Gaming the Los Angeles Teachers’ Contract

Useless teacher “professional development” classes cost California taxpayers billions in increased salaries and pensions.

On June 14th, my blog, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Union Wind Blows,” addressed the “Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD,” a 58 page report commissioned by United Way and several civil rights’ groups, produced by the National Council on Teacher Quality and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The “Roadmap” was full of mostly common sense prescriptions; it suggested changes to the current union contract and to laws regulating staffing, evaluations, tenure, teacher compensation and work schedules. But there was one egregious element in the report that warrants special analysis and is the subject of my latest City Journal post:

“With California reeling fiscally and education eating up about half of its budget, the state’s taxpayers are being hoodwinked to the tune of billions of dollars by an outrageous contractual perk that pays teachers to take useless classes, ostensibly with the aim of improving their classroom work.”

To continue reading the article, go here.

About the author: Larry Sand is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.