Is AB114 an insult to teachers already laid off?

No.


It means that fewer of those of us still employed join you.


I am not a giant fan of the current system of teacher layoffs, because at least for some districts (including SFUSD), it unquestionably impacts high-needs schools more.  Furthermore, I think teacher layoffs are stupid, full stop.  Smaller class sizes work.  Laid off teachers have experience.  Experience is important.  And somehow districts who lay off teachers end up hiring uncredentialed newbies to replace them.


Nor does it impact rehiring.


Besides, anything that has school boards and deformers that riled up can't be that bad.  Sure, it sends them into their brooding, union-hating pits.  But so does everything else.  Let's quote Lance Izumi, who apparently found his union-label pajamas too scratchy years back:


“This is shocking,” said Lance Izumi, Koret Senior Fellow in Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchdog’s parent think tank. “It’s obvious that unions do not care for the kids at all if they are willing to shorten the school year. This is about protecting teachers’ jobs, whether they deserve it or not.”


That's right.  If you think 40:1 classrooms are worse than a shorter school year, you are scum.  Mr. Izumi does not consider the possibility that teachers might think both of these are bad, and he seems unaware that teachers take pay cuts when school years get shorter.


It's an excellent deformer soundbite, though.  He gets in a "bad teachers" crack, even.

Izumi said that many other states are going in the opposite direction, and implementing more school choice opportunities and teacher evaluation processes, while “California is regressing into 19th century union vogue.”


Yeah, it's true that many states, stuck in an ugly scramble for federal education money, are putting untested and unreliable "effectiveness" schemes in place.  And many school districts are being further defunded by "school choice" scams.  How this is a positive he doesn't explain.  Moreover, he doesn't have an equivalent contradiction to his Naughty California Wobbly Teachers proposition - unless the overall framing is "Unions hate children, hate teaching and are basically giant fascist juggernauts holding knives to the throats of valiant, underfunded, loving education reformers."


Let's not give him that framing assumption for free, shall we?


I hereby make the same offer to Lance I made to Dick Armey years ago (sadly, he never took it up!  I sent a whole position paper and everything!):  Lance!  Come do my job for a year.  I'll do yours.  We can trade salaries or not, your call.  Then you tell me how much I hate children, okay?