In an article in The Atlantic, Dana Goldstein explains the reasons for tenure–mainly to protect against politically motivated hiring and firing–and she assesses the likely effects of the decision.
She agrees that California’s current timeframe for tenure decisions is far too brief. Teachers need at least three years to demonstrate that they are qualified for the protection of tenure.
But “Is the premise of Treu’s ruling correct? Will axing tenure and seniority lead directly to better test scores and higher lifetime earnings for poor kids?”
She concludes that: “Getting rid of these bad laws may do little to systemically raise student achievement. For high-poverty schools, hiring is at least as big of a challenge as firing, and the Vergara decision does nothing to make it easier for the most struggling schools to attract or retain the best teacher candidates.”
And she nails her argument here:
“The lesson here is that California’s tenure policies may be insensible, but they aren’t the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the state’s middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the country’s most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why, ranging from plain old racism and classism to the higher principal turnover that turns poor schools into chaotic workplaces that mature teachers avoid. The schools with the most poverty are also more likely to focus on standardized test prep, which teachers dislike. Plus, teachers tend to live in middle-class neighborhoods and may not want a long commute.
“Educational equality is about more than teacher-seniority rules: It is about making the schools that serve poor children more attractive places for the smartest, most ambitious people to spend their careers. To do that, those schools need excellent, stable principals who inspire confidence in great teachers. They need rich curricula that stimulate both adults and children. And ideally, their student bodies should be more socioeconomically integrated so schools are less overwhelmed by the social challenges of poverty. Of course, all that is a tall policy order; much more difficult, it turns out, than overturning tenure laws.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I completely agree. We no longer have tenure-everyone signs “probationary” contracts every year and we have very stringent evaluation systems that include student test scores. I can tell you that we still have kids who struggle, drops in test scores, not nearly enough high school graduates, etc. The idea that this is the cure-all for the education system does not hold weight. I’m sure there is data from the places where they haven’t had tenure in a long time.
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She concludes that: “Getting rid of these bad laws may do little to systemically raise student achievement. For high-poverty schools, hiring is at least as big of a challenge as firing, and the Vergara decision does nothing to make it easier for the most struggling schools to attract or retain the best teacher candidates.”
The best teachers are motivated to work hard in order to have a positive influence on the growth and development of young people. For a very wide range of reasons, high-poverty school environments make this intrinsic goal almost impossible to achieve.
It takes a super-human effort just to tread water in such schools. The apathy, dysfunction, and hoplessness spawned by generational poverty are simply too difficult to overcome for the vast majority of highly talented, and well intentioned young teachers.
This is sad but true.
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This is true. Some of the best teachers I have ever seen teach in high poverty schools. In fact, in my opinion, many of the teachers in high poverty schools can teach circles around those in lower poverty schools (I’ve worked in both settings). The problem is that our definition of “good schools” is so hinged on test scores that high poverty schools will always look like “bad schools.” Teaching in high poverty schools has always been difficult and somewhat thankless, but with this never-ending push to raise test scores, it has become impossible. Add to that the perverse incentives this fixation on test scores brings, and you’ve got an impossible situation. High poverty schools already struggle with funding, and now that funding is cut to schools that have lower test scores, the austerity really hits these schools hard. Frankly, teachers can only teach so long in a place that has high turnover (of both students and teachers), low morale, and such low funding that a teacher practically has to pay for the “privilege” of working there. Better funded schools don’t have to pay for their own copy paper and tissues, but I have to.
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Yep: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/173854/
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She speaks the truth. The writer is anonymous because her statement would seem politically incorrect to anyone who has not taught in an urban, high-poverty system. I find thet this topic (student apathy and chronic misbehavior) is often ignored or avoided on this blog. Teaching in the worst performing schools is a burn-out position for all but the most incredibly dedicated and super-human of teachers; and even they have their eventual breaking point. If you have spent a career in an affluent suburban, district with students from mostly two (biological) parent households, you cannot begin to imagine the stress and dire conditions under which our urban teachers struggle. They are bashed more than any other teachers in the system yet their day to day efforts are nothing short of heroic. It is true missionary work.
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You can only beat your head against the wall so long.
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She’s certainly right that it’s just a step, but it is that. The idea that we can’t do anything because no one thing makes enough a difference is just another excuse for inaction.
Teachers I know don’t want to work with “grossly ineffective” teachers either. There aren’t many, but they are toxic, especially in the very schools that she is talking about.
It has to be possible to protect teachers from arbitrary firing or firing because of high cost without offering lifetime job protection after a few evaluations and strictly seniority based layoffs.
The system of using the courts to prove intent has worked pretty well in other fields. No doubt, it would work better in teaching with unions to support the suits.
I hope teachers get out in front of the effort to redesign these things instead of having it done to them.
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The thing is, how does one define “grossly ineffective?” Is it solely based on test scores? Because if that is the metric, then I don’t want to label teachers effective or ineffective that way.
Teachers HAVE been trying to “redesign” things, as you suggest. Our ideas are ignored. Don’t blame the victim here.
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Can you provide some examples? Honestly interested. What I see is denial that there is an issue, or that it’s important. I agree that test scores alone are not good, but neither is seniority, nor a system that deems 98% of teachers “effective”.
It seems to me that Vergara is asking for reasonable things: more time to evaluate teachers prior to awarding tenure, consideration of factors other than solely seniority for layoffs, and making it easier to get rid of truly horrendous teachers Most of the public will agree with these things, as will many teachers. Using the yardstick of what’s best for kids, it’s hard to argue that these changes would not be an improvement for them. The only thing I’ve heard is that fewer people will go into teaching without these protections, but I just don’t think it’s true Who’d want to go into a profession where you can be hugely effective and work your butt off, but be laid off to protect the job of someone lousy with greater seniority?
I think the statements by the major unions show that their approach on this will be to fight it tooth and nail rather than try to come up with something reasonable. I suppose it’s because the majority of their power comes from what they can offer the most threatened teachers.
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My school district has had teachers discussing and adapting the district teacher evaluation system. We even met at the union offices to discuss and suggest items to go on our evaluation system. We were also heavily involved in the putting our core curricula together before CC came along. I expect that a lot of other districts do the same thing.
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Grossly ineffective should not be defined because it is an inaccurate term.
Ask any student and they can describe the worst teachers in any school system. Their list would include the following, in no particular order, I give you the Seven Deadly Sins of Bad Teaching:
1) Disorganized
2) Unintelligent/poor content knowledge
3) Intellectually and physically lazy
4) Boring/uninspiring
5) Poor coomunication skills
6) Cannot relate to young people’s needs
7) Wrong profession, just dont get it
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To the true plaintiffs, not the shills, it “validates” bringing in teach for america scabs, and churning them every 2 years, and promoting them through the ranks, via bogus masters degrees and the Broad Supe school, and gets “them” into more positions where they can continue to hire their cronies, set low salaries, eliminate retirement, fire everyone at will, ruin the teaching profession, enact legislation, and all of the stuff they are already doing with back-door preferential deals, close public schools, open up charters for profit, oh, and Ka-ching, Ka-ching.
No one is going to want to become a teacher anymore, right? No matter – there will be a steady stream of elite unprepared scabs to churn through because after all, it isn’t about saving the kids, its about favoritism to the elite, erasing their college debt, putting this little slice of “peace corp” on their resumes, and moving on to greener pastures.
Wendy Kopp’s recent spin isn’t that there isn’t a sufficient amount of teachers, its that they are low quality teachers, because they didn’t graduate from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et al. How can someone from a State college’s educational problem POSSIBLY be as good at anything as someone like her majesty, Ms. Kopp and her ilk? Oh, but lets spin it one more time, since TFA really is all about the politics and the money – in Denver TFA is working to 5-week-train and get quickie-lube certifications for illegal aliens, and Arne Duncan and Obama are all for that too. So to listen to her “Koppness” say a) its about the teacher shortage; b) its about the kids. c) its about stupid people becoming teachers, and kids need the best and the brightest…..well, now its about anyone that she can make money on. Perhaps when Obama and Duncan decree that monkeys can teach, Ms. Kopp will give our children Monkey for America.
This case was designed to do one thing – make it easier for “them” to abuse our kids and divert public funds into private profits.
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That was awesome! You hit it on the head. It’s not about the kids it’s about profit.
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You are so right. This decision is just an effort to privatize schools. Honestly, with the new teacher evaluation system schools will probably severely cut the number of continuing contracts they give anyways. As you see the older teachers leave, the districts will not give out that many continuing contracts. A teacher will have to be in the principal’s inner circle to receive that honor. You will see excellent teachers always come up short to get that continuing contract. Some teachers in my district had good test scores, but were marked down for doing too much direct instruction (which is how they got the good test scores.) It has all gotten so silly. . Also, in my district the SLO evaluated teachers are getting higher evaluations than the value added teachers. The SLO teachers know what their tests look like, and the value added teachers do not. But, I don’t think continuing contracts will be as common as they are today. With the unfair practices of this new system, they will be able to withhold tenure from many deserving teachers. It’s sad, but it is true. Again, a young person would have to be crazy to go into this broken profession with low pay and no job security at all.
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Let me guess, do you have the danielson eval where you are highly effective if your kids “teach” each other? Direct instruction is somehow an educational crime
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Well, we have to pave the way for our computer overlords to take over all instruction. The first step is to get teachers used to the idea of not teaching.
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I’ve seen grossly ineffective teachers become department heads and administrators.
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It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. It was ever thus.
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You are so right. A lot of ineffective teachers become principals and department heads. These painful policies go after the good people – those good teachers who you want your kids to have. You think these new policies will get the bad teachers – – – but they don’t….they go after the good people..Young kids would have to be crazy to go into this broken profession with low pay and no job security.
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I agree, its much easier to attack teachers than pull up their sleeves and actually do the work on the local school level to change things. Imposing change from the top by people who don’t even know about education is a recipe for disaster. They are not questioning teach for america 5wk training teachers but teachers in public education need more than 2 yrs before tenure. These actions I repeat have nothing to do with improving student achievement and all to do with a money grab from privateers for their own personal gain.
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Exactly! Can you imagine what wonderful things a school could do, just with the money used to try this case? Field trips, new books for the library, copy paper? And lets not forget the money that the district and state had to put into defending this case, and will have to continue to put into appeals. That money comes directly from school budgets.
And don’t even get me started on the millions of dollars poured into various deform organizations. If these people REALLY cared about schools, they would put the money into the schools.
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I wish the writer would interview the teachers in low income areas. They could share just how difficult it is to teach in these schools. I’m tired of this claim about all of these bad teachers. Someone should interview teachers in detroit’s Eaa. The teachers deserve to be heard. The reformers are defining the argument that there are a bunch of these types of teachers. It is just bull. Most of the teachers work hard and deserve credit for showing up every single day. I’ve lately been seeing stories about teacher attendance and attacks on attendance. No stories ever of the hell teachers may be going through which may lead to stress, sickness, and absences. Just more and more attacks and no praise. Look at Duncan cheering this decision that will only lead to a lesser quality of teachers.
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I disagree that she “nails it.” Far from it. For one thing, she conveniently leaves off the two most important reasons good teachers avoid low-income schools: 1) Personal safety, and 2) The desire to teach, rather than spending all their energy just trying to maintain a modicum of basic discipline. Which kids are more rewarding to teach: highly-engaged college-prep students, or struggling kids among which there are some serious discipline issues?
Perhaps even more glaring, Goldstein makes the oft-repeated error of attributing way too much importance to “teacher quality.” Show me a low-income school and a high-income school — Swap the student bodies, and the high-income kids will still outperform the low-income kids, and probably by the same margins as before. In the end, student motivation to learn, not teachers, is the biggest driver of outcomes.
Lastly, the bit about schools needing to be more socioeconomically integrated is just the usual poppycock. Sitting next to a suburban kid is not going to make one bit of difference to a poor kid. And besides, the suburban kid won’t be sitting there long, because his parents (regardless of race) are not going to tolerate their kids attending unsafe schools or schools where so much energy is spent on dealing with discipline problems that college prep gets short shrift. Mix up the schools any way you like — in ten years, things will be right back where they are now, even if that means a lot more middle-class kids in private schools.
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All good points Jack. I would assert that about half the people operate on self interest and money, meaning, if they are a teacher or parent, they will go where the grass is greenest. The other half operate on a combination of self interest and idealistic notions. They will teach in low income schools or put their kids in integrated schools for the betterment of society, if the conditions are fair, or, up to a point.
As you say, putting your kid in a class where the other 29 kids parents have a fifth grade education? No matter how stellar the teacher, probably won’t work for a middle class kid.
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I think most people are a little idealistic. There are many people who can afford private school but who put their kids in public school in order to let them mix with “normal” kids and not turn into insufferable snobs.
That said, idealism runs on a spectrum, and I believe the number of middle-class people who are so idealistic that they would risk their own children by putting them in even semi-troubled schools is very, very low. Maybe less than 5%.
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“The schools with the most poverty are also more likely to focus on standardized test prep, which teachers dislike.”
In schools with high poverty rates, where I taught for most of the thirty years I was in education, high stakes testing and the most difficult to teach at-risk kids become the vise that squeezes teachers to the breaking point leading to high levels of PTSD and burn out.
The schools where I taught for 27 of those 30 years had poverty rates higher than 70% in addition to the violent street gangs.
How dangerous?
The first school where I taught was in an area so dangerous, the roofs had concertina wire on them to keep the gang kids off (that was 1976), because they climb up in the night and on weekends to chop through the roofs to get into the classrooms where they would steal anything of value. Before they left, the custodians went around and chained and double locked all the classroom doors from the inside. On Mondays, it wasn’t uncommon to arrive at school and find our classroom doors pocked with bullet holes and the parking lot lights shot out. The custodians went around every morning to fill in those holes and paint them over. And this was a grade school. The high school, a few blocks from that elementary school, where I taught the last sixteen years had its own police squad (CPOs) linked by walkie talkies while using peddle bikes to patrol the campus and cover it faster.
At lunch, a sheriff’s squad car would arrive and park on the grass near the lunch area where the kids could see that shotgun attached to the dash and the officers sitting in the front seats watching them through dark glasses. After lunch, the squad car left. It was common seeing the police cars out front of the main office as they picked up kids who were taken away with hand cuffs on.
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This should be required reading for anyone who thinks: 1) Forcing teachers to transfer to rough schools will not result in many such teachers quitting, 2) “Better teachers” will do anything to really make these schools great (or even minimally acceptable), and 3) Socially engineering the schools with forced integration will be tolerated or will do one darn thing to improve things. People who believe such fairytales are living in their own personal la-la land.
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Forced integration will not work. Educated middle class parents no matter what race or color will either move to another city or rebel and go to court. They won’t want their children in the same school with some of the kids I worked with.
This has nothing to do with racism. It’s common sense that a caring, educated parent will not send their child into the lion’s den with pack of hungry lions.
For instance, one year, one of our honor’s kids who lived in the middle class hills on the other side of the barrio was gunned down on a street corner, because her cute gang banger boy friend had gone into hiding and she was the only target the rival gang could find to get back at him for killing one of them. She didn’t belong to any gang. She just fell in love with someone who did and dated him. That wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been at that high school as a student. Not all of the gang bangers are brutes. Some of them are nice guys you end up liking because they are charming even if they don’t want to read or do the school work.
Would you send your young children to schools into a war zone like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan? I know what a war zone is like. I fought in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, and where I taught some of the streets around the schools turned into war zones at night and sometimes during the day. There were areas in that community that the local police wouldn’t even patrol at night. Their squad cards weren’t armored.
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“Forced integration will not work.”
Exactly. Unfortunately, Diane hasn’t gotten the memo on that one.
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It sounds like working as a prison guard at Sing Sing would be more relaxing.
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Maybe, but we still managed to teach the kids who were there to learn and bring a few across from the dark side to start learning. We even had kids who went off to college. I know one who is now a nurse and another who is a lawyer. A couple even became teachers—-they didn’t listen to my warnings.
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The California decision makes no sense since the traditional complaint is that the most experienced (a.k.a tenured) teachers transfer out of high poverty schools as soon as they can, leaving inner city students with perennially high turnover of inexperienced teachers.
We don’t let first year doctors perform the most difficult surgeries right out of med school. Yet we expect brand new teachers to succeed with children who face the most difficult circumstances.
High-poverty student populations NEED highly trained and experienced teachers who’ve developed a full tool box of proven strategies. They deserve tenure, extra pay, and all the safety net supports needed to help these children survive and thrive.
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Bad analogy. The challenge of the most difficult surgeries isn’t that your patients (or their acquaintences) want to kill you. Teachers transfer out of high-poverty schools because they want some job satisfaction and because they want to continue breathing. Instituting a policy that puts the best, most experienced teachers in these schools will only result in most of them quitting. One reason for this is that most of these teachers realize that, despite all their skill and dedication, they will not be able to make a meaningful dent in most of these kids.
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Of course there is the “extra pay”. In a free market model, how much extra pay is required to get equal quality teachers to trade middle class schools for low income schools? 20K, I don’t know, ask Chetty.
It is a more demanding job, which requires more money, in a free market economic model.
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This flies in the face of all we want to believe, but is the stone cold, stark naked truth of urban, high-poverty teaching.
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I found this to be the most frightening aspect of Stephanie Simon’s story on the Vergara decision:
“But Education Secretary Arne Duncan signaled his support for the ongoing campaign to reform hiring and firing laws. He noted that ‘millions of young people in America … are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students.’ And he called the ruling ‘a mandate to fix these problems.’
The Education Department has been slowly drafting a plan to nudge states to better distribute effective teachers.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/california-teachers-tenure-vergara-ruling-unions-107656.html#ixzz34Rmt57sP
Those teachers, judged by VAM, would quickly become “ineffective” and could then be more easily be dispensed with, opening the way for more of Wendy’s 5 week miracle TFA’s. Wonder who’s behind Arne’s latest scheme?
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Compensation for teaching in such difficult schools could be made by exempting any tenured teacher from paying federal and state income taxes. This would not cost poor, underfunded districts one dime, but would result in a significant monetary incentive to attract anf retain good teachers. I doubt that the feds would ever put their money where their mouth is.
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What it matter, though? Are the teachers at the “difficult schools” worse than the teachers are other schools? If the teachers at the difficult schools were better teachers, how much would it improve students’ education? None? A tiny bit? Enough to justify implementing “a significant monetary incentive to attract and retain good teachers”?
These questions — and the even more fundamental question of whether the answers to these questions are knowable — are at the heart of the Vergara case. Is there any agreement among the commenters here about them? My sense is no.
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You have been part of this blog long enough to know that there is very little we all agree on.
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Another thing that gets me is this oft-repeated refrain that our best teachers should be teaching the worst students. Why? Should we stick our best students with the newbies and the soon-to-be washouts? Who is going to do more to generate economic activity in the future: The brainiacs or the juvenile delinquents?
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It is akin to a farmer devoting almost all his attention and resources to the least fertile land that he farms and negecting to attend to the most productive. That would be a strategy that would probably maximise his economic losses.
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I like your thinking, but then the argument would be over which schools were “bad enough” to qualify for the tax exemption. Either one of two things would happen:
– Schools “in the middle” (bad, but not quite bad enough) would get shafted, meaning morale would be low, teachers wouldn’t want to be there, and the schools would actually get worse.
OR
– The definition of “bad enough” would be defined upward to the point that some not-so-bad schools would qualify. Thus, all the best teachers would head to those schools and there still wouldn’t be much incentive to work in the real cesspools.
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Tax exempt schools would be defined by their location (large and small city districts), a poverty rate over 50%, and a minority population over 50%.
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I hear you, but you still run into the same problem. The school with the 49% poverty rate will become the least-attractive school in the district. And what about the school with the 80% poverty rate that is only 30% minority? Do those kids not get help?
Plus, if by “poverty rate” you mean the percentage of kids qualifying for free/reduced lunch (bar for this is actually well above the poverty line), something like 75% of the schools in Alabama would qualify. But teaching in inner-city Birmingham is not the same as teaching in Dogpatch.
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A combined poverty/minority rate of 100%.
My definition was meant to be a starting point of the conversation. The alternative is to do nothing to attract and retain good teachers into very difficult environments. Believe me, they will earn every extra dime.
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Again, I like your thinking, but I just think making it actually work without serious unintended consequences would be extremely difficult. And then you still come back to the problem of whether these high-quality teachers — if they even came — would do any good. It seems to me that in many cases, a “tough” teacher who can more or less control her class would be a much better fit for an inner-city school than a better instructor who has no idea how to handle those kids.
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Must be a small or large city school distyrict to exempt teachers from state and federal taxes.
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NYS Teacher,
I like it. If they can do this for state taxes for employees of startups at universities, why not this?
I also think we need alternative pay schedules that go up more quickly and then start to level off. Same total cost, but greater incentive to stick with it early on.
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Yes to quicker pay scales.
NYC teachers need only 8 years to get to max.
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Until our businesses and government work to support living wages for american families “fixing” schools is a mute point. Let’s start pointing the finger at the real issue….POVERTY! Every billionaire and politician better start with themselves. So sick of these narcissistic goons!
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So if we instituted “living wages” across the board — and ignoring here whether that would actually work economically — do you really think that would cure the pathologies afflicting the kinds of neighborhoods we’re talking about? Please keep in mind that most people in the world would give their right arms to live as well as America’s “poor.”
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Jack, The USA has the highest rate of poverty rate of any industrialized nation. Finland has established mechanisms to support children with their emotional and physical needs to give them at least an attempt to improve their lives.
Maybe you should start with the pathologies that afflict the kinds of neighborhoods billionaires live. If it weren’t for workers billionaires would only have their money to eat. I guess that’s why they need their drone force. And, don’t worry the boyz will continue to import the cheapest labor they can find adding more folks to the welfare lines as they will not have a living wage either.
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It’s an apples and oranges comparison for many reasons, starting with the facts that most of the countries we are compared to are racially-homogeneous mono-cultures who have outsourced their national defense to us. Finland is a grade-A example of that — just try to emmigrate there and see how welcoming they are.
As for the billionaires, they don’t really have that many pathologies, at least not the kind that cause their neighborhoods to be dangerous cesspools. That’s one reason they got to be billionaires.
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The “billionaires’ dangerous cesspools” afflict all Americans. They buy politicians to make tax codes unfair e.g. carried interest, offshore accounts, etc. They legally steal a disproportionate share of resources, contributing little to GDP growth. They take profits from the products that American consumers buy, and invest them in foreign countries so American jobs can be outsourced. They pay for advertising to convince decision makers to favor for-profit schools, owned by convicted criminals. They publish false studies to get policy makers to enact austerity measures, eliminate Social Security, send local tax dollars, earmarked for education to foreign companies. Their media creates the kind of fear that leads to ubiquitous guns, with claims of greater safety while their politicians prohibit guns in the statehouses.
Their lobbyists encourage tax spending on useless military equipment, when it could build an infrastructure for a great America in the future.
They harm Americans far more than “pathologies” in small pockets of the U.S. Those you believe otherwise have been sucked into the Rush Limbaugh school of argumentation. Take anecdotes from small samples and imply great effect, building outrage and fear.
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Finland was ruled by Swedes for some 600 years and then by Russians for another century. They believe in “Finland for the Finns”.
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What makes a good teacher? Is a good teacher the same thing in first grade as a good teacher in 7th or 11th? Is a good teacher in one school automatically a good teacher in another school or community? Should the criteria for a good teacher be the same no matter the surrounding circumstances? Should working conditions be considered? Will an excellent teacher be able to connect with every student? Can a good teacher be good for one student and bad for another? If we only consider the factors that make for quality teaching, are we guaranteeing the success of all students? We throw around the idea of the role of excellent teachers with little agreement on what defines such an individual. Can test scores answer these questions? If we decides what the ideal teacher looks like, is it realistic to expect that all teachers can meet this ideal? Seriously? Read the Danielson checklists. Check out the Marzano material. Read the online job descriptions. I have yet to meet the teacher who meets every single criteria in the highly effective range, but I have met many teachers who are good at what they do.
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