In California, this is the week before the November special election to vote on seven ballot measures, several of which modify the state constitution. Trying to revisit my performance from last November as a “good citizen”, I am reviewing the actual text (I hate TV ads and I hate nearly as much those silly text debates they send you WITH LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS and *lots of italicized angry text!*). In my reading of the ballot measures, I have found a most interesting fact: you can’t be both a teacher in California and a member of the Communist Party.
Oh yeah, that’s right. Here we are in the 21st century, with so many social advances, and the California Education Code is living in the 1950s. Let me put some context on this find.
Proposition 74 proposes to amend the California Education Code to change from two to five years the probationary period granted to teachers prior to tenure. This ballot measure appears in the form of modifications to two sections of this code: 44929.21 and 44932. I was reading through 44932, which lists the grounds upon which a teacher can be dismissed, and found a few sensible ones: immoral or unprofessional conduct, dishonesty, unsatisfactory performance, conviction of a felony.
And there is was: section 44932, subdivision a, paragraph 10. *Knowing membership by the employee in the Communist Party*.
It’s awfully funny that we’re about to have an expensive special election, care of our governor, to in part vote on measures that are alleged to reform the California education system. We are squabbling over whether teachers are better if they can be fired within two years or five years without a hearing (prop. 74); whether capping education funding in the middle of a fiscal year, rather than guaranteeing that funding for the entire fiscal year (prop. 76), is better for a system struggling to keep libraries open and classes small. Yet, we ought to be removing outdated provisions that judge a teacher not by the success of their teaching, but the content of their politics.
Of course, that kind of social progress seems to be nowhere on the ballot. Instead, we get the option to enshrine an unscientific and medically inaccurate definition of “abortion” in our state constitution (prop. 73). Huzzah.
