Diane Ravitch Takes On Some of the Current Outrages

against public education, including Waiting for Superman or whatever the idiotic "documentary" is called.

About "tenure":

The claim that "tenure" is a guarantee of lifetime employment is a canard. Professors in higher education get lifetime tenure, but teachers in K-12 schools do not have lifetime employment: they have the right to due process if the principal wants to fire them. Teachers get due process rights only after a principal agrees that they have earned it. The reason for due-process rights is that teachers have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because a supervisor didn't like them. Teachers with due process can be fired, but only after a hearing by an impartial hearing officer.

And as readers of this blog know after yours truly has written about it a billion times, "due process" hearings are  jokes.  The hearing officers (or panel) are supposed to be impartial, but hearing officers regularly flout administrative law.

There are real flaws in administrative law which make it so favorable to districts and their idiot administrators to ruin teachers, and teachers have little or no recourse because they have to pay for attorneys up front if they want to appeal decisions they lose. The unions typically bail out on teachers after these "hearings," which more often than not are held on school district property and not at a neutral site.

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