CA Teachers Union Wants to Remove All Oversight and Assessment Testing For Teachers

A new bill will strike literacy requirements and state oversight for classroom teachers

Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash

Michelle Obama once famously said, “When they go low, we go high.”

California has its own version of her quote, “We they go low, we go lower.”

Education standards in the public system have been plummeting over the last few years and California is no exception. The decline in achievement has been accompanied by a decline in teacher employment. The pandemic motivated many veteran teachers to take early retirement and the social agenda permeating public education has pushed many more sane educators out the public school system.

California is looking to increase the number of teachers in the state, and to that end the California Teachers Association has proposed a brilliant plan - get rid of assessment tests for prospective teachers altogether.

Diana Lambert of EdSource reports:

Senate Bill 1263, authored by state Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, would do away with the California Teaching Performance Assessment, known as the CalTPA, through which teachers demonstrate their competence via video clips of instruction and written reflections on their practice. 

Senator Newman told EdSource removing the qualification testing will go a long way to relieving the teacher shortage.

“One key to improving the educator pipeline is removing barriers that may be dissuading otherwise talented and qualified prospective people from pursuing a career as an educator,” Newman said in a statement to EdSource.

Let’s play that back: literacy tests are barriers for potential public school TEACHERS. What’s next? Residency requirements are a barrier for doctors? Weapons training is a barrier for law enforcement?

But wait, there’s more! Not only will this bill eradicate performance assessments, it will also do away with state oversight of all literacy instruction for teachers.

The bill also would do away with a literacy performance assessment of teachers and oversight of literacy instruction in teacher preparation programs mandated by Senate Bill 488, authored by Sen. Susan Rubio, D-West Covina, in 2021.

Why would the teachers union - an innately pro-Big-Government body - in a state with as dismal education outcomes as California, want to remove oversight by the state?

I’ll tell you why. It’s just another move by the ideological wing of the teaching profession to conceal curriculum and classroom discussions from parents. State law hasn’t quite caught up to the quickly-changing progressive political landscape. There. are still quite a few education laws and policies that reflect a saner time in California politics. Parents and pro-parent activists use those laws to combat egregious progressivism in schools. If the state doesn’t know what’s going on at the teaching level, they have plausible deniability when parents complain - “Your daughter is uncomfortable with the teacher’s discussions of “queer theory” and sexuality? Sorry, we don’t have the authority to provide oversight for teachers in the classroom. You’ll have to deal with your local school administration.”

It’s just another step towards creating a wall between parents and the public school classroom. It also allows the unions to set their own rules and standards without having to worry about parents finding out through FOIA requests to the state. No reporting, no reports.

If you’re wondering why our public school students are barely reading and writing these days, look no further than the teachers union. Diseased roots cause rotting branches.