Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The Reefer / Politics / Clout City Sunny's Opus—a new twist on an old story
Posted by Ben Joravsky on 02.22.12 at 12:52 PM
It’s called Won’t Back Down and it stars Viola Davis as the good parent and Maggie Gyllenhaal as her good teacher sidekick.
We've come a long way from Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the Illinois Supreme Court officially abolished tenure in Chicago’s public schools.
Yay, whee, whoo—let’s make a movie!
Because as we all know, tenure’s the main thing keeping poor kids from poor neighborhoods from doing as well in school as rich kids from rich communities like—oh, you know it’s coming—New Trier.
Our favorite mayor's alma mater—what’s up, Mayor Rahm!
Explanation time…
Tenure’s a union-negotiated, contractually protected (ha, ha, ha) right that protects teachers with at least three years experience from being summarily fired without cause.
In 2010, Ron Huberman, apparently having nothing better to do, came up with a personnel policy called redefinition that essentially enabled him to circumvent tenure.
Huberman used to be the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bore you with the details, but why not…
Say you’re a principal with a tenured English teacher that you want to get rid of 'cause she doesn’t worship the ground you walk on. With redefinition, you simply redefine her position from English to something like English with a specialty in basketball. You then tell the old English teacher she’s not qualified to teach the redefined position and, voila, the dirty deed is done.
In August of 2010, several hundred teachers were redefined out of their jobs. The Chicago Teachers Union took the matter to court. Last week, the court ruled in favor of CPS.
If you recall, I wrote about this once or twice or thrice—OK, I was obsessed.
In particular, I fixated on the case of Sunny Neater-DuBow, a nationally certified art teacher who was redefined out of her job at a public school in Little Village. Then she couldn’t find another job in the public school—couldn’t even get an interview—though she applied to at least 20 schools.
She wound up at the School of the Art Institute where (irony of ironies) she taught want-to-be art teachers how to teach art. So the teacher who wasn’t good enough to teach kids was somehow good enough to teach how to teach kids.
I can’t make this shit up, people.
Wait, there's more.
After I read about the Supreme Court ruling, I called Sunny. Turns out she found a job teaching art in a charter high school on the west side.
As in charter schools that I’m always ripping as stooges for the mayor.
Sunny says she couldn’t be happier. Says the charter school's administrators are great, her fellow teachers are great, and she loves her kids.
So, at this point, I believe I have an apology to make...
Charter schools, I've been wrong to paint you all with a giant brush. It’s not your fault that the mayor uses you as a hammer in his fight with the teachers union.
Well, some of you are willing hammers, but don’t let me stray from my apology.
In particular, I’d like to take my hat off to the folks at that west-side charter school who had the foresight to hire a great teacher who never should have been “redefined” in the first place.
Which brings me to the final irony…
In the case of Sunny we have a teacher who apparently wasn’t “good” enough to teach in the regular public schools the mayor says must be changed. But she is good enough to teach in a charter school, which the mayor says is a model for that change.
Like I said—you can’t make this shit up.
You know, if they turn Sunny’s saga into a movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal should play Sunny. Brad Pitt should play her faithful husband, Shane. And I’ll play myself in a cameo performance as the chocolate-milk-guzzling writer who had to say: Well done, charter school, well done.
Comments (3)
Showing 1-3 of 3
So what kind of money/benefits does Sunny have now, relative to her old job with CPS?
The point of breaking the union is to crush working people; I wondered how it played out in this case.
like
dislike
Congratulations, Ben. You may have established that a policy implemented in a very large organization with over 40,000 employees can sometimes be implemented in a poor manner. You write an article that provides evidence that one quality teacher cannot get a job at CPS because of a poor implementation of the "redefinition" policy. This would be somewhat useful if the purpose of the article were to highlight flaws in the program and show areas where it can improve. But instead you are basically using this example to argue that because everything does not always work perfectly when principals are giving discretion that we should instead just leave tenure policies the way they have been and make it almost impossible to make efforts to improve, discipline, or terminate tenured teachers who may not be serving the students as well as others who could have the job. That's not convincing.
Do you think someone else cannot easily write an article that describes instances in which the tenure process results in situations that clearly ends up with worse personnel in the classroom than otherwise would be the case? When there are two policies diametrically opposed to each other in a very large organization of course it is going to be the case that each of them will sometimes not work out great. But that obviously doesn't mean that the other is the right course of action. So these types of articles, in my opinion, don't establish anything of significance in this policy discussion. If you wish to be convincing, you must show why a rigid tenure system systematically is the better option and provide evidence that it works overall much better than a system in which principals are generally given discretion over who is teaching in their schools. I don't think you can do so.
