Tenure: That’s not how it works

There has been a great deal of ballyhoo this week regarding a California judge’s ruling that teacher tenure is unconstitutional in California.  The decision has been praised by conservatives as well as Obama’s Secretary of Education.  I am aghast. 

Have you seen the commercial where Beatrice posts her vacation pictures literally on her wall and her friend says, “That is not how it works.” 

Beatrice is so far off base one is stumped to know where to begin to explain to her how misguided her perceptions are.  I feel much the same in discussions of tenure.  Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that I am a public school administrator and superintendent of schools.  Somebody is nuts, and I guess it could be me.  So let me lay out the arguments for tenure as a good thing and you decide.

First some assumptions that I hope are commonly accepted, but I suspect are not:  I have never experienced a political climate that is as polarized and hostile as today.  Neither party, neither side, appears to be willing to compromise for the sake of improvement.  So sad.  For a democracy, that is not how it is supposed to work.

I have never seen a time where education policy, practice and rules are made almost entirely by lay people dramatically influenced by private sector billionaires.  Professional educators are out of the loop.  Many will argue that is a good thing.  I disagree, and I watch elected judges, and elected legislatures mandating education practice with little understanding of the educational process.  And the mandated processes are based mostly on private sector notions.  That is not how it works.

Teachers in general are different than other people in that market motivation has little or nothing to do with how they perform their duties.  You may not like that realization, but I have seen it verified over and over again.  Yes, some teachers may migrate from one school system to another to earn more money, but in general we are talking minuscule changes.  No one enters the teaching profession to make money or become rich.  People who are motivated to make money enter private sector endeavors, not teaching.  Offer a teacher homemade brownies for doing bus duty today and they will be thrilled.  Offer a teacher $10,000 to fail a successful student and they will call the cops.  Teachers are as different from most folks as preachers are, they are motivated by a noble cause, and accept a certain degree of poor income for the sake of making a difference in the future lives of kids.  Teachers improve with collaboration, not competition.  Any effort to apply private sector assumptions to teachers is a pointless and fruitless effort.  I could go on and on, and in fact I have elsewhere on this blog, but the bottom line is treating teachers like assembly line workers is a huge mistake.  That is not how it works.

Teachers are degreed, certified professionals who for the most part work in total isolation.  The bell rings, the door closes, and the teacher is alone with no telling how many young people in a setting where the teacher is not only responsible for the discipline of the students, the health and well-being of the students, but is also responsible for ensuring the mastery of content prescribed elsewhere in a one-size fits all model.  Worse, teachers are now accountable for the measure of their success via a high stakes standardized test.  Nothing is more ludicrous.  Holding teachers accountable for student performance on a test assumes that the teacher is the sole variable in learning, which is not true, and that the test is somehow valid, which is not true.  In other words, the entire reform movement is based on a poor understanding of how teaching and learning occur.  The assumptions of reform are not how it works.

How does it work?  The reason so-called incompetent teachers remain on the payroll is an indictment of the quality of the administration, not the teachers.  Are there incompetent, lazy teachers who simply ride from year to year on the payroll untouched and unchallenged by competent administrators?  Yes.  But I would argue they are very few in number and continue to remain on the payroll due to fear and incompetence on the part of the administration.  Some teachers are sacred cows, well connected in the community and supposedly safe from any accountability and some administrators are too fearful to milk the sacred cows.  I know of no state where it is impossible to terminate an incompetent teacher. 

In fact, in California where the judge ruled that tenure was unconstitutional, the process to remove a teacher is clear and simple, though it may be expensive and time consuming.  An administrator delivers a “Notice of Intent to Dismiss” whereby the administration lets the teacher know they do not intend to keep the teacher around.  Clearly to deliver such a notice would require documentation and homework as a prerequisite, but those are administrative functions.  Once notified, a teacher has 30 days to request a hearing before a Commission on Professional Competence.  This CPC is comprised of a teacher selected member, an administration selected member and an Administrative Law Judge.  The teacher must be given an “Accusation” documenting the administration’s rationale for dismissal.  The teacher has the right to full discovery and will see all the administration’s evidence prior to the hearing.  The results of the hearing are final, though the teacher may appeal to the courts.  That is how it works.

Teachers in California may be fired for any or all of the following reasons:  (1) Immoral or unprofessional conduct; (2) Dishonesty; (3) Unsatisfactory performance; (4) Evident unfitness for service; and (5) Persistent violation of or refusal to obey the school laws of the state or reasonable regulation prescribed for by the government of the public schools by the State Board of Education or by the governing board of the school district employing him or her.  Clearly it is possible to terminate incompetent teachers.  Difficult?  Maybe.  Why haven’t there been more terminations?  Ask an administrator.  And yes, I am sure the union supports the teacher.  That is how it works.

I absolutely admit that it is easier either to simply live with an incompetent teacher or play the dance of the lemons whereby the teacher is consistently passed from one setting to another.  That is an administrative short coming.  I further admit that we tend to practice a philosophy that assumes the best teachers teach the kids who are easiest to teach.  Some teachers who work with very challenging kids would prefer to work with kids who arrive in their classrooms ready and eager to learn.  As administrators we sometimes have difficulty in assigning our “best” teachers to the most challenging subjects and students.  None of this has to do with tenure.  It all has to do with administrative courage.  That is how it works.

Add to all of this the simple fact that judging the quality of a teacher is much like judging the quality of a piece of art.  It is not scientific.  I know what I like, but I do not know why.  I know who is good, but am hard pressed to tell you how I know.  No single measurement of the quality of teaching performance will ever suffice.  That is not how it works.

Why does tenure help kids?  I have worked for school boards who wanted to terminate teachers because of the bumper stickers on their car that indicate the teacher thinks differently in ways political from the board member.  I have worked for school boards who wanted to terminate teachers because their surname implied they might be Muslim.  I have worked for boards who will protect to the nth degree their niece, sister, wife, cousin who is on the payroll.  I have worked for boards who will judge a teacher based on behavior outside the profession that is not illegal but is in conflict with the board’s sense of values.  I have worked for school boards who believe sexual orientation is a key determinate of teacher competence.  Every one of those teachers needs the protection of tenure.  In a system where who you know means more than what you do, tenure is a necessity.

(Interesting to me is that the Harvard professors who testified at the trial in California against teacher tenure were both tenured.  One wonders if they would give up their tenure to prove their commitment to their thesis that tenure hurts kids.  Yes, universities practice tenure but these two profs have drunk the Kool-Aid of the reform movement.  They also live in a La La Land that assumes student failure in public schools is the teacher’s fault and student failure at the collegiate level is the student’s fault.)

Finding good teachers is very hard.  Investing in their improvement makes little sense if we can simply terminate the ones that may need some help, or who happen to think differently than the prevailing values in the community.  Why would a young, bright, altruistic person decide to become a teacher in a setting where they are held accountable for kids’ performance on a mandated standardized test that purports to measure the mandated standardized curriculum prescribed by lay people, and have no sense of job security at all?  If doctors were judged by mortality rates, who would chose to become an oncologist?  The loss of tenure is much more likely to lower the overall quality of the teacher corp. 

Beatrice clearly does not own or operate a computer, much less a membership in Facebook.  She will likely never get that her perception is not how it works.  The same is true for elected officials who propose to prescribe improvement for public education oblivious to professional educator input and based on a private sector model. 

Ask a professional and they will tell you how it works.