Michelle Rhee’s proposal to abolish teacher tenure in Washington, DC has sparked some great commentary in the blogosphere. Wendy doesn’t think it will improve education. Megan writes, "If Rhee’s plan goes down, it will indicate that a majority of DC’s teacher’s think that they’re incompetent. Which does comport with the data coming out of DC schools."
Megan points out that Rhee’s plan isn’t simply about abolish tenure. Her plan is:
Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal.
Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay increases but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more-junior teachers if their school closes or undergoes an overhaul. If they were not hired by another school, their only options would be early retirement, a buyout or eventual dismissal.
Proposals to give up tenure in return for a bigger paycheck have been kicking around for a while. Teachers unions always vote them down. Why?
I think, but I’m not certain, that most academics would give up tenure, if they had assurances that their pay would double. People willingly go into all sorts of careers that don’t offer tenure. It seems incredible, but most teachers must be certain that a loss of tenure would mean automatic termination. Otherwise, why not go for the double pay? Are teachers an especially risk-adverse group? Does this have anything to do with the fact that most teachers are women?
Apt. 11d 
I can’t remember if I mentioned this in my post, but I teach at a university that does not have tenure.
We are a teaching, not research, oriented university, fwiw. And I think we have plenty of incompetent teachers. I also think we have plenty of great teachers. Pretty much, I think we’re the same as most other universities except that we don’t have tenure.
I’m not worried about getting fired because I’m a bad teacher. I’m a good teacher. I do worry about pissing off administration somehow.
I worry about stuff like this. Maybe we need to redefine tenure slightly. Teachers who are doing the stuff mentioned in that post should be disciplined or fired.
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“I think, but I’m not certain, that most academics would give up tenure, if they had assurances that their pay would double.”
Oh, I meant to reply to this too.
I’d take tenure over my pay being doubled. As it is, I don’t know what to do with the money I have. I live a simple life, no Coach purses. 😉
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So, I think unions vote down these options because they don’t believe “assurances that their pay would double”
(because, of course, if you are terminated, your pay won’t double).
They don’t believe them because 1) they don’t want to trade a future assurance for something that is now guaranteed. Governments have a very bad track history of living up to future obligations. The money just turns out not to be there, and “their hands are tied.” 2) they don’t trust the administration, including their principles. 3) they are extremely risk averse — the tenure system almost guarantees that those who weight security highly will be more likely to see the relatively low pay as being balanced. 4) people in general are insecure these days, at this particular time. The time to try something like this is when people feel like they have lots of options, not when the people who are most comfortable are the ones who have guaranteed employment.
I don’t think this kind of plan would have any significant effect on schools because I do not think the primary problem in schools is bad teachers.
I do, however, think that drastically increasing pay would have to come with a weakening of security.
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I suspect that there is a strong self-selection issue here. Folks who value security more highly are going to be drawn to careers that provide them with tenure. The result is that they will be more opposed to revoking tenure than would those who were drawn to careers that never offered the promise of tenure in the first place.
Tenure also tends to bind people to particular jobs by increasing the cost of moving. I suspect that this is part of what makes tenure attractive to unions. It decreases the mobility of their constituents.
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“So, I think unions vote down these options because they don’t believe “assurances that their pay would double””
That’s O.K. I don’t believe that the school would actually fire bad teachers.
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“I suspect that this is part of what makes tenure attractive to unions. It decreases the mobility of their constituents.”
I’ve known union reps, and the mobility of their constitutents (teachers and police) is not something I’ve ever heard them mention or be concerned about.
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Tenure isn’t protection against dismissal. It’s protection against arbitrary dismissal. Schools are creatures of local government; local government changes; who knows who will be deciding your fate in the future. It may be Sarah Palin.
Even if DC teachers trusted Rhee (and based on her dealings with administrators and principals, I don’t see why they should), there’s no reason for them to assume her successor (and there will be a successor after the next election) will be equally trustworthy.
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Jim gets it in one. The first public school my mom taught at, the principal was angling for influence in city politics. The school and schooling were his base. At her present school, some twenty-odd years later, she’s seen at least five principals come and go. Every one of them brings a new style, a new set of priorities. Almost all of them have been willing to characterize teachers who don’t automatically follow their program as anything from “negative” to “incompetent”. Superintendents aim to put their mark on a system; elected school boards put their fingers into everything; and if all else fails the state legislature mandates a raft of new criteria, or the state board decides to buy textbooks from a particular publisher, making everyone change teaching.
We’re not far from the days when communities nosed into teachers’ personal lives, and made their jobs depend on it. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that my 6th grade English teacher was fired because he was gay. To say nothing of the gamesmanship that every level of leadership within the system has engaged in over decades to avoid desegregating the system.
Presuming good will on the side of the administrations and the school boards shows not so much experience with these things as they actually exist.
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Union vs. management. Teachers vs. administrators. That’s why these public employment debates are so unproductive. (Labor issues are likely to shut down the bus I ride, so I’ve been exceptionally cranky on public section unions.) Yes, management can be stupid, venal, vindictive and pointless. And February is cold. Everybody has to deal with these issues, unless you can hold a school kid or a transit passenger hostage. Because if you’ve got a hostage, you can make arguments that amount to “As soon as everything else is perfect, then I’ll start to reform.”
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I think a more reasonable way to go about this change is to start offering incoming teachers less security in return for more pay, rather than trying to change it for the people who already bought into one system.
Now, I’m not used to unions, and the ways that collective bargaining, but, the requirement that you get buy-in from the people who will bear the brunt of the changes seems only reasonable to me.
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As someone who will soon be looking for a job in New York City teaching high school English, I’ve given Rhee’s proposal a lot of thought. I’m well prepared with a Master’s from a respected and fairly rigorous program, am excited to teach, know my subject well, and could really, really use the extra money Rhee’s floating. BUT… I think I’d stick with tenure. The politics of schools and local governments, together with the possibility of unfounded or unfair accusations from students or parents, mean that I want my due process. I don’t want or need guaranteed lifetime employment, and tenure does not provide this; but administrators need to be able to show just cause for dismissal.
In the school where I recently student taught (a tough and underperforming school in NYC), teachers were very nervous of breaking up fights between students or of helping students individually after or before school because of a fear of being accused of something improper. There’s real fear of the rubber room. That’s sad, but it’s a reality. In my time there, I worked with a lot of very smart, dedicated, creative teachers, most of whom were looking to get out, as well as with a few who might have been a good fit for other schools but who were not, I think, particularly good for this student body. And yes, I worked with one who I would characterize as pretty dismal, though the students loved her because she was easy and all their projects seemed to be crafts-related. Perhaps she would have been under review for incompetence, but she (like the rest of the English teachers) was being evaluated by the Assistant Principal for English, whose subject area was: Social Studies! He knew nothing about the English curriculum or teaching methods, and had some of the worst grammar and spelling of any school professional I’ve witnessed. So…
Rhee’s proposal seems like an excellent idea for Teach for America candidates, who are only going to give about two years then move on to something else (that’s Rhee’s background, and she has a total of 3 years’ teaching experience). For those who plan to make teaching a career, I don’t think it’s a good plan. Also, I am deeply disturbed by the fact that she won’t say where the money’s coming from. This brings up some question about whether there’s potential conflict of interest or some quid pro quo arrangement.
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Quick question — do people feel that teachers are more at risk for arbitrary dismissal than people in other fields? I work in the business world and I definitely see people lose their jobs arbitrary. However I don’t work with children, and any time you work with children it seems the opportunities for arbitrary job loss increase.
I wonder about the comparison between political positions and teaching? What about something very subjective like sales? An equivalent level of arbitrary job loss?
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Jen, it’s hard to say. I’ve just spent a few minutes poking around and reading about the history of teacher tenure laws.
“Laws protecting teachers’ jobs originated in the 1920s, with their roots partly in the women’s rights movement of the era — even today, more than 70 percent of teachers in Californian are women. “They [due process laws] were a direct result of teachers banding together to put an end lo what they thought were arbitrary and abusive practices in school districts that would summarily dismiss teachers without good cause,” says Scott Plotkin, chief consultant to the state Senate Education Committee.”
Also from here:
“The Red scare following World war I shows what can happen without tenure. The Los Angeles superintendent imposed a loyalty oath on the city’s teachers with the intent to fire any who professed support for the I.W.W., a radical but legal labor union.”
I don’t know–is there any reason to believe this kind of thing would happen? I don’t want to find out, to be honest.
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I really don’t think teachers are at more risk for arbitrary dismissal than others. I think the difference is that we’ve offered (and teachers have accepted) tenure in return for decreased pay. Tenure, at least in short term budgets, doesn’t seem to cost anything, while pay does.
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Before I began my Master’s, I worked for 20 years in publishing, so I have some experience with corporations in that industry. How arbitrary are firings? It depends a lot on the company and the situation. In the large corporations I worked for, it was difficult to fire relatively low-level people. We had a departmental editorial assistant who was incompetent (meaning terrible at his job) and whatever word you would use to describe someone who spent the majority of his time at work watching major league baseball on his computer and e-mailing his friends. Trying to get rid of him was a six-month process at minimum; we had to have a written employee action plan and to give him ample time to improve and to review his progress with him often, and to monitor and document, etc. Ultimately, it was easier to take him out to lunch and beg him to look for another job and say we’d help in whatever way we could. It was company policy to not say anything negative about an employee in a reference anyway (for legal reasons), so it didn’t much matter. Upper-level employees were much more likely to be fired for political reasons or for something one might describe as arbitrary, but they got huge severance packages to compensate. Those of us in the middle fell somewhere in the middle of those extremes; the typical modus operandi was to make the employee so miserable that he or she left sort of voluntarily. There are ways.
I do think schools are different from corporations in some important ways. The school system is a relatively closed system, with employee records centralized in a way they are not in other industries. If you get fired arbitrarily (you feel) from your company job, you can usually find another job in the same area. It is likely that your new employer will know only what you disclose, because all publishers or law firms or whatever in a given district (county, city) are not part of the same large personnel system. In addition, the student-teacher relationship can’t be compared with a customer-service provider relationship in other industries. Students need recourse when they feel they are being treated unfairly by a teacher (or, worse, abused in some way), but the teacher should have the right to a hearing if a student, parent, or administrator makes charges.
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Not to be a tool but why is tenure still around? This concept seems to be so archaic and not something that benefits anyone other than bad teachers. Good teachers have no need for this just like good employees at public companies. Wonder why its hard to find good people on Monster.com? It’s because they have no need for those sites because their network takes care of them. Same thing with good teachers getting pulled to new schools to be dept heads.
Furthermore, why do public employees get so many perks for jobs? Towns and cities need to keep their budgets as low as possible so they end up pushing for the lowest bidder on everything except teachers, cops and firemen. Companies no longer provide this and neither should cities. We don’t get to have unions, we don’t get to have pension plans and we don;t have tenure. Yet I wold venture a guess that the private sector has much more agility to make immediate changes and resolve problems within the organization much more effectively.
Better schools means the flexibility to make changes
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“We don’t get to have unions, we don’t get to have pension plans and we don;t have tenure.”
Bug, not feature.
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I have to say, listening to all these comments, that tenure seems like a weird solution to ineffective HR. And it seems like it’s introducing its own set of problems, without really addressing the root problem.
It seems like every time we have a discussion about education it comes back to the same thing: there is (currently) no effective, generally accepted way of judging teacher performance. The HR function within education has completely failed to set up effective performance management. And so we end up with a wildly mixed bag in terms of performance of those who are in the classroom.
In response to this reality, administration asks for the power to fire anyone at will. The teachers’ union blocks the firing of everyone. In both cases the baby is going out with the bathwater. What ever happened to the middle path? And you’ll note that there is still no discussion of fixing the root cause — educational HR and performance management.
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kip — tenure (a rather recent invention) is “still” around because it dramatically reduces the financial costs of public schooling. The problem for public schools is NOT getting rid of teachers; it is retaining them. Teachers have one or two probationary years during which they are easy to dismiss, and if you cannot trust managers to identify incompetent teachers at that point (and, let me tell you, you can’t), then why think they will be any better at it later on?
Even with tenure, managers who can win the trust of unions can dismiss incompetent teachers without too much difficulty. The problem is that very view managers of public schools can win the trust of unions; because they are not worthy of that trust, on the whole. Tenure and unions do pressure them to intervene to improve the quality of the incompetent teachers (very few people are incompetent and unable and unwilling to learn), but without much success.
That said, Rhee’s bet is that she’ll be able to increase teacher’s pay a good deal and therevy compete more effectively with neighbouring districts for reasonable quality labour, and that giving up tenure is a neat trick for introducing this (she is nothin if not media-savvy). She’s probably right, but this is a reason to do what she is doing in DC (and, perhaps, similar places), not for abolishing tenure in general.
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Jen, I think you have an interesting perspective. I just poked around Obama’s education plan, and I don’t think he’s really coming at it this way. I’ve been impressed with some things Roy Romer has been saying, but he seems also to be intrigued by Rhee, and I think she’s a dead end for educational improvement.
I have to come back to my experiences again and again. I am one person. I have skills. I am the same person from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. But it is clear to me that one of my comp classes is succeeding more than the other. (And of course the one that was not succeeding was the one that did course evals this year, but I have to let that go. 😉 Were the students stronger writers to begin with? Was it a factor that one class was at 7:10 and the other at 11:30? Was it the chemistry among the students? Was it that one special needs student who talked a lot threw me off in the 7:10 class?
Teacher assessment has to be incredibly intense and time-consuming and thus expensive because it has to be observed regularly by trusted and trained observers who understand how teaching works and how innovation and success occur. If we invest that much money into assessment of teachers, taxpayers will scream.
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Well, here’s the thing: taxpayers are already screaming, and we’re already spending tons of money. This system is so clearly broken. And — and perhaps this is the worst side effect — to a large extent it’s driven off the very people who are needed to fix it. (By this I mean both teachers and students/parents.)
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Jen is right–much of the problem traces to methods of evaluation. The easiest way, on the face of it, is standardized tests, so that is what the system emphasizes. I’m not against standardized tests—they’re important tools for looking at student progress across geographic and demographic borders. But they give only a small part of the picture, and I would resist using student performance on standardized tests as the sole, or even chief, measure of a teacher. (Note that scoring of these “standardized” tests is a whole separate issue for English, which requires essays.)
In the school where I student taught, many of the kids would inevitably perform badly on a standardized test no matter what I did that year, and here’s why: poor attendance; poverty (no health insurance, didn’t eat); most did no work outside of class (other obligations like work or caring for children, no support from parents to do it, not part of the culture); students arrived without the proper skills to do the work in that grade, but I was required to teach the standard curriculum (some read and wrote at a 3rd or 4th grade level, but we had to teach Toni Morrison and Shakespeare and the critical lens essay); some classes were vastly overcrowded; no computers and often not enough books; inclusion classes with inadequate support; English language learners with no support (they did have an additional ELL class); family problems and social problems, like gang activity (including among the parents).
Despite all this, I really liked most of the kids and loved teaching them. The ones who showed up regularly to work made a lot of improvement, and it was thrilling to see them get excited about a book or about their own progress. That progress might be finally mastering the idea that every sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period. If you looked only at their performance on a standardized test? Yikes. But in the current climate, there’s a good chance that I’d be judged “good” or “bad” on these performances.
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But, Suze, the tenure system actually works against young, smart, energetic teachers like yourself. Combine tenure with an economic downturn and what are the chances that you’ll find a position in the spring?
I’m just not sure that you I agree with you and Harry and others on the impossibility of evaluating teachers. Steve’s job is evaluated. He’s isn’t evaluated based on sheer numbers of output. In this economic downturn, nobody expects that he should turn out the same amount of documents as he did when the economy was going well. He gets a 360 evaluation and people comment on a variety of very subjective variables including self-promotion, which he always scores very low on. He’s never felt that he ever received an unfair evaluation.
I would definitely take the pay hike and lose tenure, because I’m very confident that I’m a kick-ass teacher.
It just is odd to me that most teachers would cling so strongly to tenure that they would be willing to give up a 50% raise. That’s not tiny. That really speaks to the great insecurity of teachers and profound distrust of administrators.
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“That really speaks to the great insecurity of teachers and profound distrust of administrators.”
Isn’t that because school administrators are people who couldn’t hack it in the classroom? (Incidentally, in a couple countries I know of, principals still have teaching responsibilities.)
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Never did I say it was impossible to evaluate teachers! Of course it’s possible, and it’s possible to evaluate them well. But it’s far from a given in the current system, where standardized test performance is becoming all-important. The other method is through observation by an administrator, who may or may not be qualified to evaluate the teacher, and who may or may not have his own political agenda.
I’m not sure why the ability to fire someone arbitrarily would benefit me. The tenure system doesn’t—in the K-12 school system, I understand that the university system is different—prevent the school from getting rid of a bad teacher. But they have to show just cause (and incompetence is cause), which is not a bad thing if you are being unjustly accused of something.
Look, if I’m teaching in a middle-class or upper-middle-class suburb, sign me up for the extra 40K, because the kids are going to do well if I do my job well and I’d take my chances on handling the administration and others deftly. If I’m teaching in a high-need school, there are far too many variables out of my control to depend on my students’ scores meeting the NCLB standard, which most experts agree are unreasonable for many.
Let’s also acknowledge that Rhee’s plan isn’t going to help these schools with intractable problems, because these high-need schools experience a one third turnover of teachers and administrators every year (at least in NYC). The teachers there don’t typically make it to the tenure year.
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OK. Now I’m all confused. So, if teachers leave anyway after a few years and teachers can get fired no matter what, why go to such trouble to defend the system? Go for the money. If the tenure system is really to benefit administrators who don’t want to pay for evaluations and who have a much stronger interest in retaining, rather than firing, teachers, why should teacher fight so hard for it?
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Because not all teachers leave anyway (though retention is a problem in general, especially in difficult urban schools). And the point of tenure is precisely that teachers can’t be fired “no matter what”—they can only be fired for just cause. Tenure is not to benefit administrators (they don’t pay for evaluations, they do it themselves), it’s to protect teachers. I’m not sure why one would argue for the possibility of capricious or politically motivated dismissals or those based on unfounded charges. You’re right in that a teacher should just take the money if the plan is to teach only 2 or 3 years. If you want a career in teaching, given the current state of the system, it’s likely not such a great deal.
PS: I am supposed to be studying for the comps; if I fail, it’s on you!
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