Judge tells JCTA "No"

Kentucky children are guaranteed a fundamental right to an adequate education by our Constitution. But teachers have no such guarantee of employment - especially when they are under a one-year contract - and especially when their performance is generally lousy or specifically harmful.

This from Toni at the C-J:

Judge rules against request to rehire teachers
Judge denies request for immediate action

Jefferson County Public Schools will not have to rehire 18 teachers who were let go for alleged disciplinary and performance issues, at least for now.

Circuit Court Judge James Shake refused yesterday to grant a temporary injunction that would have given the teachers their jobs back, saying the law "does not provide for a right of employment as to these employees."

But an attorney for the teachers' union said he was disappointed with the judge's decision and will continue to work to have the teachers reinstated.

"This is a preliminary stage of the lawsuit … a final decision on whether they can be hired is many months away," said Everett Hoffman, representing the Jefferson County Teachers Association. "At that time, the court will decide whether they have a right to be reinstated and if they deserve back pay and other damages."

Tyson Gorman, the attorney representing the school district, said he has filed a motion for summary judgment and hopes the case soon will be dismissed.

"We are pleased with the judge's decision today," Gorman said. "This is a tremendous step in the right direction and a great victory for he district and the children of Jefferson County." ...

...According to documents filed in court by the school district, 14 of the 18 teachers had significant misconduct or disciplinary problems in addition to having received a poor evaluation for the 2007-08 school year...

...In his ruling, Shake said the plaintiffs "have failed to meet their burden of supporting the motion for injunctive relief."

He added that "while there is clearly a substantive question of law at stake, there has been no showing that a concrete personal right is in jeopardy and no showing of injury that is not compensable by monetary damages."

Two teachers in the lawsuit, Bryan Beeler and Cynthia Norton, said they were disappointed with the ruling.

Beeler, whose contract was not renewed for failure to maintain a learning environment and poor performance, received two excellent evaluations from Southern Leadership Academy before his arrival at Knight Middle School last year.

"I am not a bad teacher and I believe that my record shows that," he said. "I received one written reprimand in three years. It never even crossed my mind that I would be looking for another job at the end of the year. When I got my nonrenewal letter, it came as a complete shock to me."

Norton, who taught at Doss High School, received reprimands for tardiness and failure to follow proper procedures in securing a substitute when absent. She also was suspended for five days for calling students a "bunch of assholes."

In her file, Norton admitted it was an "inappropriate thing to say."

Yesterday, she said the incident was "completely mischaracterized."

"I know that I have things that I needed to improve on, but they never gave me the chance … I didn't know that it would be the end of a career," she said.

In a related story, the Courier-Journal ran the word "assholes" on the front page of the paper, above the fold.

Damned if I'm not defective

I don't often take on religious issues. A person's faith, is a person's faith as far as I'm concerned - so long as it doesn't do harm anyone else.

I agree with Thomas Jefferson, a great American and defender of religious freedom, when he wrote in his Notes on Virginia, 1782, "...it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

I consider it a full-time job just to follow the golden rule, as taught by Jesus.

But freedom of thought means freedom to disagree and this past week my beliefs were termed defective. Maybe they are. Perhaps, I'll be judged later for that. In the meantime, if you're like me, you may enjoy this voluntary recall of several defective consumer products. You may be defective, too.

This from Slate.

A Future Herald-Leader?

There have been several days lately when I have opened the front section of my Herald-Leader only to find that I am largely familiar with the world and national stories being reported. This is much less true for City & Region and subsequent sections – and I almost never read the ads. I wonder; are other readers having the same experience?

I don’t raise this question to be critical of the Herald-Leader. I’ll bet the same would be true if I subscribed to the Courier-Journal or any other daily from a mid-sized city. I just find that today’s technologies put me in touch with more real-time news than I can consume.

But newspapers are important. From America’s early days publicists have realized the power of our newspapers to influence public opinion. As David Sloan wrote in American Journalism, “Their main purpose was to have a forum to promote their party’s views…to win elections…and thus determine the nature that the political system would take.” As Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson is said to have used state department funds to pay Philip Freneau, to edit a pro-Jefferson, anti-federalist bi-weekly newspaper called the National Gazette.

As late as 1870, 89% of urban daily newspapers were overtly affiliated with one party or another. But the conditions changed. Paper became cheaper, telegraph and new printing technologies came into being, cities grew and demand for news increased. These combined to make newspapers much cheaper to produce. The climate was right for new entrants into the profitable newspaper business.

Papers found that their editorial positions had to change to present both sides of the issues. Increasingly, cities had one newspaper and its readership was composed of liberals and conservatives. By 1920, fewer than half of the nation’s newspapers were politically affiliated. This journalistic model sought truth and valued honesty in a non-partisan manner; a neutral government watchdog.

That journalistic model is now under attack. Changes in technology have allowed politicians to use the press in ways that are new to 21st century citizens and increased political polarization has resulted. As the Scooter Libby trial has revealed, some of our watchdogs have been lured into government service. (For example: this from the Star-Tribune)

Today many newspapers seem to be struggling with a business model that just isn’t working. Take the mighty Wall Street Journal, for example, with their 1.75 million print subscribers. WSJ’s Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, David Wessel told an audience at the Yale School of Management last April that they maintain that number only by persistently discounting subscription rates. There is no growth.

But the on-line WSJ has 750,000 subscribers, an increase of eight percent over the prior year. Their growth market consists of college kids who are getting their news on-line. The problem is that they can’t charge advertisers as much for on-line readers as they can for the print readers. How can they continue to support the number of reporters it takes to produce reliable stories?

The unit of Dow Jones (WSJ’s parent company) that includes print and on-line editions of WSJ, Barrons and Market Watch had revenues over a billion dollars in 2005 - but still lost $2.5 million. They created their web site, hoping to move advertisers to the internet with them. The advertisers went - but most of them skipped WSJ and advertise with Google instead. Now Google has annual revenues four times that of Dow Jones.

The competition that once drove journalism toward unbiased reporting seems to be having the opposite effect today.

Harvard economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer argue that today’s competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers. As a result, news outlets seem to be returning to the kind of political niche marketing that existed in the days of pamphleteers. Whenever competitors can create so called “differences of opinion,” they do so to further divide the market and enhance profits.

So what’s a local newspaper to do? Is the most effective future business strategy for the Herald-Leader to be “in the middle;” fair and balanced in the traditional sense? Will competition reemerge in Lexington, perhaps in the form of an outrageous, youth-directed New York Post/Fox News-style on-line tabloid; meant to strip 30 percent from the Herald-Leader’s readership at low cost?

I suspect the answer for the Herald-Leader won’t come from its journalistic philosophy. It will more likely come from the local content itself. That’s the only thing the paper can (and must) produce better than anyone else - if it is to reinvent itself for the new century.