As the key speaker, Villaraigosa threw his support behind the Vergara ruling — and the group’s ideas to accommodate it.
“When you take extreme positions, like tenure, that says you can’t ever fire anybody… that’s extreme,” he said. “The other extreme is that we shouldn’t have teacher unions and due process. But what Vergara said was, this is uber-due process; this is way beyond.”
Teach Plus works to elevate the influence of teachers in policy discussions, and yesterday’s forum “is an example of that,” said John Lee, executive director of Teach Plus Los Angeles, referring to 10 Teach Plus fellows, all of them LA classroom teachers, who spent the summer researching Vergara.
The researchers compiled their findings in a policy brief, “Valuing Performance and Honoring Experience: Teacher Solutions for a Post-Vergara Profession.”
First up was tenure, which currently gives teachers extensive due process rights after 18 months. California is only one of five states that awards tenure within two years, according to the Teach Plus presentation.