This is the first crack in the tenure iceberg. I love being at a non-tenure-granting university.

The interesting thing is about the 'caucasian kid' comment... many don't really have an idea how bad it is in some of these schools. My wife has a STEM foundation, and I've been with her to some of her talks. She's a latina civil engineer and advocates more science & technology learning for girls, and cites the problems she had growing up. Her parents refused to pay for her education, or even support her doing it (and wouldn't sign the parent-release on her student loan form) for college because "you don't need a degree to change baby diapers". She had a full-ride from NASA, it was the only way she was able to go to school. Her parents wouldn't even sign the admission forms, which at the time, required a parent's signature.

The first time she was invited to a talk in a neighborhood like that, she had talked to NASA & aerospace leaders about getting old simulators for schools & such, and planned to do something like that, only to find out from the teachers that they don't really need anything like that - most of the kids come to school with lice, and few eat outside of the school cafeteria... anything she could help with in that area was welcome. She took up a collection from her friends and office coworkers for all the freebie shampoos & such on business travel and started giving it to them for their food shelf in the school where kids go and get what they need for home. I guess I can see the problem, hard to concentrate on math when you are scratching at the lice in your hair.

We always like to blame the unions & such, and I do at every opportunity myself, but we have some larger societal problems going on.

When I was in Dubai on business back in the 90's, I couldn't put my finger on it... but soon realized you can't make a "left turn" anywhere. You have to do 3 right turns around a block to go left. The reason being, there is so much regulation in their society, and the monarchy makes pretty much every decision, that people there are incapable of choosing for themselves at an intersection for example on the road. I think we're getting to that point now - the lack of personal freedoms is like a boiling pot with the mass shootings, outbreaks, etc. I think we need more rugged individualism, and more pioneering opportunities to let people go off on their own and explore like they did when we settled the new world. There are no new worlds, there are no more adventures... people that were loners by nature could really go off on their own.. now we're a little stuck with them.

The teachers union didn't see anything wrong with these statistics... 350,000 teachers... over the last 10 years, a total of 91 were fired for cause. Apparently, they do a "fantastic" job of hiring that is far and above (by dozens of orders of magnitude) better than what any other industry can do... Not...

They need a Jack Welsh approach.. every year, promote the top 10% of performers, and fire the bottom 10% (automatically).

Because that's the only way to win anything in California. If anybody gets the idea it might help a causasian child somewhere it's out. I'm not joking about that... And, for the most part, the judge is telling the truth. Overall, I think this is a great development in California. Yes...students really do matter.

I know that it means you don't have to join a union, but why the name "right to work"? It sounds like some States don't have the right to work...it just sounds stupid.
I agree, there's not much firing of teachers going on in public schools.
Also, the article mentioned 'the real problem with public schools" but they NEVER EVER discuss the REAL problems and no one seems to notice that that goes ignored. I'm so done with government schools...and all the people that work for them too.

"Right to Work" outlaws required-union membership... however, in union-positions, it's usually more "BS" than legitimately different. California is actually right to work as well, if you are an employee of a public agency under a bargaining agreement for example, you can "opt-out" of union membership, but you still have to pay your "fair share" of bargaining costs... in my observation, (SEIU 1000 for example) that discounts the membership cost by $1.00 a month (out of like $100 / month) and the person is 'not a member' of the union and doesn't get whatever protections... and supposedly their money is not used for political contributions... (more BS obviously).

I looked up the statistic for Arizona. In the last 3 years, state-wide, 0% of teachers (probationary or with seniority) have been fired. 0.

In comparison, 9.8% of teachers in a private school system are dismissed for cause or performance on an annual basis (nationally).

Excellent ruling. Not sure why it bothers me so much that the judge seemed to go out of his way to stress that he based his ruling on the fact that most under performing teachers were in poor and minority districts. While this may be true all schools should be able to remove teachers that don't perform. Hope this starts a trend.

AZ teacher unions are not like other states, this is a right to work State (I hate that name by the way, 'right to work' wth? I need to research where that came from) they already have performance based appraisals and they don't get tenured.

It's simple, and very factual. Districts in California tend to be rather small, we don't have many "county-wide" districts, most are neighborhood area ones with maybe a dozen schools. The districts in the poor neighborhoods have a lower tax base and higher costs from vandalism & such. Even though their reimbursement rate per student is the same per day, their attendance sucks, so they don't get much from the state compared to a higher-income area (the disparity might be 50% attendance compared to 98.5% attendance). Simple, the poorer neighborhoods don't pay well, so senior teachers will want to be in the most desirable schools / districts for the highest level of compensation and the lowest amount of drama on a daily basis. When layoffs come around, they follow a "last hired, first fired" mentality, so the same teachers in the poor areas are also the lowest with seniority, and are the first ones out the door... so poor schools are very adversely affected, where high-quality areas may not lose anyone at all.

In order to "win" in California on stuff like that... you have to take an environmental justice, or income inequality approach. I don't agree with it as being the strategy, rather than just a simple "if you don't do your job, you are fired" justification... but its the strategy needed to win in a bleeding-heart state with retired bleeding hearts on the jury panel. Keep in mind, you don't see a lot of high-income / high-producers sitting on juries... (ever). Even if they make it through the initial selection process, you would never see them selected to be empaneled.

Think this will happen in AZ.?

When I heard this yesterday that was my reaction as well. Like he had to use that as a crutch to get his point across. If you're not first and foremost thinking about the poor or minorities then your goal doesn't have validity or something. It's only fair if they benefit the most, otherwise it's inequality.