“Tenure is not a guarantee of lifetime employment but a protection against being terminated without due process. It does not protect teachers from being laid off in a recession, nor does it protect them from being fired for incompetence or misconduct. Why does due process matter? Teachers have been fired for all sorts of dubious and non-meritorious reasons: for being of the wrong race or religion, for being gay or belonging to some other disfavored group, for not contributing to the right politician, for not paying a bribe to someone for their job, for speaking out on an issue outside the classroom, for disagreeing with the principal, or simply to make room for a school board member’s sister, nephew, or brother-in-law” (Ravitch 176).
“A 2005 study by the New Teacher Project, the national nonprofit organization that works with school districts to recruit high-quality teachers, examined five urban districts and concluded that seniority-based transfer privileges written into contracts often force principals “to hire large numbers of teachers they do not want and who may not be a good fit for the job and their school.” All but five states have laws giving teachers lifetime tenure after three years or less. While procedures for removing tenured teachers for “just cause” appear in most contracts, the available procedures are so burdensome that they are rarely used. A recent study of Illinois public schools found that, since 1986, an average of just two tenured teachers a year have been removed–in a state with more than 95,000 tenured teachers. The New Teacher Project report cited above found just four tenured teachers out of 70,000 fired for poor performance in the five districts studied” (Hess and West 41).
These two quotes from assigned readings conflict in their opinions on teacher tenure and its relationship to teacher effectiveness. Do you believe tenure should exist for teachers? How many years should it take to get teacher tenure? Which author do you agree with more?
Tenure, like most aspects of the educational system, doesn't have an easy answer or a quick fix. The point that Ravitch makes about teachers wanting protection from unfair termination is valid, but so is the point that Hess and West make about ineffective teachers continuing in the classroom because tenure creates barriers to hiring effective teachers and dismissing ineffective teachers. I would tend to agree more with Hess and West, and would advocate for a new tenure system based not on length of employment, but rather on effectiveness. Although as the collective bargaining readings mention, getting such a system to fly with the teacher unions would probably be extremely difficult because many senior teachers would fight to keep their current job security.
Due process and protection from being fired for trivial reasons is important in any profession. Employees want to be able to work and feel secure in knowing that they'll have a job even if they have a disagreement with the administration. Tenure in higher education has been in place to allow for academic freedom - for professors to be able to study and research possibly controversial topics. However, in K-12 education, teachers are (usually) not doing research, and thus don't need the same type of academic freedom. In K-12 education, tenure is more about creating stability for teachers - which gets back to a conversation from last week's forums about whether stability and risk-aversion are pros or cons in regards to who gets into the teaching profession.
Assuming that we need some sort of protection in place, then comes the question who do we want to keep as teachers, who do we want to give stability to? While teaching quality does correlate with experience for the first few years, in general after the first three years, there is little experience-related improvement (as mentioned in the Photo Finish reading). So if we were able to actually sort and select out the ineffective teachers at the end of three years, then instituting tenure after that might make sense. Or perhaps some way of giving short-term tenure to teachers that show their effectiveness, renewable as they continue to be effective? Having tenure/seniority based on effectiveness rather than work length would also help with the issue of principals feeling like they have to hire undesirable teachers. (Of course, with this system, there's still the issue of measuring effectiveness effectively...)
The other issue to change with tenure would be the process of due process. While we don't want teachers being fired willy nilly, we do want principals to be able to move ineffective teachers out of the profession. As the Great Teaching reading shows, the difference between an effective teacher and an ineffective one can be huge and long-lasting for children. Perhaps if an outside group evaluates ineffective teachers and decides whether they can be coached or need to be let go. That might get rid of some of the potential 'the principal fired me because she doesn't like me' issues. Although it does increase costs and bring in a third party, which could be more hassle than the principal wants and thus she just lets the teacher continue.
Also interesting links from Lana's post -
http://cecr.ed.gov/pdfs/CECR_MCPS.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/education/06oneducation.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Also...
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