A new thing under the sun was reported yesterday on the AP and in the Daily News. Eight California students—all of them presumably under 18, since their guardians were also named in the action—filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming that specific state laws violate their constitutional right to a quality education by keeping inadequate teachers from getting laid off or fired.
The action was filed in the name of something called Students Matter. If this had indeed only been an genuine action by a handful of kids in their teens who thought up the idea on their own and brought it to fruition, what a magnificent accomplishment!
But the eight youngsters named as plaintiffs obviously didn’t put the action together on their own. The suit was filed and I think it is fair to assume prepared by five stalwart litigators from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher—the team includes former George W. Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olsen, so may I assume this is not a pro bono operation?
The central contention is that the California Constitution guarantees an education to its young and, under the current system of laws that doesn’t forthrightly root out bad teachers, the young are not getting a good enough one (the citation quoted just says “education,” actually. Not what kind). Nobody likes bad teachers, no one wants to be taught by one or to have one teach ones own kids. Or even to be one. But I’d never heard of Students Matter and I was curious as to who they were.
What the group claims to be is “a 501(c)(3) organization that was founded to change outdated and harmful state laws that prevent the recruitment, support and retention of effective teachers.”
In other words, another manifestation of the fashionable thinking that the biggest problem with our knock-kneed public education system is the people who teach. As one who has taught in both public and independent secondary schools, I can’t help but believe that making it easier to ease out bad teachers would help the practice of teaching. But clearly it isn’t the cure for even most of what ails modern secondary education. As an increasing number of vocal people increasingly seem to believe.
The Times’ Howard Blume reported that two big fiscal guns are backing the Students Matter suit. One of them is researcher and Silicon Valley magnate David F. Welch. Another is local moneybags-about-town Eli Broad. One virtue of putting a lot of money into a highly-publicized legal action like this is that it instantly builds a platform for you to sound off on.
Cf. Mr Welch: “We are challenging a system that was fashioned by special interests and has burdened our schools with an inflexible environment for hiring and retaining our best teachers.”
There is some syntactical obscurity here, as though Mr. Welch himself had been burdened with an inadequate high school rhetoric teacher. I think he’s trying to say the current system makes it hard for schools to hire and keep good teachers. But not hiring the best teachers and keeping them has a lot to do with how poorly teachers are paid in general, and how unappetizing the profession gets if, in addition to low pay, you have low job security. It is no wonder there are bad teachers—however many there may be. I am aware that believers in test results as an essential to teacher performance rating and better pay think they have that one licked.
They have not yet convinced me. But enough of that for now. An advisory committee for Students Matter include several hard-core education-advancement organizations such as former D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s Student First. In other words, Students Matter is just another ad hoc Astroturf outfit, with some very deep pocketed supporters, pushing for radical revision .of state laws long ago gained by teachers and their unions.
But that leaves another question, which has not been answered at deadline. Whose idea was this suit, and how were the young plaintiffs recruited? I left a message with Gibson’s lead attorney on this action, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. But he didn’t get back to me.
Maybe another time?
Source: Which Students for Whom?