So does an English teacher who wants to assign a controversial and thought-provoking novel. Tenure protects teachers with high standards from the wrath of parents angry that their children received poor grades or were disciplined for misbehavior. Without tenure, will the teacher be able to resist the powerful parent who wants his or her mediocre daughter to get the lead part in the play?
Without tenure, what happens when uninformed but powerful parents demand that a highly trained special education teacher exclude students with special needs from the classroom?
Tenure also allows teachers to stand up and openly disagree with a boss pushing a faddish but unproven educational practice, without fear of being fired. In Holyoke, Mass.
When an untenured English teacher who was also a union official objected publicly in that this was an unsound tactic and was humiliating to students, he was fired, despite having previously received excellent ratings Jaffe, Tenure would have ensured a fair process. More generally, tenure empowers teachers to become more involved in school decisions.
When teachers have a say in how schools are run, they are more likely to be invested in the school and to stay longer, and are more engaged with colleagues in cooperative work. Having this sort of strong culture, furthermore, is linked to increased academic achievement for students.
By contrast, schools that lack teacher voice have higher turnover, which is wasteful and disruptive to student learning. Eliminating tenure reduces teacher voice in a very direct way. It takes all the powerful people a teacher must deal with and arms each one with a nuclear device. Teacher tenure is an important feature of American public education for yet another reason: It is a significant carrot for attracting qualified candidates to the teaching profession.
Teacher pay is in the 30th percentile for male college graduates and the 40th percentile for female college graduates. Part of what offsets low American salaries — and allows American schools to continue to attract talent — is tenure. Polling by Public Agenda and Education Sector came to similar conclusions. If you take away tenure, school districts would have two choices: Accept a diminished pool of applicants, or significantly increase salaries to keep quality at its current levels.
Abolishing tenure would make it especially hard to recruit in schools with lots of low-income students — the purported beneficiaries of the Vergara litigation. Under current accountability standards, teaching in a high-poverty school is risky because low-income students face extra obstacles and so, on average, perform less well academically than middle-class students.
Strong tenure laws allow dedicated, high-quality teachers to know they are unlikely to be fired. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that states with strong tenure laws and strong unions to back up these laws tend to perform better than those with weak laws. Likewise, some of the leading education systems in the world — Germany, Japan, and South Korea, for example — have long had tenure protections even stronger than those in the United States.
Can tenure laws be improved? If tenure laws are fundamentally sound, that does not mean the statutes in all 50 states are perfect. Reasonable reforms are underway, but they are needed in more places in two areas: the process by which tenure is earned and the procedure by which ineffective tenured teachers are removed.
To begin, tenure should mean something, so teachers need a sufficiently long period to demonstrate skills and not everyone who tries should succeed. Indeed, such a short time frame is unfair to teachers, as a decision must be made before they are able to fully demonstrate their mastery of the craft.
With respect to the rigor of tenure, there should not be a set percentage of teachers who fail, but neither should success be automatic. However, New York City has made getting tenure more rigorous.
Clearly, achieving on-time tenure means more in New York City than it did in the past. So what is to be done? Many who believe that eliminating tenure is out of the question and that defending teacher incompetence is equally intolerable, have converged around a third way: tenure combined with peer assistance and review.
First used in Toledo, Ohio, peer assistance and review involves master teachers evaluating new and veteran educators, providing assistance, and in some cases recommending termination of employment. Under the plan, the brainchild of Dal Lawrence, former president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Toledo set up an advisory board consisting of five teachers and four administrators to make decisions on assisting and, if necessary, terminating the employment of new and veteran teachers.
Six votes are required for action. Evaluators teach the same subject as teachers being evaluated but come from different schools. At first, peer review was hugely controversial.
Peer review weeds out bad teachers in a way that enhances rather than diminishes the teaching profession. Peer review and assistance is common among professors, doctors, and lawyers, who police themselves, as Shanker argued, and it strengthens the case for teacher involvement in other areas, like textbook selection and curriculum development.
While some critics liken union involvement in terminating teachers to the fox guarding the hen house, in practice, teachers have been even tougher on colleagues than administrators have been in several jurisdictions. In Cincinnati, which was the second city to adopt peer review, The same has been true in other places.
In Montgomery County, Md. Unfortunately, peer review has not spread as widely as it should have. In some districts, teachers have expressed concerns about being evaluated by colleagues; in others, management has not wished to share power over personnel decisions with teachers.
The up-front costs of hiring new teachers to cover classes while expert consulting teachers provide peer assistance and conduct reviews also can be substantial. Fortunately, districts often recoup costs by increasing teacher retention and reducing costs of dismissal. Especially as attacks on tenure increase, local unions could incorporate this innovative answer to the spurious charge that unions are chiefly in the business of protecting incompetent members.
Cases like Vergara are problematic in part because they elevate a peripheral issue — tenure — which detracts from the really necessary debates over poverty and segregation. Worse, at a time when we need to recruit and retain the very best teachers, the inordinate focus on bad teachers further demoralizes the education profession.
Some pundits think eliminating tenure will elevate the profession, but by a ratio, teachers disagree that they would have greater prestige if collective bargaining and lifetime tenure were eliminated Duffett et al. That the attack on tenure has gained traction in courts, state legislatures, and major media outlets is enormously problematic. Teachers unions are not perfect, but they are one of the few voices speaking on behalf of disadvantaged kids. As journalist Jonathan Chait has noted, politicians have a short-term horizon so tend to underinvest in education.
Taking on poverty and segregation — long recognized as the largest drivers of educational inequality — is hard work and can be expensive, so conservatives have focused attention elsewhere. For years, the right wing has been using the sad reality that poor and minority kids are stuck in lousy, segregated schools as an argument for private school vouchers to dismantle public education.
Now, in Vergara and Davids , inequality in access to good teachers is leveraged to promote an antiunion agenda. That this is done in the name of poor kids and civil rights turns the world upside down. Brody, L. New York City teacher tenure dispute in court. Wall Street Journal. Washington, DC: Author.
Casey, L. Education Week. Chait, J. New Republic. Chandler, M. Tenure, simply put, is a safeguard that protects good teachers from unfair firing. Once a teacher is granted tenure — a right that must be earned after three years or more of service, oversight and evaluation — a teacher cannot be fired without a fair hearing.
Tenure does not mean a job for life. It means simply that a teacher has the right to a fair hearing on charges that could end a career. This is fundamental due process — an American value enshrined in our Bill of Rights and one that is not reserved only for the wealthy elite. Tenure must be earned. It is not automatic. Upon completion of that evaluation, the local school board then votes whether to grant tenure — which simply means the teacher cannot be fired without a fair hearing.
Tenure ensures good teachers cannot be fired for reasons of race, gender, age, religion, handicapping condition or sexual orientation. Tenure does not transfer from district to district. If a teacher leaves one district and accepts employment in another, the process essentially starts over.
In higher education, it generally takes six or seven years to earn tenure , which at colleges and universities is known as a full professorship or simply as achieving the position of professor. In the years before achieving tenure, a teacher might be an instructor, an associate professor, or an assistant professor.
Typically, college or university instructors are given a series of two- or four-year contracts and then reviewed around their third year, and again in the fifth or sixth year. To achieve tenure, a non-tenured instructor might need to exhibit published research, proficiency in attracting grant funding, teaching excellence, and even community service or administrative ability, depending on the institution.
Tenured teachers in public education at the grammar, middle, or high school level, are entitled to due process when they are threatened with dismissal or nonrenewal of contract. This process is exceedingly tedious for administrators because just like in a trial case, the administrator must show proof that the teacher is ineffective and has failed to meet district standards in a hearing before the school board.
The administrator must produce definitive evidence that he gave the teacher the support and resources necessary to correct the problem if it is an issue relating to the educator's performance. The administrator must also be able to show proof that the teacher willingly neglected her duty as a teacher. States differ as to how a teacher achieves tenure, as well as in the due process procedure for firing a tenured teacher.
According to the Education Commission of the States , 16 states regard performance as the most important step for a teacher to earn tenure, while others place a higher level of importance on the amount of time an educator has spent working in the classroom. The organization notes some of the differences in how states handle the issue of tenure:. The American Federation of Teachers notes that there are wide disparities in due process in regard to firing or disciplining tenured teachers.
Citing a New York court case, Wright v. The federation adds that an analysis using the New York State Education Department data found that in , disciplinary cases took only about days statewide. And in New York City, data show that the median length of proceedings is just days. Indeed, Connecticut has adopted an day policy for terminating tenured teachers, unless there is agreement from both sides to extend the process, the AFT says.
Advocates for teacher tenure say that teachers need protection from power-hungry administrators and school board members who have personality conflicts with a particular teacher. It provides job security for teachers, which can translate to happier teachers who perform at a higher level.
Tenure also ensures that those who have been there longest have guaranteed job security in tough economic times even though a more inexperienced teacher may cost the district significantly less in salary.
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