but I think most professionals recognize that it’s necessary for the integrity of the profession. In any profession, whether it’s teachers or doctors or lawyers — the more we say we’re not going to evaluate those people on the merits, I think that’s when the profession goes into decline.

Full Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/18/david-boies-helped-california-gay-couples-win-the-right-to-marry-now-hes-attacking-teacher-tenure/

By Lyndsey Layton | The Washington Post

David Boies, the superlawyer who chairs a group that is trying to overturn teacher tenure laws in New York and elsewhere, said Monday that his organization is not looking to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court — at least not in the short run.

Boies, who helped lead the legal team that won a Supreme Court victory allowing same-sex marriages to resume in California, said his organization is focused on challenging tenure in state courts.

Last month, Boies became chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown to challenge teacher tenure laws. The group says that tenure laws make it too costly and difficult to get rid of weak teachers and that poor students are saddled with the worst educators.

A similar group based in California — led by lawyers Ted Olson and Ted Boutrous, with whom Boies worked on the Supreme Court case regarding gay marriage — challenged and won a judgment in a Los Angeles court against that state’s tenure laws. The judge found that tenure laws violate students’ civil rights under the state constitution. The teachers union and Gov. Jerry Brown are appealing.

Boies said in an interview with The Washington Post that he is crafting a state-by-state strategy regarding teacher tenure because many state constitutions explicitly require the provision of an equal education to all public school students.

The U.S. Constitution does not include the right to education. But civil rights activists used the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — which says that no state shall deny to any person “the equal protection of the laws” — as the basis for Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that put an end to racially segregated schools.

Bringing arguments in state court can help lay the groundwork for an eventual Supreme Court case, Boies said. He noted that the fight for gay marriage was initially waged state-by-state. “It helped frame the issue,” Boies said. “It helped raise people’s knowledge about the issue.”

The Partnership for Educational Justice filed a legal challenge to New York’s tenure laws in July. The New York City Parents Union, a better-established group, already had filed a similar suit weeks earlier.

There has been tension between the two groups, with the parents union accusing Brown of trying to run roughshod over the parent group. Last week, a New York State Supreme Court judge decided to combine the complaints.

But tenure is just one factor that creates uneven educational opportunities for poor children, Boies said. He said disparate school funding based on real estate taxes means that public schools in poor communities have fewer resources than those in more affluent neighborhoods. And despite efforts by the federal government and some state governments to make up for those shortfalls, “the children who need the most get the least,” Boies said.

Getting rid of tenure, evening out school spending and allowing parents some choice among public schools would improve outcomes for students, he said.

“If you had fiscal equality and promotion and retention [of teachers] on merits and you had family choice, these three things would go a long way to radically improving our education system,” said Boies, the son of two public school teachers.

Boies, 73, has been quietly involved in education groups for several years. He is on the board of StudentsFirstNY, which is part of the national organization founded by Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. Schools Chancellor who recently announced she is stepping down as chief executive of that group. Boies also supports Teach for America and hosts an annual picnic for TFA members from the New York metropolitan area.

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/david-boies-eyeing-education-through-a-civil-rights-lens/2014/09/15/5f93f39c-3d09-11e4-b0ea-8141703bbf6f_story.html

By Katharine B. Stevens | New York Daily News

“The two recently filed New York lawsuits claiming that teacher tenure laws violate children’s constitutional right to a “sound basic education” are finally dragging the long-obscure section 3020-a of the state’s education law into the spotlight.

This attention is badly overdue because that section has played a crucial and underrecognized role in the quality of New York’s teacher workforce for decades.

Written into state law in 1970, entitled “Disciplinary procedures and penalties,” 3020-a specifies that tenured teachers can be terminated only after just cause for dismissal has been established through particular state-run hearing procedures.

Reformers argue that the law shields the jobs of chronically ineffective and even dangerous teachers. Opponents of the recent lawsuits, on the other hand, maintain that it simply provides teachers with due process prior to termination, protecting competent teachers from arbitrary firings, nepotism and vindictive principals.”

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By Frank Bruni | New York Times

DENVER — Mike Johnston’s mother was a public-school teacher. So were her mother and father. And his godfather taught in both public and private schools.

So when he expresses the concern that we’re not getting the best teachers into classrooms or weeding out the worst performers, it’s not as someone who sees the profession from a cold, cynical distance.

What I hear in his voice when he talks about teaching is reverence, along with something else that public education could use more of: optimism.

He rightly calls teachers “the single most transformative force in education.”

But the current system doesn’t enable as many of them as possible to rise to that role, he says. And a prime culprit is tenure, at least as it still exists in most states.

“It provides no incentive for someone to improve their practice,” he told me last week. “It provides no accountability to actual student outcomes. It’s the classic driver of, ‘I taught it, they didn’t learn it, not my problem.’ It has a decimating impact on morale among staff, because some people can work hard, some can do nothing, and it doesn’t matter.”

I sat down with Johnston, a Democrat who represents a racially diverse chunk of this city in the State Senate, because he was the leading proponent of a 2010 law that essentially abolished tenure in Colorado. To earn what is now called “non-probationary status,” a new teacher must demonstrate student progress three years in a row, and any teacher whose students show no progress for two consecutive years loses his or her job protection.

The law is still being disputed and has not been fully implemented. But since its enactment, a growing number of states have chipped away at traditional tenure or forged stronger links between student performance and teacher evaluations. And the challenges to tenure have gathered considerable force, with many Democrats defying teachers unions and joining the movement.

After a California judge’s recent ruling that the state’s tenure protections violated the civil rights of children by trapping them with ineffective educators in a manner that “shocks the conscience,” Arne Duncan, the education secretary, praised the decision. Tenure even drew scrutiny from Whoopi Goldberg on the TV talk show “The View.” She repeatedly questioned the way it sometimes shielded bad teachers.

“Parents are not going to stand for it anymore,” she said. “And you teachers, in your union, you need to say, ‘These bad teachers are making us look bad.’ ”

Johnston spent two years with Teach for America in Mississippi in the late 1990s. Then, after getting a master’s in education from Harvard, he worked for six years as a principal in public schools in the Denver area, including one whose success drew so much attention that President Obama gave a major education speech there during his 2008 presidential campaign.

Johnston said that traditional tenure deprived principals of the team-building discretion they needed.

“Do you have people who all share the same vision and are willing to walk through the fire together?” he said. Principals with control over that coax better outcomes from students, he said, citing not only his own experience but also the test scores of kids in Harlem who attend the Success Academy Charter Schools.

“You saw that when you could hire for talent and release for talent, you could actually demonstrate amazing results in places where that was never thought possible,” he said. “Ah, so it’s not the kids who are the problem! It’s the system.”

When job protections are based disproportionately on time served, he said, they don’t adequately inspire and motivate. Referring to himself and other tenure critics, he said, “We want a tenure system that actually means something, that’s a badge of honor you wear as one of the best practitioners in the field and not just because you’re breathing.”

There are perils to the current tenure talk: that it fails to address the intense strains on many teachers; that it lays too much fault on their doorsteps, distracting people from other necessary reforms.

But the discussion is imperative, because there’s no sense in putting something as crucial as children’s education in the hands of a professional class with less accountability than others and with job protections that most Americans can only fantasize about.

We need to pay good teachers much more. We need to wrap the great ones in the highest esteem. But we also need to separate the good and the great from the bad.

Johnston frames it well.

“Our focus is not on teachers because they are the problem,” he said. “Our focus is on teachers because they are the solution.”

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/opinion/frank-bruni-the-trouble-with-tenure.html

By The Editors | New York Observer 

“There’s no question that New York’s public schools have shown signs of improvement over the last few years. It’s also true that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his education team achieved important reforms, especially in the growth of charter schools.

But it is equally true that much more work needs to be done. The question is whether politicians, administrators and union bosses understand this simple fact.

An advocacy group called Families for Excellent Schools released a report the other day that should sadden any New Yorker who cares about quality public education. The report documents abysmal failures in 371 city schools, nearly 25 percent of the total. In that so-called “forgotten fourth,” more than 90 percent of students cannot read or do math at grade level.

As the group noted in its report, if a quarter of the city’s subway trains were chronically late, or if a quarter of the city’s police precincts failed to solve 90 percent of crimes, the outrage would be all-consuming.”

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By Valerie Strauss | Washington Post

I have recently published several posts about a new effort led by former CNN journalist Campbell Brown to eliminate or restrict teacher and other job protections for teachers. (You can see them here, here, here and here.) Brown has appeared on numerous television shows recently arguing that legal job protections for teachers have a negative impact on student achievement; critics say there is no research showing a connection between teacher tenure laws and lower rates of student achievement. In the following post, Brown responds to the posts I have published as well as other criticism of her activism. Readers, as always, are welcome to respond.

By Campbell Brown

“This blog has devoted considerable space lately to covering me, and while I believe in the value of opinion writing, I also think some sense of fairness still matters. I have been falsely accused of perpetuating racism, blaming teachers, opposing due process and manipulating public opinion – and that was just in one blog post alone.

To go point by point on it all would miss the point, because the debate that really matters is not about me or my critics. It is about the best ways to improve education.

What readers should know is that the effort of which I am a part is designed to ensure that all public school children in New York have access to a quality teacher. Period. That is the motivation of the parents who have sued the state. It is why my organization supports them. It is the foundation for challenging a state that constitutionally promises a sound education for all and yet does not provide it.

We want a system that supports, protects and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible, in a responsible, fair and timely way, to remove teachers judged to be incompetent. We also want to eliminate the scenario in which excellent teachers get lesser layoff protections than other teachers simply based on seniority.

Our approach, a lawsuit, is borne of years of parental frustration and based on a successful suit in California that tackled the same basic issues: tenure, teacher dismissal and seniority. The judge in that case found that the evidence about the harmful effects of “grossly ineffective teachers on students” was so compelling that “it shocks the conscience.” He rendered all the laws in question unconstitutional.

So was that ruling an attack on all teachers? Of course not. Was it a new way to help ensure that substandard teaching is never sanctioned in California schools? Yes.

That is what we want in New York. On tenure, we agree with the nation’s top school official, Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Due process is vital. But awarding added tenure protection to someone with no record of improving student achievement “doesn’t respect the craft of teaching, and it doesn’t serve children well.”

The idea of connecting quality on the job to whether teachers essentially get to keep their jobs indefinitely is hardly radical. Most professions consistently demand quality in return for employment. Why would we not expect that for our children?

What’s more, tenure is only one part of the case.

We think the state’s dismissal laws are flawed not because they provide due process, but because the process can be onerous to the point of absurdity. And we think that if budget cuts prompt schools to fire teachers, the criteria for who loses a job ought to be a little more thoughtful than simply who walked in the door last.

The parents who put their names and reputations on this suit know their schools have caring, dependable, inspiring teachers – and that is not their worry. What exasperates them is the other side of the story, the minority of educators who blatantly do not do their job and get away with it because the state allows it.

So here is the question for critics: What would you do if your child had those teachers in class? Nothing? Attack the motives of people trying to do something? Cast the effort as anti-teacher when in fact it is designed to get more good teachers?

A lawsuit is a serious matter, and we look forward to a fair, dispassionate review in the courts. We have never portrayed this, however, as a solution to everything.

This blog has done a good job of raising other issues that matter significantly to the quality of education and demand more attention: innovation, leadership, professional development, parental engagement, poverty. We agree in every case.

And finally, there has been the focus on me. My responsibility to take on questions is a legitimate part of this, as I am using my platform as a former television anchor to give lift to these concerns and to the case of the parents. I happen to think that is exactly what a person with a platform ought to do – to use it to draw attention to a problem and to ask for support with the solution. Criticism is part of any tough fight.

Anyone who really listens to me, though, hears my target: Laws that directly work against our ability to provide quality teachers to all our children. Anyone is entitled to care, and that includes me. When the clever Stephen Colbert made a joke that I was playing the “good-for-child card,” he was being funny. When the author of this blog picked up that Colbert line, she derisively added: “Which, of course, she was.”

Actually, no one is playing a card. No one is playing a game. This is for real. And if you are going to take a stand, perhaps the best one possible is the one good for the child.”

Full Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/08/13/campbell-brown-responds-to-critics-including-me/