Why can’t teachers be fired in California? “Kids don’t have a union,” Kathleen Collins, Associate council for the L.A. Unified School District, told the L.A. Times. In all, not even one per 1,000 tenured LAUSD teachers is fired annually. Other large districts aren’t much better: six per 1,000 tenured teachers at Long Beach Unified, and two per 1,000 at San Diego Unified. A single ineffective teacher can have up to 1,300 students over the five-year path to dismissal. Even in the worst-case scenarios, including abuse, sexual misconduct, and drugs, dismissals can be overturned on technicalities. California Commissions on Professional Competence have the final administrative say about who goes and who stays. In recent years one commission overturned LAUSD’s decision to fire a high school teacher who kept marijuana, empty cocaine vials, and pornography at school because it believed termination was too severe. With rulings like that it’s little wonder that California teachers are ever fired simply because they can’t teach. In fact, in about four out of five successful dismissals of tenured teachers teaching performance is not even a factor. Better than unionizing schoolchildren, of course, would be empowering parents to pick the schools and the teachers they thought were best.
