Teachers Unions Trying To Lower Standards

after year after year. As far as the actual job that the workers within the teachers union do, i e. Teaching kids, where so many California public schools are failing, failing, failing, failing, And yet what is the teachers union, individual local teachers unions, statewide teachers associations. What do they do? More money, more jobs, more power. And they are far and away the most powerful entity in Sacramento, the most powerful lobbying entity in

Sacramento are unions. And lest someone say, well, how could you criticize teachers like that? That's so terrible of you, Oh my god. First of all, this is the teacher's union union entities I'm talking about whose job is not the heroic, noble mother Teresa esque work of educating kids. The job of a teachers union is to get more money for teachers, more jobs for teachers, better hours for teachers. That's the job of a union make sure teachers don't get fired. That's the job of a union. Its job

is not actually to educate kids. It is about having jobs for adults. If kids are educated, well, that is a happy byproduct, but it is not necessarily the end goal of what the union wants. Secondly, if you're saying, how oh could you attack teachers like this, chehol that's so these teachers do. That's the most difficult job in the world. It ain't coal mining. Pretty sure, that's more difficult. And Secondly, I am a firm believer in getting rid of this sort of piety about any job. I say

this about teachers, and this will tick off liberals. I'll say this about nurses, and it'll tick off anyone. It's a nurse, I guess. I'll say this about cops and soldiers and it'll tick off conservatives. I think any job has a range of people who do it. I think any job has a couple of people who are really excellent at their jobs, a couple of people who really really stink, and probably a large number of people in the middle who are okay to pretty good. Teachers are

no different. Okay, there's some teachers who are great, there's some teachers who stink, and there's a lot of teachers in the middle, and obviously we would like to have policies that increase whatever that standard is for, especially the teachers in the middle. You're always gonna have bad teachers, you always have some teachers that need to get fired. You're always gonna have screw ups. But if you can raise the standard for everyone in the middle, that would

be good. What the Teachers' Union is concerned with, apparently, is not increasing that standard for everyone in the middle, in fact, actively working to eliminate measures to raise the standard for people in the middle, to increase the pool of people able to become teachers. Maybe more people become teachers,

maybe more people get accepted more jobs. So this is an actual piece of legislation that was being debated in Sacramento, and it's remarkable because it shows this is how bold the teachers' unions have gotten in California that they were able to present this with a straight face. It did get defeated ultimately, but this is how far they're trying to push. Pressure from education advocates ends the effort to eliminate teacher assessments, a controversial bill that would have. This

is from the outlet ed sources in GVWARE. A controversial bill that would have eliminated teaching performance assessments, the last licensure test California teacher candidates are required to take, has

been dramatically revised under pressure from education advocacy groups. Senate Bill one two sixty three, sponsored by the California Teachers Association, would have so California Teachers Sociation big consortium of all the different local school public school labor unions for teachers throughout the state, one of the most powerful lobbying entities

in Sacramento. Senate Bill one two sixty three, sponsored by the California Teachers Association, would have ended the requirement that teacher candidates take video clips of classroom instruction, submit lesson plans, student work, and written reflections on their practice to prove

they are prepared to become teachers. In mid June, the bill was amended to retain the teaching performance assessments, with a provision that the California Commission on Teacher credentially convene a working group of teachers, college education faculty, and performance assessment experts to review the assessments and recommend changes The revised bill, if passed, would require the commissions the Commission to approve recommendations from the work Group by July first

of twenty twenty five, and to implement them within three years from that date. The Commission would be required to make annual reports to the legislature. Leslie Littman, CTA Vice president, said that the amendments retaining the test were disappointing, but that the creation of the work group is a positive step towards addressing the concerns that union members have had with the assessment. All right, so they get this bill passed,

but they don't eliminate the assessment part. This teacher assessment in which teachers in training have this final sort of part of their examination where they take video of classroom instruction, they provide their written course materials, reflections from students, et cetera. And it's the video thing I want to focus on. All right, you have all these teachers complaining about this. Many here's the story. Many teachers say that the test

is a waste of time. The bill was originally introduced by Senator Josh Newman, a Democrat from Fullerton, chair of the Senate Education Committee, who said in April that eliminating the assessment would encourage more people to enter the teaching profession. Yeah, if you could get a job without having to take a bunch of tests and examinations and stuff and not have to prove that you actually learned anything, I'm sure more people would want to apply. Oh, I have to

do work. Ooh, I have to get uncomfortable. Ooh, I don't want to do that. He also said that it duplicates other requirements teachers must fulfill to earn a credential. Okay, that's okay. Yeah, do the same thing repeatedly. See if you can actually do it more than once. K through twelve. Teachers who commented on ed source stories about the legislation were overwhelmingly critical of the assessment. Yeah, because people like to complain. You know what lawyers like to do about

the bargs. Nam, they like to complain about the bargs. Is it a good thing. It's probably a good thing. It's probably good to have a really hard barrier to entry before someone can become a lawyer. That requires a lot of really hard studying. Is it the best test that's ever been devised by man? Is it the most perfectly suited to no, but it shows a certain base level of hard work, competence and the ability to jump through a hoop that maybe you'd want out of a lawyer.

California teacher candidates must pass either the California Teaching Performance Assessment, the Educative Teaching Performance Assessment, or the Fresno Assessment of School Teachers before they can earn a preliminary teaching credential. The test costs three hundred dollars total one hundred and fifty dollars per cycle, according to Littmann. Now, other people say it's a valuable tool, but this is the level that

the teachers' unions are getting to at first, blush. Does anyone look at the state of how California teachers are doing, the results we're getting out of our public schools and think, you know what, you know what we should really do. We should really water down the requirements for our teachers. We don't need teachers to be this highly assessed. Just

let them skate. We don't need to actually take video of them actually doing their jobs and have that be part of our assessment of whether or not they should be teachers. No, no, no, no, no no no. We should just just trust them. Or just have them do a written test or something for this job that's primarily about verbal communication. I mean, of course you're gonna want to have video assessment,

either video assessment or in person assessments or something. Video assessment seems to me like a great way to do it. More on that later. But it's just the boldness of this that it just stuns me. The teachers unions have so much power that they're basically like, yeah, we want to just knock down we want the we want the doors wide open, let anybody come in and become a teacher who needs this test. So what's gonna happen. Well, we're I wonder if it's just sort of like, well,

we're not there yet. Enough people were able to look at this and clearly like this is the remarkable thing about this. Okay. Teachers unions by far the most powerful lobbying entity in Sacramento, far and away. Sacramento dominated by the Democrats, like three quarters majority in both houses of the state legislatures. Democrats and teachers' unions in Sacramento are like frickin' frack. They're joined at the hip. What one does,

what one thinks, the other things they finish each other's sentences. Okay, there there's no division. There's no like Sacramento is run by the teachers' unions, one of the most powerful constituencies in the Democratic Party, which completely controls Sacramento. It's not like Republicans voting against this how much of a say. The reason this thing went down is because Democrats looked at it and went, Okay, this seems like a couple

of steps too far. I'm gonna have a hard time explaining this to my voters why I voted actually to water down the standards for teachers. And you would think there would be some level of like professional pride of like, no, we're not gonna lessen our standards for teachers, because again, that's not the job of a union. All right. When you know, not that the ABA is any or state bar associations or anything like that or anything. Not that

they're the greatest, most perfect entities on planet Earth. But I think when the California Bar Association is looking at well, how should we structure say the uh, you know, the bar exam, I think they are able to credibly assess that because I think associations of lawyers those aren't lawyers' unions, Okay, that their advocacy doesn't result in lawyers getting more and more jobs. Lawyers aren't unionized, they're they're their own sort

of deal. They run their own law firms. And this is just a professional association that does have an interest in maintaining a high standard for the bar. So when they look at the bar exam, I think they can make reasonable judgments about like, Okay, well, the California Bar Exam, for example, was getting extremely difficult, maybe too difficult, to the point where only forty percent of people were passing.

You had people from really good law schools failing it. Okay, well, are we making this punitively difficult versus okay, well, we want to maintain high standards, but we nonetheless, you know, the point of this isn't to be punitively bad. It's just to demonstrate that you know this stuff. Let's compare

it against other states. What are we doing. I think the Bar Association is able to make more kind of credible judgments because they don't have there There's nothing self interested for lawyers about having more lawyers in the profession. If anything, I would imagine the Bar Association has an interest in not flooding the market with lawyers. You would want there to be less competition. I mean, the fewer lawyers, the more work for you, you know more, you know,

less supply, equal demand, higher prices. But with the Teachers Association that there's nothing. It's totally non credible. They want this in order to allow for more people to be teachers, and they're talking openly in their advocacy about maybe this would encourage more people to be teachers. Yeah, because you want more jobs, you want more power, you want more positions, you want to advocate for more and more and more and more and more. Because that's how a labor union

gets powerful. More jobs, more pay, fewer hours, fewer standards. That's what the Teachers Union that, that's its end goal that it pursues. And that's why I think public sector unions are so stupid when when you have that in the context of a private sector union, it has a

natural force that a poses it. When you have a private sector union, Okay, the employees at Ford Motor Company, they want more jobs, more money, better hours, et cetera for themselves, and management wants more of the profits for itself, and the two forces are in opposition. To each other, in tension with each other, to hopefully bring about some fair resolution. In the context of public sector unions, there's nothing in opposition for them. It's a bunch of liberal

politicians in Sacramento spending other people's money. And even that, even the lack of any material thing in opposition to them resulted in this case in looks. Listen, we know the Teachers' Union runs the show here in Sacramento. You can't just eliminate requirements for teachers like you can't dumb it down so much. When we return, I want to talk about this specific aspect of this bill, getting rid

of the video assessment. Why that is total bunk. Next on the John Girardi Show, talking about this bill that was actually well, this one portion of it that was defeated in the state legislature, Senate Bill one two sixty three, which was sponsored by the California Teachers Association, which would have eliminated the teacher one of the teacher credentialing assessments, and the specific portion of this assessment was this requirement

that teacher candidates take video clips of classroom instruction, submit lesson plans, student work, and written reflections on their practice to prove they are prepared to become teachers. Okay, so this bill originally was going to do that. The California Teachers Association was pushing for this, which represents all the unions. They were pushing to get rid of this requirement for someone to become a new teacher, including the video assessment. And this is the thing I want to talk about,

all right. I have some experience with this. People hate watching themselves on video. They hate listening to themselves on audio. And I remember this. In law school, I did a lot of different classes for trial advocacy and so basically learning how to be an in the courtroom trial litigator. And the lawyer. The professor who sort of taught those classes, he taught a lot of these practicum classes and he had this really great practice, this really great program he

had put together. He was sort of famous for it, and he insisted that everyone be video recorded doing all the various different things they were doing, so he would video record you. He also had like deposition practice classes where you would practice giving a deposition or representing a client during a deposition or whatever, so he would video record us. And he would also he would video record us and make us watch ourselves doing whatever it was

we were doing. I remembered one time I did it, and I did the video recording of me giving an opening statement, and I was watching myself, and I was so embarrassed because I kept shifting from one foot to the other, like I was rocking back and forth, back and forth, and I had no idea I was doing that while I was delivering this. People hate watching themselves, but it's a really useful tool. It lets you know, hey,

you're doing something weird. I'd say the best thing I ever did with radio to help me become a better radio host, the best thing I do is listen to myself. I listened to myself on the podcast the first time I ever did any kind of podcast or radio thing. It was a podcast thing I was doing with my buddy Jonathan Keller, and he asked me, hey, afterwards, can you just take the audio file and edit out anytime any of us says the word uh or um? And it was me, Jonathan and some pastor. It's a pastor

lots of experience with public speaking, never said um. Jonathan some experience with public speaking said um a few times. I at that time, with very little experience public speaking, I said uh or a billion times and I had to edit out every single instance. And I'll never forget that. It was such a formative thing for me to realize this is actually how you talk, and you can't improve unless you you know, you can't treat the illness and

unless you diagnose what it is. So the idea that the teachers a association in this bill, and thank god this got amended, how with a straight face are they able to say, no, no, no, no, no, These teachers don't need to submit video of how they're doing. They don't need to submit video of their classroom instruction as part of the assessment whether they should get a credential to be a teacher. No no, no, no, no, no no,

you don't need to do that. I can understand the motive for why you wouldn't want to do that, because it stinks. It's painful. It's painful to listen to yourself. It's painful to see yourself sometimes if you're screwing up, because often in public speaking you're doing stupid things without realizing it. How many of you can think of a pastor or something who was bad at sermonizing or being

a homilist whatever. It's probably because he's not painfully forcing himself to watch and listen to his own stuff, and he doesn't realize all the things he keeps saying and saying and saying and saying, all the ticks he has, all the annoying things he does. But I think this is part of professional development. If you are in a position where you're public speaking, that's what teachers are. They're speaking. They're speaking in front of a group of thirty kids

every single day. So are you gonna do it well? Are you gonna make sure that these people are prepared to do that? Or are we just gonna just leave the doors wide open let anyone do this. I don't think the performance of California teachers has been so great that we should be looking for ways to make it easier for people to become teach. That seems to me, like you know, and again for people getting piously upset like I'm you know, tarnishing the reputation of mother Teresa

or something over here. I think there are some teachers who are great. I think, though, like in any job, there are some teachers who stink. And I think there are a lot of teachers in the middle. And you know who's probably nodding their head and agreeing with me right now, because every time I say this to a teacher, they nod their head and agree with me. Is a bunch of teachers, Okay, a lot of teachers stink, a lot of teachers are mediocre, and then there's a good

number of teachers who are good. And that's true of cops, it's true of lawyers, it's true of doctors, it's true of nurses, it's true of guys in the military. Pretty much any job has people who are really really good, people who are really really stink, and a bunch of people in the middle. But to weaken the requirements for

teachers is ridiculous. So thank god that portion of Senate Bill one two sixty three was taken out, though they are going to study the matter, which means CTA, the California Teachers Association, will keep pushing for that change at some point down the road when we return. Some thoughts about Tim Walls reading the Bible and respect for newly born disabled children next on The John Girardi Show. One of my kind of chief building blocks of my prayer life is it's kind of like an adaptation of the

Book of Common Prayer. So the Book of Common Prayer is sort of the foundational prayer and liturgy textbook for Anglicans and Episcopalians and people in that universe. Now, pou Benedict the sixteenth one of the more significant things he did was he set up a structure to allow Anglicans and Episcopalians to convert to Catholicism while retaining a lot

of their prayer traditions. Basically, a lot of Anglican prayer and practice has its roots in ancient more ancient Catholic stuff, and bo Benedict sort of recognized that there was much within the Anglican and Episcopal prayer traditions that was really good. So while you know, acknowledging that converting Anglicans and Episcopalians would have to, you know, believe in points of Catholic dogma, it's not like they can become Catholic and who is

this pope? Guy? We don't need a pope. Nonetheless, the traditions of how they pray Bo Bendict thought were beautiful and worthy things to be preserved. So one of the things that was brought over was sort of the tradition of daily prayer that was rooted in the Book of Common Prayer, and these Anglicans who became Catholic produced this book called Divine Worship the Daily Office, and that's been kind of my daily round of prayer. I sort of found it and it seems to sort of work well

with my work and life schedule, and it's pretty cool. Basically, it involves praying all one hundred and fifty Psalms over the course of a month, and then you have a big read it. It's divided into basically morning prayer and evening prayer, so you read a chunk from the Psalms, an Old Testament reading, and a New Testament reading, along with two other sort of biblical or extra biblical canticles,

and it sort of changes depending on the season. It reflects the liturgical calendar, the liturgical season that exists within the Catholic but also the Anglican and Lutheran and other traditions of you know, lent Easter time, after Pentecost, Advent, Christmas,

et cetera. So pretty much every day I'm reading at morning prayer and at evening prayer two big chunks from the Old Testament, and over the course of the year you sort of wind up reading through You're not reading the entire Old Testament, but you're reading through, you know, selections of almost all of the books of the Old

Testament over the course of a year. You also get two big chunks from the New Testament every day, and you do read I think about just about one hundred percent of the New Testament over the course of a year,

and right now over the last since Pentecost. The selection that I've been reading from the Old Testament that's been assigned is a lot of the history of the kingdom of sort of King Saul and then King David's kingdom King Solomon, and then the division of the two kingdoms of Israel into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah Israel in the north, Judah in the south, and a lot of this is this is all written out in First Samuel,

Second Samuel, First Kings, Second Kings. And now we're sort of into the book the Prophet Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is at the time of the Babylonian captivity, where Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Judah, is taken over by the Chaldeans or the Babylonians, and the devastation that comes as a result. Now, the thing that you see throughout this history is the way that the author, the divine author, but the divine

author working through this human author of these books. They are basically judging these various of Judah and Israel on the basis of their fidelity to the Old Law, their fidelity to God, or their abandoning of God to allow or promote the worship of other gods. These other gods that were worshiped in the area of Palestine. And there were two that were sort of the most prominent. There was Baal, or at least what the Old Testament calls Bal. It seems like there were a number of different kinds

of balls Ball, Baal and Asherah. Now, the worship of Ball one of the characteristic aspects of it that is discussed throughout these books of the Old Testament. It involves human sacrifice in many cases, and often it seemed to involve the burning alive of children. And there were kings of Israel and or Judah who actually killed their own children,

offering them as human sacrifices to Baal. You also had connected the worship of Asherah and the worship of Ashrah involved ritual prostitution rituals, and this religious practice was always in tension and opposition to the authentic worship of God

that happened in the Temple in Jerusalem. And basically all of these kings of Israel and Judah in the years following King Solomon, they were always sort of measured according to the standard of well, were they worshiping God or were they allow or promoting the worship of Baal and Astra, and so what were they doing? And I think sometimes with our modern eyes, we look at this and think, well, this seems so bizarre. Why would there be this such a temptation to want to worship these other gods? It

just seems so illogical. It seems like a temptation that the Israelites suffered that we can't. It's hard for us to understand. And I recognize that the response to us will be, oh, well, that's just the same way that we idolize things like money and power. It's like, yeah, but it's a little different. It doesn't. That has never felt like a satisfactory answer to me. Why were they so drawn to this? And I think the answer lies

in the killing babies and the sex stuff. The authentic worship of the God of the Hebrew, of God, the God of the Jewish people. It precluded a lot of things that were fairly common in the culture that surrounded the people of Israel and Judah, namely taking advantage of

people for sex outside of marriage. Right, all of the cultures surrounding Israel in Judah would not have batted an eye at a male citizen or a male person with power engaging in sexual conduct outside of marriage, whether that was with a slave, whether that was with a prostitute, whatever it was, that was not uncommon, okay, and it it Israel and Judah were weird for insisting on sexual

conduct within marriage. The other way in which Israel and Judah were weird, and you might think, why would anyone be tempted to join, you know, the worship of a god like ball that wanted human sacrifice of children. That seems so weird? What what what would be appealing about that? The other way in which Israel and Judah were weird was in the area of preserving human life, including the lives of infants who were not wanted. Frequently, you know, like,

let's think about this. You know how the prophets in the Old Testament frequently sort of excoriate the infidelity of Israel and Judah for not taking care of widows and orphans. What does that mean if you're a widow, if you're a woman with no one to protect you, like your husband's dead, your father's dead. What's going to happen to you in this brutal and violent world of the Middle East. Well, often you could be subject to some kind of sexual violence.

If you're a child with no one to protect you, you are highly inconvenient and often what would happen in the ancient world, in the ancient Near East when a child was born with any kind of disability, or a child was just born and the parents didn't want that child. Maybe the child was born of a slave, Maybe the child was born of an illicit liaison. Maybe whatever it was, this was very common in the Roman Empire, common in Greece, common in all these cultures surrounding the people of his

real Judah. What would they do? They would kill the baby, they would leave the baby to die somewhere, that was what the Romans did, Or in the case of some of these Near Eastern Phoenician religions, you could have the baby be ritually burnt, offered in sacrifice to God. And I think it's this that leads me to talk about Tim Walls. One of the Tim Walls's record on abortion is terrible, but one of the most extreme things he did, and there's a great piece about it written by Charlie Comosi.

I think that's how you pronounce his name. I linked to it for my Twitter account Twitter dot com slash Fresno Johnny at Fresno Johnny. It's the piece he wrote in the First Things talking about specific changes Tim Walls signed into law in Minnesota to eliminate requirements for treating a child who is born after surviving an abortion attempt. It's not actively killing a child after they've survived an abortion attempt or have been fully delivered in the midst

of trying to perform an abortion. It's letting a child die providing care or not providing care on the basis of whether the child's wanted, not on the basis of whether or not the treatment will be successful on the

basis of whether the child's wanted. And one of the things Kamosi goes into further is this sort of silent epidemic of not treating children who could be saved on the basis not just of whether they were wanted to be abortion, but whether they want to be a disability, and that in many cases, the same kinds of doctors who would move heaven and earth to save a disabled five year old who was facing illness will not do

the same thing for a disabled newborn. And it makes me sort of, look, this is a more and more commonplace thing, and this is what the Democratic Party supports. I'm afraid more and more it's what a lot of Republicans are okay with. Given the way that votes have gone on the abortion issue in states like Ohio, There's part of me that wonders more and more Republicans are okay with this, and it makes me think we're really

not so different from the ancient Israelites. Yeah, we're not offering our children to ball, but the same sort of motives to get rid of human beings who are inconvenient and to instrumentalize women for the sake of sexual gratification. These things are hallmarks of our culture too, just as much as it was of their unfaithful culture. When we return, how no one seems to be standing up for Tim

Walls with this whole stolen valor thing. Next on The John Girardi Show, the Tim Walls stolen valor story seems to kind of be getting legs. And the thing that I've been sort of surprised at is that it's not a thing where like, Okay, Republicans are making this claim, but then some people close to Walls are upset about it, but other people are like, hey, you know, he he didn't do anything that bad, Like like this is you know, I served with Walls and he was a pretty good guy.

The thing that's I'm finding to be extraordinary and maybe I just haven't seen anything else. Maybe I'm just consuming too much conservative media. Nobody's sticking up for Walls. His battalion commander just issued a statement blasting the guy for claiming to be a rank that he wasn't. His former chaplin is blasting him. I feel like this story has legs, and I'm almost afraid of Republicans spoiling it by hyping it up too much to allow Kamala time to switch

him out before the Democrat convention. So we'll see about that. That that'll do it for John Glady Show. See you next time on Power Talk