That being said….. I’ve been teaching a l-o-n-g time and I have rarely seen a teacher who just didn’t care about the students or considered themselves “above the rules or standards of professional behavior”.

I have however, encountered many OUSD principals and administrators who feel quite entitled to use their power and position to intimidate, bully and harass the very people they are supposed to be leading. Mr. Mesfun is among them.

http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2007/06/20/news/8_accusation_070620.txt

http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2008/03/23/news/4_suit_080322.txt

Parents should not be intimidated. They should strike when bad teachers are protected, to the determinant of thousands of Oakland kids.

I am all for job rights, and due process, (and the fact that we need way better principals in our schools–we get what we pay for, incidentally, compared to Cupertino, for instance) but protecting bad teachers WHILE HURTING OUR FUTURE GENERATION is unconscionable.

@Union Supporter – as a parent, get the other parents riled up, and strike this teacher’s class.

We’ve gotten close to calling that lawyer again a couple of times – a really bad teacher who wouldn’t follow our child’s IEP, but the principal overruled the teacher and our child received the grade that was appropriate to the IEP requirements. When the state took over the district and most/all of the staff in the district’s Department of Special Programs were removed, but (perhaps because Dr. Ward met with our family on his first day in the district) the new state administrator restaffed the department *very* quickly.

When we documented openly, the district made commitments to do what our child needed, and because of the documentation, they also knew that they had to *keep* their promises, not just tell us whatever we wanted to hear, and then ignore us once we went away.

Of course, I have spent so much of my own time reading and researching state education law, that sometimes I feel like I should have earned my law degree by now.

Walton Barnaby we have some very, very good teachers at our school, a couple of excellent teachers at our school, but for the several teachers that were switched to grades / subjects for which they themselves do not know the content it is horrid for the students.

When complaining both to the principal and the the teacher, the teacher has retaliated twice. Both time the teacher backed down when confronted directly with witnesses present and changed statements saying “there was a misunderstand” or perhaps “not enough attention was paid.”

The teacher has been offered training in the deficit area and the principal paid for a substitute and the training, the teacher did not show up because of a “transportation problem.” The teacher has refused summer courses to bring minimum skills up to minimum levels and depends on the school’s “resource specialist” to teacher math concepts that are foreign to the teacher. The teacher uses “smart student work” to grade other students’ work and has marked answers wrong that were correct and left correct wrong answers.

The union is protecting the teacher, the union stewart makes sure that the teacher does not have to use personal summer time for training and the transportation issue was overlooked as a “one time incident.” We are nearing the school year, so we continue with the tutor and based on the benchmark tests, our student who was “advanced” in all categories has slipped to the bottom of the “proficient” category. Nearly every student in the classes has had their scores slip and I know this for a fact because the teacher could not pull my child’s records without giving me the results of every child because of inferior computer skills.

It is a very tense and difficult situation. And Sue, you are right, we should have began documenting from the beginning. We only started documenting when the retaliation began happening. I am angry with the teacher, the union stewart and the union. The principal will have the teacher moved next year, but students whose parents have not already begun the process of tutoring will have a rough year next year and the teachers will have to pick up the slack.

I like to think that we’re getting a representative slice in these threads, but wonder. If we’re hearing from the upper half in here, what do the constituents in the lower half think? How pleased are they with both Montera and Skyline. The best public schools in Oakland have significant achievement gaps.

All great comments in here, though. The lawyering up, Sue, makes me think we live in sad times. Maybe education will improve.