Tenure Protects Poor Quality Teachers
As someone who isn’t convinced that tenure for public school teachers benefits students, I thought it was nice to see the perspective of this Los Angeles Times story.
The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission: 159 in all (not including about two dozen in which the records were destroyed). The newspaper also examined court and school district records and interviewed scores of people, including principals, teachers, union officials, district administrators, parents and students.
Among the findings:
- Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don’t make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.
- Although districts generally press ahead with only the strongest cases, even these get knocked down more than a third of the time by the specially convened review panels, which have the discretion to restore teachers’ jobs even when grounds for dismissal are proved.
- Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can’t teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.
When teaching is at issue, years of effort — and thousands of dollars — sometimes go into rehabilitating the teacher as students suffer. Over the three years before he was fired, one struggling math teacher in Stockton was observed 13 times by school officials, failed three year-end evaluations, was offered a more desirable assignment and joined a mentoring program as most of his ninth-grade students flunked his courses.
Even our Governor talked about the “Dance of the Lemons” where principals were forced to accept poor teachers from other schools as those problem teachers were passed from school to school. While the problems a poor teacher causes a principal and their fellow teachers can be significant, the real victims in this scenario are the students. That’s why I really like this article. It considered the students’ perspective.
Meanwhile, said Kendra Wallace, principal of Daniel Webster Middle School on Los Angeles’ Westside, an ineffective teacher can instruct 125 to 260 students a year — up to 1,300 in the five years she says it often takes to remove a tenured employee.
“The hardest conversation to have is when a student comes in and looks at you and says, ‘Can you please come teach our class?’ ” she said.
When coaching and other improvement efforts don’t work, she said, “You’re in the position of having to look at 125 kids and just say, ‘I’m sorry,’ because the process of removal is really difficult. . . . You’re looking at these kids and knowing they are going to high school and they’re not ready. It is absolutely devastating.”
As Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford suggests, a student with a poor quality teacher will learn about a half year’s worth of material while a students with a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth. You can easily see that after a few years of bad teachers, even students who started at grade-level can quickly fall behind. Additionally, even with a very good teacher, students who are behind are only going to be able to catch up a half-year of content. It could take several years of very good teachers to make up for starting behind or for some poor quality teachers.
While tenure works well for poor quality teachers, it doesn’t benefit students. They’re the ones who bear the burden of the damage caused by poor quality teachers. We need to find another way to protect teachers from arbitrary actions of administrators while at the same time building a more realistic process for getting rid of poor quality teachers who are unable to improve after reasonable attempts at improvement. We also need to find a way to reward above average teachers financially to encourage their continued extra effort. Finally, we need to find a way to protect outstanding young teachers when layoffs occur so that they’re not losing our best and brightest new teachers in order to keep poorly qualified but experienced teachers. Our students deserve the best education we can provide. We, the adults, need to figure out a way to do that.
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