Mercedes Schneider reviews a new report from the Education Research Alliance in New Orleans. The bottom line: When Louisiana eliminated tenure, teacher turnover increased.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Removing job security encourages attrition. Other research has shown that instability and teacher churn are not good for teaching and learning.
Schneider writes:
“In 2012, the Louisiana legislature passed Act 1, commonly known as the “teacher tenure law.” Moreover, the Louisiana State Department of Education (LDOE) has translated Act 1 into an evaluation system whereby 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is connected to “student learning”– the bottom line of which is student test score outcomes.
Act 1 began in 2012 as House Bill 974. The reason it is called Act 1 is that the 2012 Louisiana legislature rammed it though as the first act, with calculated speed, amid an atmosphere dripping with then-Governor Bobby Jindal’s business-and-industry-backed intention to bring “accountability” in the evaluating of the state’s teachers.
Once 2012 hit, Louisiana teachers began considering how and when to leave the profession. And each year beginning with 2012, Louisiana’s teacher workforce has experienced a noticeable exit of many experienced, seasoned teachers who otherwise would not have likely chosen to leave the profession so soon.
Thus, it comes as no surprise to me that a February 22, 2017, study by the Education Research Alliance (ERA) for New Orleans has found that based on teacher data from 2005 to 2012, Louisiana teachers did indeed begin leaving at a more notable rate, with those retirement-eligible comprising the greatest number of exiters.
Having 25+ years of employment, this group also happened to be the most experienced.
Moreover, it should come as no surprise that schools graded “F” lost the highest number of teachers in the post-Act-1 exit.”
The most experienced teachers left. The leavers disproportionately taught in high-needs schools. Can the state replace? The state seems to have succeeded in creating. A teacher shortage in hard-to-staff schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am a retired CA teacher. I have very mixed feelings about tenure. On the one hand it protects teachers from administrators who just don’t like them. On the other hand it protects teachers who are not doing their job and, in some cases, are abusive. In CA it is almost impossible to remove a tenured teacher.
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I am a working CA teacher. I have seen teachers dismissed — for valid and invalid reasons — with frightening regularity.
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It should not be a snap of the fingers to deprive someone of the right to practice their profession. It should require documentation by an administrator, following the guidelines agreed to by both parties to a contract. In my experience, when an administrator claims it impossible to fire a teacher, the translation is the administrator does not want to do his/her job of documenting the teacher’s shortcomings.
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Where ideology is in charge, research is only considered significant if it supports that ideology.
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It helps to define what the word teacher “Tenure” means when it comes to K-12 public education.
Due Process Rights would be the correct term.
When we talk about “Tenure: among university professors, the definition is different than due process rights for K-12 public school teachers.
Due process, aka Tenure, means teachers can’t be fired without cause and cause must be proven with evidence and in a court of law if the teacher demands it.
K-12 teachers can be fired if the school district administration follows the legal steps spelled out by due process laws.
Due process, aka Tenure, does not protect incompetent teachers.
Find Law.com explains how this “tenure” or Due Process works.
Teacher Tenure
“Most states protect teachers in public schools from arbitrary dismissal through tenure statutes. Under these tenure statutes, once a teacher has attained tenure, his or her contract renews automatically each year. School districts may dismiss tenured teachers only by a showing of cause, after following such procedural requirements as providing notice to the teacher, specifying the charges against the teacher, and providing the teacher with a meaningful hearing. Most tenure statutes require teachers to remain employed during a probationary period for a certain number of years. Once this probationary period has ended, teachers in some states will earn tenure automatically. In other states, the local school board must take some action to grant tenure to the teacher, often at the conclusion of a review of the teacher’s performance. Tenure also provides some protection for teachers against demotion, salary reductions, and other discipline. However, tenure does not guarantee that a teacher may retain a particular position, such as a coaching position, nor does it provide indefinite employment.”
http://education.findlaw.com/teachers-rights/teachers-rights-tenure-and-dismissal.html
For decades the public has been misled by alternative hate mongering fake news sites that spew out propaganda that uses alternative facts that allege for K-12 public school teachers, that “tenure” means they can’t be fired for any reason.
That is not TRUE.
Find Law.com reports what “Dismissal for Cause” is:
A school must show cause in order to dismiss a teacher who has attained tenure status. Some state statutes provide a list of circumstances where a school may dismiss a teacher. These circumstances are similar to those in which a state agency may revoke a teacher’s certification. Some causes for dismissal include the following:
Under due process laws, the malignant narcissist in the White House and most of his deplorable cabinet could lose their White House job for at least five of the items on that previous list of seven.
Due Process is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution (thanks to FindLaw.com for this information)
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (Ratification on July 9, 1968 when LBJ was still president), like its counterpart in the Fifth Amendment (Ratification on December 15, 1791 when George Washington was still president), provides that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This clause applies to public school districts and provides the minimum procedural requirements that each public school district must satisfy when dismissing a teacher who has attained tenure. Note that in this context, due process does not prescribe the reasons why a teacher may be dismissed, but rather it prescribes the procedures a school must follow to dismiss a teacher. Note also that many state statutory provisions for dismissing a teacher actually exceed the minimum requirements under the Due Process Clause.
The United States Supreme Court case of Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill is the leading case involving the question of what process is due under the Constitution. This case provides that a tenured teacher must be given oral or written notice of the dismissal and the charges against him or her, an explanation of the evidence obtained by the employer, and an opportunity for a fair and meaningful hearing.
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You’re absolutely right about clarifying the “tenure” refers to due process. Many anti-union commenters appear to believe that tenure means a tenured teacher who drives a steamroller through the playground at recess is still guaranteed a job. The terms must be clarified so even casual observers are clear about the specific issues that are being discussed.
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There may be people who think that a teacher with tenure cannot be fired, period. My sense is that most people believe that teachers with tenure “effectively” cannot be fired for performance reasons, meaning that it is very difficult to fire a tenured teacher for performance reasons. Whether or not one agrees that it is “difficult” to fire a tenured teacher (what is “difficult”? how “difficult” is “too difficult”?) for poor performance, the numbers that I’ve seen indicate that it happens rarely, at least in NYC.
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I read a piece written by a lawyer who wanted to know if teachers could be fired using due process and she discovered after much research in more than one state by checking actual court cases and discovered that most teachers that end up in the due process pipeline do lose their jobs.
I don’t have that link memorized but it is somewhere on my Crazy Normal blog, because I mentioned the results of this lawyers research in a blog post and I provided link to what she wrote.
This lawyer wrote that when school districts follow the law step-by-step, due process works.
The reason critics don’t like this is because they want the power to fire someone without due process. They don’t want to take the time to prove someone is incompetent. It takes time and money to pay for that time to gather the evidence needed.
If incompetent teachers remain in the system, it is not the fault of due process but the fault of administrators and/or politics.
To get rid of due process means any teacher, even the best teachers, can be fired for no reason making it much easier to purge the system of teachers that don’t think like Betsy DeVos or Bill Gates.
The question is how many teachers are incompetent. There never has been a reliable long-term study to determine this. The guestimates I’ve read range from 1 percent (mention in the Vergara trial be alleged expert witnesses from Harvard) to as high as 7 percent (mentioned in a UK piece I read).
So, to easily get rid of that 1-to-7 percent, we take away all job protection for the other 93- to-99 percent.
The end goal of getting rid of due process for teachers is obvious to me. Without any job protection, eventually every teacher that keeps their job will be teaching what the overlords want them to teach and there will be no one standing against the creationists who also think there is no such thing as global warming and maybe even believe the earth is still flat and the sun and stars revolved around our planet.
That will be the end of the civilization as we know it, nd the beginning of the second inquisition led by fake Christians who think all their sins are repeatedly, automatically forgiven because Jesus Christ died on the cross for them.
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It seems likely to me that the numbers vary considerably by state. I have no evidence for that, just a hunch.
In New York at least, it’s very difficult to find good research on this issue because the process is opaque (to the public) and the data isn’t easily accessible.
I’ve never found the that “If incompetent teachers remain in the system, it is not the fault of due process but the fault of administrators and/or politics” very appealing. For one thing, there can be structural impediments in life that technically don’t prohibit people from doing something, but which nonetheless make it marginally more difficult to do that thing and end up having very large effects in the aggregate. Voting is a classic example. To any one person, the concrete upside of voting is almost nil. Elections are almost never decided by just one vote, so from any one person’s perspective, voting is arguably pointless. On the other hand, voting is a pain in the butt, especially when it happens on a day when you have to work. We can yell at non-voters until the cows come home about how they have a personal responsibility to vote, and how they surely could find the time to vote if they really tried. Yet we know that people will go on acting like people, and that election turnouts would probably increase substantially if elections were held on Saturdays rather than Tuesdays.
The economics of whether to fire an employee aren’t the same, but they’re similar. I’ve fired people for performance reasons before. It’s just awful, probably the most unpleasant things I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think I’m an outlier in this — if other things are equal, people who aren’t sadists will always choose not to fire someone over firing someone. And that’s in the private sector where there are essentially no technical hurdles to firing someone. Put some hurdles in place — a lot of paperwork, administrative hearings, interviews, and an awkward period of several months when you have to go on working with the person — and performance-based firings will become extremely rare, limited to only the most extreme cases where the continued employment of the person in question is so disruptive and intolerable that initiating termination proceedings will be worth any amount of inconvenience and unpleasantness. Maybe this is a good way to run a school system — that’s a separate argument. But I don’t buy the idea that tenure rules don’t have a huge impact on the number of terminations.
The other thing I don’t like about the argument that administrators are to blame for the continued employment of incompetent teachers is that it’s a dare that you really wouldn’t want to be taken up on. I don’t think any of us wants a world in which a school system decides you’re right, i.e., where a school system decides that the reason that there are so few terminations is because administrators haven’t been working hard enough to fire people, and that they were going to relentlessly pursue that goal to the maximum of their ability.
I think tenure is a necessary and good policy, overall. But I don’t buy that they don’t have a very big impact on how difficult it is to fire teachers. That’s what tenure is supposed to do, because presumably a world in which it was easy to fire teachers is a world we don’t want.
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Another question to consider is how many teachers start out incompetent and stay incompetent versus how many were competent and then burned out from the pressure.
Inner city teachers working with a high rate of children living in poverty have a higher risk factor for burn-out/PTSD.
Do we punish our combat vets who served in the military because they have PTSD? The malignant narcissist in the White House might do that but the country as a whole doesn’t.
I agree that the rate of lack of competency among teachers varies from state to state since teacher training and support varies from none to some but few have the kind of teacher training and support that works best.
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The problem with the numbers is that many of the teachers that end up in the due process pipeline quit rather than get fired. So then, when someone looks at the numbers of teachers that get fired, the number is very low, and then everyone argues that teachers aren’t ever fired.
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My recollection is that even the number that go into the “pipeline” are pretty low. And of course a lot of people in the private sector get demoralized and quit after a bad review, too.
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Is the tenure removal in nys opaque & data retrieval difficult since their 2012 tenure reform law? We had a tenure reform law enacted the same yr in NJ. It extends the probationary period from 3 yrs to 4 (NYS extended from 2 yrs to 3), spells out evaluation details for teachers & admins, specifies causes for tenure removal. It also reforms pprwk, sets a series of shortened deadlines (cases must be decided w/n 5 mos), &, most significantly, adjudication is performed by arbitration rather than admin courts.
I gather NJ’s reformed sys may not be so opaque, based only on newsppr articles reporting tenure removal details w/links to court cases. The 1st case decided after tenure reform law took effect (against a Paterson elem sch teacher who used physical threats & profanity) was settled in 90 days; school district’s atty reported he was still working on cases that ran as long as 17 mos under the old law.
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Still very opaque in NY. It’s not a data point in the DOE’s annual reporting, and the arbitrations are private and the decisions are not publicly reported. If you want to access them, you have to FOIA them. If you FOIA all of them, you have no way of verifying if you’ve gotten all of them, because the state doesn’t report how many there are. I would guess NJ is the same.
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Lloyd made a salient point about the differences between teaching in Beverly Hills and Compton (not just in the same state, but in the same county). Laws created in far away capitols do not take these differences into account. It is necessary to allow schools to ignore standardized test “outcomes” and work within a system of collectively bargained checks and balances to treat employees and families as fairly as possible, based on local needs. That is justice. Is justice expensive? Too bad.
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But tenured teachers ARE vetted. In most states, teachers have a probationary period of three years, during which time they can be let go without any process at all. This reduces the number of teachers coming into the profession who can’t cut the mustard, and gives principles a good period of time to make appropriate decisions. Applied properly, that process ought to reduce to a small number the tenured teachers likely to fail.
My union did an informal survey of tenured teachers who came up for likely dismissal. It was found that previously ranked “effective” teachers had one of the following personal issues which made them perform badly: divorce, substance abuse, serious illness of themselves or a family member. In a way that affects cubicle dwellers much less, teachers are on stage all day, managing a bunch of “inputs” they do not control – kids, administrators, new and varying demands from the district and the state. Maybe you can hide or diminish these deficits when you work with grownups all day, but with kids, you just can’t.
What ought to be done for professionals who have served well and long, but are faced with personal obstacles such as these? Should they be jettisoned because they are a liability? In a sane system, we’d find a place where their experience and knonwledge base wouldn’t be thrown away.
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Denying tenure is also a way for administrators to keep a flow of low cost teachers in their schools. Even experienced teachers who apply are usually put on step one or two.
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“In most states, teachers have a probationary period of three years, during which time they can be let go without any process at all. This reduces the number of teachers coming into the profession who can’t cut the mustard, and gives principles a good period of time to make appropriate decisions. Applied properly, that process ought to reduce to a small number the tenured teachers likely to fail.”
“Applied properly” is a big variable. In NYC, until the last few years, nearly 100% of teachers up for tenure got tenure — quite a gut-punch for the argument that tenure decisions are a meaningful form of vetting. The percentage plummeted over the last couple years of Bloomberg’s third term, as a result of a Tweed directive. (I’m not sure if the criteria used in tenure decisions were changed at all — it may have just been a directive to “stop giving tenure to so many teachers.”) Not sure if the numbers have gone back up under the Blaz. The main point is the obvious one, which you implied — that tenure may or may not be an effective vetting tool, depending on how it’s done.
Relatedly, there’s the question of whether, in some markets, there’s a big enough supply of qualified teachers to make real vetting desirable.
“Maybe you can hide or diminish these deficits when you work with grownups all day, but with kids, you just can’t.”
Perhaps, but I think there is an equally persuasive argument for the exact opposite conclusion.
I hate the idea of jettisoning anyone, even those who are liabilities, in a society with so little safety netting. Everyone needs dignity.
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FLERP!, Thoughtful comment. I would add that, the fact is, you have to be there in the classroom to understand what’s going on with the teacher-student dynamic, and statistics can be, and usually are “damned lies.”
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Not simple ’cause’ required, but ‘just cause’ which is a much higher standard.
Not an attorney, but while it takes ‘just cause’ to terminate a teacher, it only
requires ‘good cause’, a lesser standard, to terminate a principal. “Cause”
means essentially that the employee can be let go for any reason. (Cause, good cause, just cause.”)
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Not sure where the ‘just’ for teachers vs ‘good’ cause for principals comes from. Neither term is used in NJ tenure law (tenure reform law 2012). Applicable causes are specified, as are all bases for evaluation.
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Tenure is crucial in keeping diversity of thought in education: allow the top-down game to take out any teacher who stands up or speaks out and we will soon end up with…well, what we actually already have in so many of our nation’s test-score “standardized” low-income schools.
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I think they are well aware of the consequences of removing tenure….teacher attrition, turnover, and shortage.
That’s the entire point.
The pathology here is not particularly sophisticated. High teacher turnover and a general lowering of teacher quality lead to a wasteland of bad public schools. A wasteland of bad public schools call out for a savior. The savior will of course be corporations.
They know what they are doing specifically and in detail.
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You are right. That is the logic.
Last I heard there is a new California lawsuit intent on abolishing unions, arguably a defender of due-process for teachers–if they are paying attention.
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Laura,
There is a new lawsuit in California to end tenure. Peter Greene wrote about it and I posted it here about three weeks ago. Can’t recall the name.
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NYSTEACHER: The problem with “top-down” ideological power is that it can and will use the system to destroy the system–that, in this case, supports tenure and due process rights of teachers. That’s what’s going on now in the larger field of our Government.
In that scene, the division of powers, at present, is staying-off that kind of dictator-power, for example, the courts’ power in rejecting the “Muslim ban.” But the Trump people are chipping away as we speak. What will expedite that movement will be unaccountable-for violence. I’m really not sure if Trump is aware of that (though his admiration of Putin and other tin-pot dictators is pretty clear); but I am dead-sure of the intentions of those around him. The use of violence as an avenue to consolidate power quickly is not a given; but it certainly would be stupid of us not to recognize its real possibility just from having read history. It’s an odd time when we trust military over (so called) political minds.
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It’s all part of the ongoing, never ending, ever escalating war on teachers. Public school teachers are the enemy (of the reformers) and must be stomped into dust. The right wing reformer agenda (aided and abetted by Democrats): kill off tenure, decimate seniority, liquidate LIFO, obliterate defined benefit pensions, dice and slice health benefits, off load paid sick leave and oust the unions to the farthest black hole in the universe. Whoopee! (sarcasm alert)
Without tenure and seniority, the older more expensive teachers will have targets on their backs. In NJ, the trial period (before tenure takes effect) is 4 years during which time a teacher can be fired for no reason or any reason. Not good enough for the reformers, they want to be able to fire all teachers, newbie or veteran, for no reason or any reason.
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This is all part of the plan to de-professionalize teaching by making teachers disposable at will employees. The more disruption “reform” inflicts on school districts puts them at greater risk of privatization.
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Joe: “Without tenure and seniority, the older more expensive teachers will have targets on their backs.”
…………….
I worked in Chicago Height, IL for 12 years as an elementary and beginning band music teacher. Then a referendum was held and it didn’t pass, by 6 votes.
I was reassigned to work as a 4th grade teacher in the district because elementary music had been eliminated. I quit, realizing that it would be difficult to teach in a class room (I was certified) without having any planning time. I didn’t feel it would be something I could tolerate and it wouldn’t be fair to the kids.
I left and with that never got tenure again. I went through 4 music jobs in 6 years. I gave each job my best.
One district music teacher told me that I was the 8th music teacher that had been hired and fired. What was happening was that districts were ‘hiring’ and then ‘firing’ music people so that they’d never have to pay higher up on the pay scale. I had a Master’s Degree and years of experience. Two new teachers with only a Bachelor’s Degree could be hired for the same salary.
I gave up and left the country to work overseas in Bolivia and
Malaysia.
I often wonder what other music teachers did when they no longer had tenure and couldn’t find/keep jobs.
The International School of Kuala Lumpur is considered one of the top international schools in the world. I worked there for eight years and eventually had to quit because of a rare medical condition.
I feel for teachers who no longer can get tenure. It means they can be dismissed for any reason. How about the Principal has a relative who needs a job or the district wants to save money, etc., etc.
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Yes and you will never have to pay a pension because you can fire a person at will before they complete the number of years necessary in order to qualify for those pension benefits.
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Where’s that enthusiasm of new teachers that’s been trumpeted as an improvement over the supposed tired approach of aged teachers with experience?
One plus is the savings realized by continually hiring newbies at a lower salary (who burn out after a couple of years and need to be replaced). Then districts (or administrators at charter schools) can repurpose the funds saved into other pockets – perhaps even their own.
The losers are the children and their families who are being rooked out of a quality education all in the name of progress.
Ultimately, a school needs a stable environment full of veteran teachers to mentor the recent hires as well as the mid level teachers who carry the majority of the workload.A top notch principal brings everything up a level. Interference by politicians lowers the quality and results in the self fulfilling prophecy of failure justifying drastic measures which do more harm than good.
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Education is already a challenging field. About half leave within the first five years. We should be figuring out ways to retain qualified, dedicated teachers.
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“When teacher tenure is abolished, teachers leave”…. This herein lies the problem… reformers WANT those “formerly tenured” teachers to leave so they do not have to pay out long-term benefits and pay these teachers the full pensions they are owed (do not forget that teachers pay into their pensions and the process is drawn out such that they mainly benefit only if they stay the duration)!
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“No concept of fundamental law is more basic to individual rights and freedoms than due process. Both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments ensure no person shall be deprived of ‘life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ The due process clause was repeated in the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment to make certain that the right extended to state governments.” “Due process of law in the federal Constitution has four aspects, and each one has been called into play by the courts in litigation involving teachers: 1) substantive due process, 2)procedural due process, 3) the vagueness test, and 4) the irrationality and presumptions test. Each aspect has special meaning in balancing the individual’s interest against the state’s.” (American Public School Law; Alexander and Alexander.)
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Tenure was introduced to protect academic freedom which is important both for the teacher so that she speaks the truth, and for the kids, so that they hear the truth in classrooms. They want to take away tenure so that teachers get corrupted, and they teach whatever they are told so that they can keep their jobs. Then teachers become more and more robotic, and they will be replaceable by computers.
In higher ed we see the same tendency in diminishing tenure. There the problem is not just with corrupted teaching but corrupted research: more and more profs work on projects for private companies which not only don’t benefit the public who pays for the research, but the companies even make the profs keep their research secret.
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Tenure was always the way to grant govtl employees– whose salaries are limited by the public purse by comparison to private-sector employees– a measure of job security to compensate for the salary differential, in an effort to attract qualified employees away from private-sector jobs requiring similar qualifications–for which they would earn 25-30% more– but there would be subject to larger risks, w/employment being more dependent on the whims of the marketplace.
Govtl employee benefits, for a period of 50 yrs or more, were echoed by private-sector union benefits including seniority. But today– tho 1/3 of govtl employees are unionized– as a result of automation & offshoring of mfg, a mere 6.4% of private-sector employees are unionized.
Teachers, as govtl employees, can expect continued and vigorous public sallies against union protections such as tenure. It doesn’t matter that tenure is merely due process: the vast majority of Americans have no such job protections. Gone are the days of well-funded agencies mandated to enforce employment law. Private-sector middle-&-working-class folks work the same long hrs as teachers, w/far less job security; meanwhile a big chunk of their salary goes to pay the salaries of govt employees like teachers.
There are prosperous segments of the US economy– the blue bi-coastal folks– who want & can afford hi-qual unionized public-school teachers. They are buoyed by inner-city poor whose Democratic votes help support unions. In many of those areas, we see tenure-reform laws that respond to abuses.
But an ever-increasing proponderance of middle/working-class citizens — the same folks who tipped the balance toward a Trump victory– have long experienced job insecurity & stagnant wages, yet their RE taxes (which support their school districts) rose thro ’90’s & ’00’s at higher rates than their salaries. In that larger population, we see states slashing public-ed budgets, removing union negotiating rights, promoting Vergara-style anti-tenure laws, opening the ed market to privatization via unmonitored uncapped charters & voucherism.
The elephant in the room since the ’80’s is untrammeled capitalism, a/k/a socializing risk, privatizing profit– brought to you by multiple laws since ’80’s untying Depression-era consumer-risk-protections like anti-trust law, accounting changes prizing short- over long-term profits, tax laws allowing squirreling untaxed profits offshore, separation of consumer-savings institutions from speculative institutions, etc, culminating in Cit-United-decision allowing sale of elected reps to highest bidder…
We could also mention another elephant, the Defense budget, which thanks to Reagan Star-Wars ballooned his predecessor’s defense budget/ deficit by 400%– we almost made it out from under by the end of Clinton’s admin, but since 9/11 defense expenditures have gone sky-hi & expected to stay that way due to projections of continual moderate-scale war [& Trump has plans to scale up defense expenditures.]
All of which goes to lower QOL for the average US citizen. The common good suffers. Because profitable US corporations do not pay their fair share, & because defense takes a bigger bite than is nustified.
I repeat: it does not matter that tenure is just due process to protect underpaid highly-qualified govt employees. Anecdotally, but on-point: my sis as a hard-working 30-yr pubsch teacher-admin could retire today w/far better retirement income & benefits than my family– whose engrg breadwinner (w/more dependents) has equal ed [Master’s] & has worked 43 yrs in the private sector [past retirement age & would love to retire, but worried by the difficulties our kids have becoming self-sufficient in current job climate].
The problem here is that we have a national pie shrunk by global trade, exacerbated by overweening defense expenditures– & those w/the most $ have been freed by US legislation (supported by our citizens) to hog the pie to the detriment of the common good [free hi-qual ed, & more]. Our fight needs to be: (1)get special-interest $ out of US politics to restore democracy and (2)demand that our govt invigorate the labor market & prioritize living-wage jobs.
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But tenure was created for philosophical reasons not economic reasons.
“tenure was seen as a clean government reform after decades of politically influenced teacher appointments, in which schools were part of the patronage machine.” Education historian Diane Ravitch notes that before tenure was adopted in New York City, ward officers could dismiss an entire staff of qualified teachers and replace them with their own choices. With tenure, as former AFT President Albert Shanker noted, “An elected politician can’t say, ‘I’m going to fire you because you didn’t support me in the last election.” ”
…
Tenure also allows teachers to stand up and openly disagree with a boss pushing a faddish but unproven educational practice, without the fear of being fired.
And there is a philosophical reason to get rid of tenure now, so that teachers won’t influence kids in the “wrong way”. It’s of course bs that they want to get rid of teachers who don’t teach well. They want to get rid of teachers who don’t want to teach in the prescribed way. Teachers’ willingness to teach their own way is broken by keeping them busy with common core, tests, score keeping, VAMming, and the worst of all: insane daily teaching hours.
The vast majority of teachers are women, so the war against K-12 teacher tenure is a war against women: they need to do what all these men in politics and business tell them to do so that they can get obedient workers and citizens.
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However, if you don’t do as you are told you can be relieved of your duties (suspended) or even fired for insubordination.
We had some high school teachers in Buffalo who refused to follow the principals instructions while grading the Regents exams because it went against the protocol prescribed by the state (which they had signed statements saying they would follow). Even though they were correct and would have been breaking the law by listening to the administrator, they were removed from the classroom (and we are talking about the entire set of teachers teaching that subject – a large portion of the Social Studies Department). They had to wait (I think it was) over a year to be reinstated while the case was reviewed.
No, they did not lose their tenure, but the angst involved cannot be quantitated. It also affected other teachers in the district who might face the same dilemma.
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Don’t know if you saw Kevin Carey’s Upshot article in the NYTimes on “new” research that shows vouchers don’t work… FWIW, here’s my take…
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W Gersen,
I am posting on this article at noon EST. The underlying neoliberal message: vouchers bad, charters good.
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