Arthur Goldstein, a high school teacher of English as a Second Language in New York City, explains in this article that good teachers need tenure too.
Goldstein gives examples of teachers who were denied tenure because they stood up for the rights of their students.
When he made demands on behalf of his students, only tenure protected him from being fired.
He writes:
“Shortly thereafter, I requested books for my students. For some reason, they were unavailable. My colleagues could get books, but I couldn’t. By then I had less than one class set, so students had to share them.
“Months later, I learned the United Federation of Teachers contract said the school had to provide supplies. I threatened to file a grievance, something I had never done up to that point. A week after my threat, my kids got two brand-new class sets of books.
“Tenure doesn’t only protect the so-called bad apples, or teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. It protects all teachers. This is a tough job, and despite what you read in the papers, it also entails advocating for our students, your kids, whether or not the administration is comfortable with it.
“I meet passionate and effective teachers everywhere I go. How many will stand up for your kids when schools don’t provide the services they need? How many will demand deserving kids pass classes even if they fail a standardized test? How many will tell state Education Commissioner John King that failing 70% of New York City’s students is not only counterintuitive, but also counterproductive?
“It’s hard to say. Abolish tenure and that number will drop very close to zero.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Again, no K-12 teacher has “tenure”. We may have due process rights, and as many have found out that is more of a kangaroo court setting with the administration usually picking one of its own to be the “impartial” arbiter. Those of us who have been vocal about these educational malpractices foisted upon us since NCLB and who have been subjected to the process know what a sham it can be. And with the self-vaunted MO NEA, being in bed with the administration, counseling you to look for another job in another district instead of fighting these malpractices, well. . . .
Duane, I thought as you do until recently when I found that teachers have more than “due process” which is what almost all government employees have. Teachers have permanent status after a few years, and this is described as “tenure” by most experts, as well as the dictionary. While it is true, that it is not the same type of tenure enjoyed by college professors and some judges, it does offer a strong type of job security. Yes, a teacher can be dismissed if a process is followed, but in real life terms, it is very difficult to dismiss a teacher for poor job performance.
Linda,
We’ll have to agree to disagree whether it is difficult to dismiss a teacher-for any reason-because I can show you a method that would get rid of a teacher in less than a month and a half. I’ve seen it done many times and have heard administrators brag about it (pretty sad that bragging, eh). I’d prefer not to “let the cat out of the bag” so to speak. If you would like to know how, just send a stamped self addressed envelope to, oops, that’s my night job to say that, feel free to contact me at dswacker@centurytel.net.
Now, maybe different states have different laws that account for our differing perceptions but here in the Show Me State it is quite easy to get rid of a “permanent status” teacher.
Not true that it’s difficult to dismiss a teacher for “poor job performance”, but even if it were most who haven’t steadfastness, determination along with a love for both learning and teaching leave teaching long before they are deemed as having a poor job performance. It’s one of the most arduous and difficult careers even when somone is determined to continue…it’s not a place to coast….you’d be eaten up and spit out. What’s unfortunate in all of this is that teachers are made not born. It takes at least 10 years before greatness is even possible and too many leave the profession long before they find their greatness. As with anything else, what is great for one child is poor for another. Perhaps, we learn least from those teachers in the middle, the one’s we can’t remember. Those on either side of the sprectrum we actually learn quite a lot from.
One of the most effective techniques to get rid of a teacher is to make her life miserable:
1) transfers
2) grade level changes
3) substitute duties
Have I let the cat out of the bag?
NJ Teacher
There was another tactic used by the district where I taught for thirty years. They would assign the teachers they wanted to get rid of to five preps in five different classrooms forcing the teacher to move five times a day from room to room with a different prep for each class. They would also load each class with kids who caused the most problems.
The average teacher not on the target list taught in one room with one prep for all five classes. The target list included the rare incompetent teacher and then those who were too outspoken against flawed policies administration was forcing on the schools—which was an annual nightmare as one fad after another interrupted the rational teaching process.
When it didn’t work for one French teacher, who was incompetent (and we all knew it), the district assigned her to both high schools. She taught three sections in three different rooms at the HS where I taught and then at lunch she had about thirty minutes to drive across town to the other HS where she taught two sections in two different rooms.
She attempted to file a grievance through the local union but support was denied, because we knew she had to go, and the district didn’t want to take the time and all the paperwork to document for a due process court case, becasue this teacher was going to court. She knew she was incompetent too, but was desperate to hold on to her job and not become unemployed.
That did the trick. She left teaching for good.
Bull. They don’t have lifetime jobs. It is the SAME thing as other public employees, so stop lying about it. In many states, post-probationary status is even CALLED “tenure.” You ONLY have the “right” to a hearing if you are “dismissed.” Teachers have NO real protections at all. Unlike you, I KNOW what I am talking about. I have been through the administrative hearing process and “lost” thanks to rigging by the school district, so I know the process intimately. You do NOT and it shows.
It is EASY to remove teachers. School districts use all kinds of jargon in order to claim they “dismiss” “few” teachers. They know good and well dumped teachers most often take severance agreements called “settlements” in exchange for not promising to sue a school district. Those aren’t included in their dubious “statistics” about how few teachers are “dismissed.”
Such due process “rights” exist in public employment to prevent favoritism by supervisors. A public sector job like teaching is considered a property right, which is something I was taught in the very first education course I ever took in college.
What “experts” say they have “permanent status”? Somebody who doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.
Almost ALL employees, both public and private sector, are probationary when they start. With the sole exception of professors, the probationary period for teachers is far longer than for other public employees.
I get so sick and tired of having to explain something that I have knowledge of and people still persist in peddling lies about the mythical “job security” teachers have.
I meant to say in many states, post-probationary status ISN’T called “tenure.” There is nothing whatsoever unique here with teachers. School districts supposedly operate under administrative law, the same as other public sectors. In reality, they most often operate ABOVE the law.
I am typing early in the morning. Teachers take “settlements” in exchange for a promise NOT to sue a school district. However, lots and lots of private businesses have the same thing. You have to sign a release form in order to get the severance money which says you will not sue a business. Same thing with a school district. School districts LOVE these severance agreements because it save them money on lawsuits and hearings.
NJTeacher,
No, you didn’t let the cat out of the bag. It’s something else.
I don’t doubt what you are saying, Duane because I too know that it is possible to dismiss a “permanent status” teacher. I am arguing semantics. Teachers ARE considered to have “tenure” by experts, by the courts, and according to the dictionary.
By “semantics” I agree with you. Unfortunately the semantics don’t coincide with the reality of the situation and far too many folks have been lead to believe that it is next to impossible to get rid of a teacher, and even a good one as AG points out, and it’s not, it’s actually quite easy..
B.S. You are making stuff up. Stop it. You don’t even know what you are talking about. “Tenure” applies only to college and university professors because of a concept called “academic freedom.” It exists for both public and private universities and colleges. Teachers in K-12 have no real protections from termination if an administrator is bent on it.
You just make it up. Because some people call it “tenure” doesn’t mean it IS “tenure.” Tenure doesn’t exist for K-12 teachers, period.
The new era of management by objectives and laser-like focus only outcomes means that the practice of shorting teachers and students on resources is embedded in the politics and policies of funding. Tenure might offer some protections, but thanks to economists–the experts on education–the slogans “Throwing more money at schools will not improve them” and “Results not excuses” can and will be used to to intimidate teachers. Teachers should not have to file a grievance, or threaten to, in order to do their work.
Even with tenure, the principal has an incredible amount of power over the teachers. If you run afoul of some petty tyrant, he can arbitrarily move you to another school and another grade level within the district and there’s not too much you can do about it. The petty tyrants are often very thin skinned and need constant ego feeding to boost their insatiable need for toadies and yes-men. No one wants to have a toxic relationship with someone you face and work with every day, especially the person who observes and evaluates you, that’s why most teachers try not to be too confrontational with the petty tyrant type of principal. I am not saying that most principals are dictators but it does happen.
I have found it to be more common since NCLB. Petty tyrants are drawn to the reformist love of humiliation, manipulation, constant harassment, and general bullying of employees. These are the types that have risen quickly and been promoted into ‘leadership’ positions in service of RTTT, CCSS, and all the businessy nonsense that has taken over education.
Still, this is a good article. I don’t think parents understand how much advocacy teachers have to do for students.
In the Vergara trial—I think the verdict was bought and paid for in some way—the judge’s verdict was based on unproven theories that a few incompetent teachers would ruin a child’s ability to earn an education. The numbers presented in one theory were one to two percent of teachers could be incompetent—not “are incompeten” but “could be incompetent” because of classroom observations of one man over a period of years.
First, how many teachers can one person observe long enough to form a valid judgement and how long should each observation be? What if the teacher was having a bad day and the other 179 instructional days were perfect?
Anyway, let’s look at a few numbers based on the 2011-12 school year in California:
There were 6,220,993 students enrolled and attending 10,296 public schools. Another 438,474 attended 1,019 Charter schools.
There were 300,140 teachers in the public schools. If we go with the 1 to 2 percent observational guesstimate, that means 3,001 to 6,223 teachers might be incompetent, but there are 10,296 schools, so that means thousands of schools don’t have even one incompetent teacher, but the teachers in those schools risk losing legal due process rights that would allow them to challenge any accusations made against them that they were incompetence.
In other words, 292,917 to 297,139 could be fired for any reason at any time and there would be no way for the teacher to defend the accusations made against them.
If the Vergara ruling survives, every teacher in California would all be at risk of being fired at any moment by an administrator who could be incompetent or be stooge owned by the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, TFA, etc who had walking orders to get rid of as many teachers as possible and replace them with younger, less incompetent teachers.
It’s obvious that Bill Gates is in charge of deciding how many teachers should go, because it is his “rank and yank” system that is part of the Common Core agenda and all anyone has to do is look at the arbitrary numbers Bill Gates set in place at Microsoft to judge how many had to be incompetent and go to be replaced by another crop who had to prove their competence. That anal arbitrary nubmer that Gates must have pulled out of his crotch was 25% with no evidence to support the fact that so many Microsoft employee were actually incompetent.
In conclusion, it’s obvious where this is going. If President Obama’s partner in crime, Bill Gates, has his way, eventually 25% of public school teachers—not just the one to two percent who are alleged to be incompetent without any evidence to support that claim— would have to lose their jobs annually all based on standardized test scores.
If you read the recent headlines, Microsoft will lay off 18,000 workers this year in addition to 12,500 associated with the Nokia Device and Services team it acquired earlier this year. Microsoft has almost 130,000 employes across the world—the number losing their jobs is almost 24%.
How many teachers in California stand to lose their jobs annually and have to be replaced using the Gates “rank and yank” system? The answer is about 75,000 annually. At that annual rate, every four years, California’s public schools would get rid of 300,140 teachers for a complete possible turnover in every school.
This is all based on two unproven theories—with crucial evidence—that both are horribly wrong headed and when implemented they create nothign but havoc and chaos.
What are the odds of one of those 6.2 million students ending up in a classroom with one of those estimated 3,001 to 6,223 so-called incompetent teachers with no proven, accepted, valid method to judge the teacher properly?
Does anyone have an answer?
What about the odds of a teacher ending up with incompetent students who have dysfunctional, incompetent parents? Does anyone have a theory for that number? I think we could start with the number of children living in poverty and/or who have severe learning disabilities.
These numbers might help: California’s child poverty rates for Latinos (31.2%) and African Americans (33.4%) are much higher than the rates among Asians (13.2%) and whites (10.1%). The child poverty rate in families where neither parent has a high school diploma is high in California (48.5%).
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=721
In addition, it might help to compare the poverty rates with the on-time high school graduation rates in California (2011-2012):
Asian/Pacific Islander 90%
White 86%
Hispanic 73%
Black 66%
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-high-school-graduation-rates-by-race-ethnicity.html
Speaking of textbooks, http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/why-poor-schools-can-t-win-at-standardized-testing/374287/
I might add to this if I may. Over and over I read about charter schools where whole families are hired by the owner. Imagine if a really good teacher didn’t have tenure and the principal wanted to give that job to a buddy or cousin or friend. It’s so easy to make up some complaint and out goes the good teacher in comes the incompetent buddy. Or if that principal just doesn’t like you. You do a good job but you don’t kiss up enough, we all know those kinds of principals. They reward so so teachers because those teachers spend an inordinate amount of time chatting up the principal and flattering them and well you know the type. The tenure protects good teachers from bad principals, unjust decisions about their class and students, nasty sick parents, angry vengeful students etc. In a perfect world where people played fairly it wouldn’t be necessary but we are far far away from that perfect world in ecucation..
It doesn’t have to be theoretical. It happened to my husband. We’re in a Right to Work state, and my husband had been working for a charter school for about six months. One day, he discovered that a student had been accessing pornography on a school computer. Upon further searching, my husband learned that this student had been accessing the pornography for about six months. It was September, and the student had been in my husband’s class for about three weeks. My husband went to the administration and reported the student. Within two days of that incident, my husband was fired. The reasoning? Lack of supervision. Nothing happened to the student or to the teacher who had the student the previous year.
About a week before, my husband said that in a meeting, it was reported that the school had overestimated the number of students the school had that year, and as a result, had too many teachers for the budget. I firmly believe that the charter management company (Academica) needed someone to do something that they could fire a teacher for, so that they could stay under budget. It was better that a teacher was fired rather than laid-off, so that the company didn’t have to pay for unemployment. My husband was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I tell this story to teachers all the time, but people refuse to believe that this sort of thing could happen to them. I argue until I’m blue in the face that we need to fight to keep tenure, but I’m not listened to.
Lloyd and Julie, You both are right on the mark. Continuing contracts protect teachers from dictator principals. I had 29 years of very good principals. I was very, very blessed. My beloved principal was replaced this past school year by one of the worst principals I’ve ever seen in my life. He is unfriendly, rude, uncaring, extremely arrogant, doesn’t even know students by name, and seems to target the older teachers in the new teacher evaluation system. The environment of my school, once happy, is now toxic with teachers turning against one another and following the follies of this ineffective principal without question. Teachers who were always friendly to you turn their heads and do not speak because they know you are an older teacher and have heard through the grapevine that you are being targeted for no reason. They quickly pass you in the hall because they do not want to be seen talking with you. They do not want to be targeted next for no reason. I can’t believe it is the same school building that I so happily taught in for so many years. A great working environment can turn into a terrible working environment overnight. It is all very sad, but it is happening in more public schools today than we know. The only friend of a teacher in this sad situation is the teachers’ union.
Many younger teachers believe that they do not need the teachers’ union because they are excellent teachers. This is so false! I am 51 years old, have hours beyond a master’s degree, have consistently HIGH test scores for my school district, and spend HOURS of overtime hours at my school building. I also dote on my students, have provided medical care for my students, and am highly requested by parents for their children. None of this matters. When you get a dictator principal they treat you badly, mark you down for not using silly group teaching techniques on “Race to the Bottom” teacher evaluation, BECAUSE THEY CAN. THEY ARE ON A POWER TRIP.
Honestly, without teachers’ unions and continuing contracts, the career educator status of our profession will die. For 29 years I never had to worry about unfair bosses, but at the end of my career I clearly saw how unfairly a teacher can get treated. There are far too many personalities for a teacher to deal with on a daily basis to not have due process when something goes wrong. Without teachers’ unions teachers will get their dismissal papers at the end of their 11th or 12th year of teaching, if they can get that far. Also, our teaching profession is designed that once we lose our jobs in one school district, it is very unlikely that we will ever teach again. Unlike most professions, we can’t relocate to another state and go looking for a new job in our trade.
Without positive changes in our states, I am very afraid that we will not recognize the public schools in 10-15 years. As they get rid of the older teachers like me who had the right of due process, they will try very hard to not even give continuing contracts to teachers based on the unfair new teacher evaluation process. I have already seen good teachers reaching for the continuing contract status to be denied and walked out the door. They become a bad teacher overnight. The evil politicians have already darkened the reputation of our professions, and many young people are turning away from the profession all together. They cannot invest $100,000 in student loans to make $33,000 per year and then have the threat of being fired every 3 years without any job security at all. Who in their right minds could take this risk?
They don’t really protect teachers at all but school districts from civil suits by traditionally putting a brake on a principal’s worst impulses to get rid of teachers for frivolous reasons. Just because it wasn’t used much in the past doesn’t mean principals COULDN’T use it. That is what is missing here with people who don’t know about this. Principals in the past didn’t get rid of teachers except in extreme circumstances because they understood staff and school morale was important. Now administrators simply don’t care.
If people want to complain about ironclad job security, look no further than school principals. They are unique in the economy because they can do pretty much what they want, when they want to do it without any real consequences for their actions. My last two principals were demoted and reassigned, and the one who was demoted for having sex with subordinates was recently “promoted” to a site administrator. This despite being a demonstrably unfit principal who should have had his license revoked.
Don’t even lecture me about how “difficult” it is to “fire” a teacher. I know this process and you don’t.
There’s actually an academic study of due process cases regarding public school teachers. I’m not going to hunt for it on Google now and cite it here but I have cited it on my Blog in one of the hundreds of posts there.
This national study by a university researcher proved that most of due process cases when they go to court favor the districts and the teachers are usually found incompetent and are fired becasue the districts did their its homework and had the paper trail evidence to prove their claims.
But in “Teacher Wars,” Dana Goldstein mentions that many principles are reluctant to go after even known incompetent teachers because the principals are aware of the circumstances and that often it isn’t the teachers fault but because of a flaw in American public education that doesn’t support teachers or offer remediation training as they do in Finland and most other developed nations.
The U.S. went down its own Machiavellian path that most developed and developing countries have not followed, and that path started with Reagan’s A Nation at Risk report that asserted that America’s public schools were failing—when the whole evidence proves they weren’t. The next dagger in the back was NCLB followed by Obama’s even worse Race to the Top.
In most other countries when teachers are found to lack classroom management skills and/or don’t use proper methods to teach, they are offered support from mentors. The goal is to help them become efficient teachers instead of create the revolving door that exists in the United States were quotas are being set to get rid of, for instance 25% of teachers annually, and close schools that don’t reach the ridiculous and impossible goals imposed by the Obama administrator that 100% of all kids by age 17/18 must be college/career ready.
In Goldstein’s book, “The Teacher Wars”, in the last chapter, she documents the fact that there have been districts and public schools in the U.S., that followed the more supportive method of teaching used in countries like Finland instead of dumping 25 % of teachers annually based on the Lowest average of student test scores. These schools offered supportive mentoring programs to help teachers improve. But in the U.S., most of these programs were closed by superintendents of state governments that have been influenced—and often bribed with grants—from the Gates Foundation or from other viscous billionaire oligarchs like the Koch brothers or Walton family.
TFA has been specially destructive of positive and supportive programs. Goldstein points out that TFA, instead of offering positive support and proper training after the limited five weeks they do offer, instead focuses on building political influence to the point where they are stuffing the staffs of Congressman with their brainwashed graduates who have already spent their two years teaching and on now on their way to fortune and fame as TFA promised.
In fact, Goldstein points out other very successful teacher training programs that have an extremely high retention rate but these programs don’t focus on building political influence. They focus on turning out teachers who are competent and have more skills to survive the classroom challenges.
I’m sure Diane is familiar with the UTR programs that offer one full year of training under the mentor ship of master teachers with follow on support after the full year with an urban teacher residency program. Goldstein mentions some very disturbing numbers about TFA when compared to UTR trained teachers who have an 87 percent retention rate at four years compared to the loss of two-thirds of TFA’s five week wonders.
Pull Quote: “Nationwide, urban teacher residencies have an 87 percent retention rate at four years, compared to the loss of nearly half of all new urban teachers over a simliar period of time, and two-third of Teach for American teachers.”
UTR’s spend a full year working full-time in a mentor teacher’s classroom compared to five weeks of summer training for TFA drones, who are groomed to move out of teaching after two years to become covert lobbyists for TFA as they infiltrate governments at the state and federal level.
In 1975, I signed up for a program that sounds like it was a UTR. I was assigned for one full year to a paid position in the fifth grade classroom of a master teacher who guided me step by step to take over teaching her classes, under her supervision, by the end of that school year, and thanks to that, I stayed in teaching for thirty years working int he same schools that were loaded with poverty rates above 70 percent and plagued by violent street gangs. My master teachers elementary school was in the same community and school district.
In addition, Goldstein mentions that the year-long residency in a mentor’s classroom is also a requirement in high-achieving nations like Finland and Shanghai—a fact that has been ignored in the United States all the way to the White House and by cold, inhuman monsters like Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family and Eli Broad.
I wasn’t referring to you, Sad Teacher, in my last sentence about lecturing on how hard it supposedly is to remove a teacher. I was making a general statement to people who still peddle the “job security” fiction.
Actually, if you can do it, you CAN relocate. You generally can’t teach in the state where you were “dismissed” even if your license isn’t sanctioned because of the incestuous network that is public education. The problem is that there is still a massive glut of unemployed teachers, and for teachers who have been dumped, it is almost impossible to get past the blackballing questions on job applications which should be illegal.
Right now if you lie on the application, you can have sanctions on your license. If you answer “yes,” you simply don’t make the cut for an interview. This should not be allowed; school districts can do criminal background checks and license checks to weed out dangerous or unfit candidates. A personality conflict with a principal or a situation where a principal throws you under the bus to cover his or her own incompetence (my situation) should not be grounds to destroy a career.
It’s usually the good teachers or older teachers or experienced teachers who are run out of the profession. Once run out, it is almost impossible for a teacher to resume a career. Districts around the country have all kinds of ways to ensure a teacher can’t resume a career, be it through “do not rehire” status, or through poor references by principals, or through the weeding out questions on job applications. A “yes” answer to those disclosure questions, by the way, guarantees you don’t make the cut for an interview, even for a so-called “high needs” area. It is assumed by districts that if you are a “good” teacher, you wouldn’t be let go, but that ignores the absolutely filthy office politics in the school workplace or the unchecked power of principals, who unlike teachers have virtual ironclad job security.
Yes, in this day and age there are so many teachers being fired unfairly and it is destroying their careers. There is no other profession where your entire career is destroyed because you were rated poorly by ONE person for whatever reason (budget problems, idiot principal, poor circumstance). The private sector hires people and does what it can to keep staff or else it is total chaos. The teaching field has been destroyed by reformers and ridiculous evaluation systems. With the correct guidance and mentoring most people can be effective teachers. Now, teachers are treated like garbage by like what Lloyd described as the inhuman reformers that are so rich and well-connected that they have forgotten what it is like to worry about careers and day to day survival. It shouldn’t be like this. So sad. Your experience and Sad Teacher’s says it all. The biggest problem though is that teachers all across America have sat by and taken it.(except Chicago).
We work with tutors, many, if not most of whom are classroom teachers in local schools in the Washington, D.C. area.
From our conversations with our tutors who also are school teachers, many of them do agree with Goldstein’s points. Tenure helps protect the strong performers who go to bat for their students, often while facing adversity. This includes issues like office politics, an issue which often isn’t thought of very much in a profession like education, because teachers spend much of their time working with children.
At the same time, tenure could also protect some of the lower performers who can manage to hide their weakness effectively towards administrators. So while tenure can be a double-edged sword, but it definitely is something that good teachers may need during their careers as Goldstein pointed out.