Los Angeles Attack on Teachers

Mar 4, 2013

Los Angeles schools superintendent John Deasy has ordered principals to count student scores on standardized tests as 30 per cent of a teacher’s evaluation.

This is an open attack on teachers. Standardized test results alone don’t show how well a teacher teaches, because they depend on many factors–such as how much money a school spends on classroom resources, for example. Or what the class sizes are. Or whether a student lives in poverty or not.

Deasy also happens to be an advocate of getting rid of seniority rules in teacher layoffs. So he wants to be able to lay off older teachers, who are paid more than teachers with less seniority. He wants to “reduce cost” by firing higher-paid employees, in other words.

Not surprisingly, some well-known big bosses in the country agree with Deasy–like Bill Gates, the self-declared “school reformer,” for whom Deasy worked before he got his current job; not to mention Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad and A. Jerrold Perenchio, among others.

They are attacking teachers so viciously because they want to cut the money this country spends on public education–so that they themselves can put their hands on that money.

That’s why this systematic attack on teachers is also an attack on workers’ children, who depend on public schools.