A sudden reality thunderstruck me this morning when I was on the telephone with an old friend in education from Fresno.
Lightning zapped me because my friend, an administrator for 27 years in the Central Valley, mentioned it:
Administrators who assess, and in 100 percent of cases confer lifetime employment on inexperienced young teachers, have as little protection as a pockmarked stockboy at a market who shows up for work every time he is in the mood.
Does anyone in Newspaperland find that goose-pimply ironic?
When it comes to job security, it is like a junior employee rating the work of a superior – when the superior knows darned well that if he comes to work in pajamas or has rotten carrots protruding from both ears, he is going to be awarded a passing grade. Security, baby. He can afford, worry-free, to purchase a grand home in the hills. What, me worry? Unless he keels over or is kidnapped by the Obama administration, he will be in comfortable position to pay off his domicile as long as the debt exists because he has employment from here to the grave.
Later I checked to be certain, but every administrator in the School District except for Supt. Dave LaRose is on a year-to-year contract. Like a drunk who reports to his job periodically, the most revered administrators could be turned upside down and dumped into a gutter by tomorrow morning if a superior wanted to replace him or her.
Conversely, a teacher is as bullet-proof as a vault.
With a wry smile, we call administrators the supervisors of the District’s 350 teachers – but who really is in charge, Murgatroyd?
Yeah, sure.
We know which side is packing the loaded pistols, which team nervously is praying for mercy.
With a straight face, every educator I have spoken with on teacher tenure assured me that a lousy, should-be-canned teacher is rarer in Culver City than a gorilla jogging down Culver Boulevard.
Of 350 teachers in Culver City schools, the best estimate is that 25 to 35 of them could walk into a windmill tonight and elicit relief sighs.
Thank heaven for windmills. While John Deasy says it takes “almost 10 years” to dump a lousy teacher in LAUSD, we live in relative paradise.
Sources, strictly off the record, say it takes four years here to get rid of a bad teacher, who does not really exist anyway in the system, according to every educator who has testified on the record.
