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November 13, 2008 11:29 PM UTC
33 Comments
Some teachers are considered incompetent but some parents and gifted by others. We have personal experience with a teacher who was basically kicked out for failure to do paperwork but was a great, positive influence on our kid. At the same time, another teacher who regularly broke rules was allowed to stay and eventually retire. How do we decide the competent vs incompetent? By CSAP scores? that is seriously flawed.
Here’s another angle on it: In our district, Planned Parenthood taught the sex ed segment because they had a grant to pay for them teaching. Now the grant has run out and the district doesn’t want to pay them directly from fear of controversy. The irony is that teachers want them to keep teaching it because they don’t want to take on the responsibility nor do they have as much current information and expertise as does Planned Parenthood. Apparently, tenure doesn’t help teachers have courage. So how will kids be taught about controversial issues? And, to me, more importantly, who will oversee principals to make sure they don’t abuse their power? The superintendent? Hah, hah, that’s a good one.
there should also be a better way of rewarding the teachers who do a good job.
For too long I’ve seen good teachers work thankless hours, receive terrible pay, and reach into their own pockets to provide classroom materials for their kids.
It’s only fair that if you make it easier to fire the bad ones, you should make it easier to reward the good ones.
I’d like to hear sxp151’s take on this.
schools, like any workplace, are not immune to politics.
I’ve seen many incidents when good teachers are roughed up verbally and secret wars are fought against them, because of personal problems or other non-performance related issues.
Tenure is the only thing stopping them from getting fired for less-than-professional purposes.
So while it could be good for the kids, it might also affect them negatively because it does nothing to address some of the real reasons why there are conflicts between the Administration and the faculty.
You hit the nail on the head when you said that like every other workplace, schools have non-performance issues impacting the view of an individuals work. But in the private sphere there is major effort made to minimize that – because it can lead to probation and firing. Because of tenure, this kind of garbage doesn’t have as serious an impact and is probably therefore not shut down as much.
Anyways, the rest of the world has looked at this trade-off and has found on balance that it is more effective to not have tenure.
True, but you can hire your way into a good school system. And, firing the incompetents (say the bottom 5%) would pave the way towards hiring some potentially better employees.
I hope Ms Rhee cuts his nuts off.
Typically, K-12 teachers get tenure after about three years on the job.
But, the percentage of new teachers that burn out by that point is huge, attrition after that point is not insignificant (with many teachers taking leaves of absence for a year or two to have children at some point in their careers) and the supply of experienced teachers is small enough that there isn’t much pressure from school administrators to sack experienced teaachers.
Unhappy teachers who leave of their own free will tend to overlap heavily with the teachers that administrators would discharge if they could. Not perfectly, but more than one would suspect.
A large share of the reasons for which administrators would want to fire teachers, like inappropriate contact with students, or failing to show up for work, are grounds for discharge even for tenured teachers. And, unlike police department unions (who have never seen a cop that deserves to be disciplined), teacher’s unions tend not to be terribly obstinant about defending colleagues whose conduct is really egregious.
Tenure does protect marginal, uninspiring teachers who don’t do anything outrageously bad, who are determined to stay in the system. But, the number of districts where administrators would seriously consider firing that kind of teacher is pretty small. There are some districts where adminsitrators chaffe at not being able to fire these teachers, but not many.
It isn’t a perfect system, and the political autonomy justification for it isn’t as strong at the K-12 level as it is at the higher education level where tenure is more of a religion.
But dropping tenure isn’t a panacea that will cure school’s ills. If it was, charter and voucher schools which sometimes don’t have tenure, would perform much better relative to regular public schools than they actually do (if anything the evidence is that they perform slightly worse, even adjusting to compare comparable students, although there isn’t much impact period).
Similarly, in higher education in the U.S. there is more robust and effective tenure protection (particularly in the most prestigious institutions), yet the U.S. also has the best colleges and universities in the world, bar none. And, teachers at public schools in other countries, which are often touted as superior to the U.S. at the K-12 level, generally have at least as strong job security protections as American teachers do. In many of the countries, even private sector, non-union employees can’t be fired at will.
If one really wants to boost teach quality, carrots, like higher pay, would probably be more effective than sticks, like an absence of tenure.
Bottom line. Tenure has much less of an impact than one would suspect, although it does have a real effect.
I agree that we need to do a much better job of retaining good teachers which starts with better pay, but also includes better working conditions and anti-burnout efforts.
Teachers are the only professionals who spend the vast majority of their workday not only not talking to any peers, but interacting with children. We need to improve their work environment.
But I do disagree that really bad teachers are fired. In the last 16 years (maybe longer – that’s the limit of their institutional memory), not a single teacher has been fired at BVSD.
It’s not uncommon for employees who know they are in trouble to resign before they get fired. Kind of like judges: Few judges get recommendations against retention, but there is often a flurry of resignations right before the retention recommendations are published.
Disclaimer: My beloved husband is a teacher. However, he teaches in a Catholic school, so he is not burdened by such things as job protection or a living salary. He and his colleagues do work very hard and keep their skills up, but I think that’s more because they view their careers as a ministry than because they fear they’ll get fired.
As of a year ago I think it was “a couple”.
Was your husband forced at gunpoint to teach where he does?
What exactly is “job protection”? Generally, it should be one’s own performance. Being a teacher and doing a good job is job ‘protection’. It’s not like the State is going to go out of business, well, that is, until your PERA benefits kick in.
A teacher that is mediocre can just cruise on autopilot year after year. With no tenure, they suddenly have a strong interest in improving. I think the big win with removing tenure will not be the few that are fired, but the many that work more to improve.
strictly focused on what best guarantees the highest quality of education for the students, is not a simple one. The most talented teachers face huge opportunity costs (that is, foregone opportunities to pursue more lucrative careers) when choosing to go into teaching: Raising those opportunity costs, by making the educational career path less attractive, will disuade many who otherwise would have sacrificed some pay to pursue their passion. Furthermore, administrators are most motivated to avoid problems and to maintain the status quo. At the district level, administrators strive not to look bad, to avoid contraversies, and to keep parents happy. Thus, eliminating tenure would not lead to a weeding out of bad teachers, per se, but rather of inconvenient teachers, only a minority of which are inconvenient by virtue of being incompetent. Highly dedicated teachers, ironically enough, are frequently inconvenient as well, and ending tenure would mean that the processes already in place which systematally weed out the best and the brightest new teachers will simply be amplified and extended to older and more experienced excellent teachers as well.
We do need to put into place a more functional selection mechanism to attract and keep excellent teachers and weed out poor ones. But eliminating tenure, by itself, is more likely to have the opposite effect.
What if 1/3 of an administrator’s pay was a bonus based on the number of graduates of their school who successfully complete 2 years of college within 4 years of graduating high school? Not percentage of students – total students.
In that case I think you would find administrators very focused on making sure teachers are doing a good job. And doing everything they can to have as many graduate as possible.
that would be a step in the right direction. But, while creating decentralized incentives and facilitating robust local experimentation is a part of the answer, I also think that centralized (eg, increased investment in think-tank research) attention to expanding the tool kit available to decentralized decision makers would help as well. One of the most pervasive problems right now is that the professional culture in education is geared toward “sriving for mediocrity.” I honestly don’t think that many have much of a clue what excellent education would look like. In fact, one problem with your idea is the focus on the bottom: The complaint would be about the disproportionate attention given to those with a chance at increasing the administrator’s salary, and decreased attention on those who won’t. The political battle would be over how to balance the incentives between plugging the drop-out hole at the bottom, and increasing the academic success rate at the top (and everything in between). In the end, you would end up with something that probably reinforces the current incentive structure of avoiding problems, and maintaining an inadequate status quo.
We do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time failing to realize that we need to teach students based on their individual aptitudes. Of course, when you’re trying to keep school budget costs under tight control to please the voters, you’re fighting a losing battle with individualized education programs.
As for David’s suggestion (thanks for going punitive again, there D…), I would suggest that no one single measurement stick is adequate to reward all teachers, all administrators, or all students. We need to get off this relentless and mindless standardization wheel if we want to step back and make real improvements in our schools.
…a product of shitty public schools, perhaps.
Economists of a certain stripe speak about shirking and incompetence among the worker bees (that’s why we need performance contracts, merit pay, the ability to terminate those in the trenches). I’d like to know what Rhee’s deal is with her school district: Is she responsible for acheiving any real performance benchmarks besides firing people. Just asking… does anyone know what her obligation is?
I’m a little leary of the CEO-as-hero approach to managing large organizations. That goes double for large public institutions operating in complex environments to impart a complex set of skills. These are organizations wherein the work isn’t directly visible by managers ans the outcomes are obscured as well, by time for one. [What really ARE the results of an innovative math curriculum and when will be know it? That’s my point.] Principals and superintendents can’t REALLY monitor and reward and direct with any of the imagined CEO deciveness. Good schools run on trust and goodwill.
Rome wasn’t sacked and burned in a day, and if the comparison of Rome to DC schools is apt, then how on earth is a heroic figure, CEO type on a shortterm contract going to do more good than harm? The heroic view of the CEO is getting a little thin, and we’ve seen it in this state in the school districts and in higher education. What’s the record been? But I digress.
I would like to suggest that public schools used to be pretty damned good. They were good (and much cheaper than the school districts in this nation deserved) because the teachers were good and the students (with parental support) were willing. The teachers were good in large part because school districts had their pick of talented, motivated and caring women for whom other professions (besides nursing) were blocked. My schools were great… I was educated in public schools by very smart and talented women who made the very best of their limited career opportunities. I had math, science and writing skills by my third year of high school that half of today’s college graduates don’t have.
As were other boomers, I was the beneficiary of an injustice. Those same women educated in the 1970’s and 1980’s would have been physicians and college professors, managers and scientists, accuaries and risk managers. Now the schools have to compete with other professions for their teachers. And you know what? The schooling equation remains the same, and its true for all schools and home schooling situations: The quality depends on the skills and motivation of the teachers and earnestness and willingness of students. We’d better pay for teachers for the value they help create or our students will be losing their white collar jobs to better educated, more articulate kids from ‘lesser’ countries.
The question is whether Ms. Rhee or any single CEO can deliver on anything close to what they promise. Or whether they will deliver limited fascimiles of ‘educational acheivement’ for school boards willing to be distracted and courted by oversold solution-sets out of the traditional (and failed) hero-manager toolkit. Is there really anything new to Ms. Rhee’s approach? Haven’t we learned from the large stock of hero-CEO’s in Philly, LA, New York schools? How close did they come to preparing their charge for employment in the 21st Century. There need to be Long Marchers in public education who hire superintendents with something other than a five-year, turn-around plan. When confronted by another package of ‘panacea of the month’ we need to think seriously about the distinctive features of schooling, kids, teachers and how solutions fit problems. Otherwise we’ll end up consuming more of the same species of drivel that has been trafficked for thirty years.
I don’t want to give too many personal details about this, so please do not take anything I write as my personal experience. ohwilleke, Don Quijote, and DemZorro have already written things I generally agree with. So I’ll try to just add to what they write.
Education in America is different from education in many other countries. While I don’t claim to know how every foreign country teaches students, the people I’ve known describe it all pretty much the same way: highly competitive exams in public schools which determine where you’ll go for the next level, increasing specialization starting at the high school level, private tutors for students to help them pass exams, and private schools for students who fail to gain entrance to the public schools.
The basic philosophy of a parent in such a system is that the burden is on the student to perform. Students thus spend more time working academically, not because they’re given lots of busywork, but because their parents want them to pass the exams so they don’t have to pay extra money.
In our system, the basic philosophy of many parents is that learning is the teacher’s responsibility, not the student’s. Students should be inspired by an excellent teacher to want to learn, like in that movie I saw once, and if that guy can do it, why can’t every teacher? If the teacher is only “mediocre,” that is, presenting needed information systematically and grading fairly, but not catering to individual students in the way they need, then the student is justified in not learning, and the parent is justified in wanting the teacher fired.
So for example, if you want to be a math teacher in Japan, you need to understand math, enjoy it, and want to explain it to students. You expect that students will do whatever homework you assign (because their parents will make them do it), and students who do not bother to work will be ejected from the public school system.
If you want to be a math teacher in America, you need to love children and have some experience disciplining them. It helps if you don’t like math, since your students don’t like it either, and who better to inspire someone to do math than someone who understands how boring it is? Teachers who make students feel bad about not doing well at math will get complaints from parents, some of whom think that their child’s time is better spent at soccer practice and why is he getting so much homework, others who think their child should be doing so much homework that the child stops bothering them when they’re trying to watch TV.
And then there’s No Child Left Behind, which intended to fix this by making everyone take a test, because that’s what smart countries do, right? Except NCLB works on the philosophy that the tests don’t actually matter to the student but instead should be used to identify incompetent teachers. Result: teachers now have no freedom even to try making math “fun,” instead teaching only what is absolutely required for the standardized test, and since students don’t give a flying fuck about the test, the performance on the test doesn’t tell you much of anything. Great job, guys.
So why should anyone want to teach math in America if they could possibly get another job?
The problems extend into college, because we have no real criterion for ensuring good students get into good colleges. Instead, the best-funded colleges are private and allow students to buy their way in, occasionally selecting other students based not on academic performance (because your 4.0 GPA only matters if you went to a “good school,” i.e., one in a rich neighborhood) or on test scores (because taking only people who do well on an SAT means you’re not getting well-rounded students who play lots of soccer and volunteer at the hospital), but rather based on what seem to many students to be more or less random criteria. Even public colleges can be quite expensive if you’re actually struggling financially.
So you get some motivated students, but you also get some lazy ones with rich parents. At this point teachers still can’t actually fail students who don’t understand the subject, because
1) 20% of students will simply never show up to class
2) if you fail more than 20% of your students, the administrators imagine you must not be teaching them very well because
3) Johnny’s rich parents will call the college administrators and threaten to withhold funding for the new stadium if they don’t reprimand that awful calculus teacher who gave Johnny a D just because he thinks Trigonometric Integration is a microbrew from Portland he’d really like to try.
I remember my first experience as a teaching assistant: I was sent to talk with a man I later found out was famous for winning teaching awards year after year. He was by far the most cynical man I’d ever met, and you could tell he hated students like only someone who really knew them could. For years I wondered why he won awards, until I somehow substituted for him one day before an exam, and had the students ask what the questions on the test would be and seriously expect me to tell them. Apparently he would give sample tests which were so similar to the actual tests that all his students would get As, they would then give him high ratings on evaluations, and administrators thought he must be the best teacher there ever was.
By contrast, in that same department there was a professor who had written his own course notes and loved teaching and was tough but fair to his students, who sometimes failed. He was put on probation.
This is quite long, and I’m sorry. All this is to explain that while I think our educational system has a fundamental flaw, firing teachers who get complaints from parents or administrators will make it much worse. Teachers teach because they love the subject and the students. It’s a hard job, and it’s easy to burn out, especially when you get little support from parents and the opposite of support from administrators. Job security is the least we can do for them.
You’re right that there are teachers who love the job and there are parents who want the teacher to set it up for their kids to easily succeed.
But there are also teachers who are just putting in the time. And there are parents who drive their kids hard – we grounded one of our once for bad grades after parent-teacher meetings and she came back from school the next day and said 90% of her friends were grounded too.
Eliminating tenure is not a panacea. It is merely one necessary step. But we also need to set up a system where teachers are rewarded for doing a good job, and supported when doing their job means flunking some kids.
Parents need to be told that they have a responsibility too, but at the same time teachers do need to work at making what they teach interesting. Everyone has work to do.
But I don’t think the answer is, the present system sucks but leave teachers job security to make up for it sucking.
teachers do need to work at making what they teach interesting
There are interesting things you can do with math, but most of it is preparatory. How do you make adding fractions interesting? You could try something like this, but in the end, aren’t you really just insulting students’ intelligence? And yet, when they get to college one of the biggest problems their professors have is that they can’t do the simplest stuff like adding fractions.
The onus needs to be on students. Not a little on students and a little on teachers, but on students. Teachers need to know that parents are on their side. Without tenure, you get the complaining parent (and yes, every teacher gets complaints) who has enough pull to fire a teacher.
Like many people, Rhee thinks that what she did is the only smart thing to do: work for a couple of years in Teach For America, where there’s no time for improvement because when you leave, someone else will take your place. That assumes there’s no need for expertise, and that there are tons of people desperately seeking that job. That’s the McDonald’s model, and it sounds really good to business-types, but it’s hardly good for students.
I believe parents should make sure their students do well, even if students come home and complain that Mr. Sxp151 the math teacher is so godawful boring because he made them add fractions instead of sharing his interesting political views. If we had parents who were on the teachers’ side instead of always antagonistic and trying to get this or that teacher fired, then tenure probably wouldn’t be necessary. You say some parents discipline their children. Great! I’ve heard of that sort of thing too.
But then there are those parents who say let’s fire 5% (or some other arbitrary number) every year, and surely that will make things awesomer. If I told you to fire 5% of your employees every year and helped choose which ones, would you think I had your best interest in mind? I’m guessing not, since you hired them, and you may feel like they’re all working well together. I’m guessing you might think I was just meddling in something to prove a political point. Teachers badly need protection from that sort of thing.
I wanted to hear what someone who would actually be affected by this had to say about it.
The teachers aren’t the problem.
Because if you do I tend to agree with you. If there is no parental motivation and discipline, and there are no consequences for good or bad grades, the student will go nowhere regardless of how good the teacher is. And I do understand the environment that SXP described, whereby parents are constantly trying to get teachers fired because they flunked little Johnny, etc.
I work with a lot of Chinese immigrants every day. Their nieces and nephews back in the homeland get straight A’s, although it is in a much more competitive environment. However, their own kids here get straight A’s too. These kids are pushed to succeed (sometimes a little too much) but they do very well.
I understand not all parents have the time or resources to devote to making sure their kid is an excellent student. There are all sorts of different circumstances, but parental responsibility has to be a part of it.
A lot of parents are the problem, but more often than that, it’s used as an excuse.
The system is horribly broken:
Bilingual education is a total disaster. Students must learn English, no exceptions. Graduating from a US high school being unable to speak English doesn’t help the student or society. For the ESL students, immersion. Just like if I want to go learn Spanish, or if you join the military and you want to learn a language. Separate immersion schools until proficiency is reached. As it stands now, teachers can’t get through their curriculum because they have to slow everything down.
Kick bad kids out. Don’t come back. Guns? Fuck you, get out. Gangs? Same. School is supposed to be safe, and difficult. Not a babysitting service.
Create a very robust vo-tech system. Many students don’t necessarily want to go to college, and they should be trained. This could be done in a partnership with trade unions. I have no idea why we haven’t done this yet.
Outlaw the teachers union and start over. Anyone that held a leadership position in the union or was on staff is ineligible to be part of the new union – one that’s focused on teaching, and not being a political organization. Outlaw any donations from teachers unions to school board candidates.
Accountability and reward. Base all teacher pay on merit. Period. Increase salaries of teachers substantially, and lose administrators. Lots of them.
How’s that for a start?
Good idea on the call for more vocational training.
I bet a kid who became a mechanic straight out of high school is going to make more than I will when I graduate from college. Actually, I guarantee it.
That just seems silly to me, even if I subscribed to the idea that the teachers’ union was a major source of the problem (and I didn’t).
For an example of how that sort of absolutist thinking works in the real world, consider the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the outlawing of all Ba’athists, which pretty much everyone agrees was stupid in retrospect.
Don’t have a strong opinion on bilingual education, but I certainly like the idea of kicking out problem kids. (Though I wonder what you do with them afterward; is it worse if they end up just hanging around on the street?) And I agree that not everybody needs to go to college, which is part of the problem with David’s proposal above (paying people based on the number of students they send to college).
outlawing the current teachers union.
They have controlled school boards and academics and nearly every politician related to education in this State for decades and we have a total disaster on our hands.
They’re fired. Time for new blood.
Now go change your last name to Rhee and get in there !
How do you know I’m not Michelle Rhee?
Only the people that came to WLJ’s place know my secret bat-identity.
I had such a nice time, I’d love to have a regular meeting with most of you. We should do it again soon.
I wanted to go so badly, we have to do it again.
While I walked away from teaching a couple years ago I still have a ton of friends who are teachers, so I still get the stories.
I have to agree with SXP that students need to be held accountable. Way too many parents or admin think that a kids time in school should be a “well balanced” fun activity and that if they learn something great. For the most part however they think that having to learn English, Math, or History isn’t as important as their “feelings”. And little Johnny getting a D or F (because he didn’t show up to class or do any work) will be bad for his self-esteem.
When did school become more about self-esteem and not about learning the basics to succeed in the future.
Ok sorry back to tenure. When I was a student in a very strong district out of state, tenure was giving after 10 years of teaching and they had to apply and get excepted. A fairly long time and normally enough time to weed out the bad (not all but most). In Colorado tenure is giving after 3 years and 1 day of the 4th year to EVERY teacher. 3 years isn’t long enough to weed out the good from the bad, and the fact that every teacher gets it is crazy!
Now for the pro side of this, one friend of mine thinks that if she speaks out at all against the admin she would/could get fired, so she didn’t say anything to stand up for herself until she had her tenure. Now that she does she stands up for her and her students. Would she have done this if not for the overall security of her job, nope. Now the question is without tenure would the she and the students suffer or just herself?
Ok long rant, sorry. Take it with a grain of salt.
It was a great comment.
I think ditching tenure is a Bad Thing. Reform of tenure might appease the David’s of the world while retaining the essential protection of tenure that allows our teachers to fight for their students and feel free enough to actually lead some of the reforms we need.
I learned some pretty hard lessons from unapologetic teachers; they put the burden on me to perform, and the lessons they were trying to drill into my head were valuable even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Now, I could suggest some improvements to them, looking back all these years…
I’m sure there are bad teachers out there, or teachers still holding on while having long since burned out… These are not the norm, though, and they’d be even less frequent if we gave them adequate support. Oh – one more thing: if you constantly fire the bottom x% of any group (and on what measure?), you’re eventually going to start canning good people for no reason. Level 3 had a review-and-fire policy like that, and the selection process was very political…