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We have no tenure. Principals choose their own staffs. The district can reassign teachers at will to any school in any position for which the teacher holds a certificate. Or the teacher can be non-renewed. Most union members here are taking advantage of the liability insurance benefits. My college professor emphasized that you should not go into a classroom unprotected. After 25 years, mostly in the inner city, I understand why.
perhaps this is one reason people think it is so difficult to fire tenured teachers. These stories have made national news multiple times.
Again, it's not tenure that is at fault. It's administrators who don't do what they need to to document that a teacher is a bad teacher. Administrators who take the easy way out. Tenure has nothing to do with this.
Without tenure, one would be a fool to stay in teaching. You'd be at the whim of any administrator who came through who didn't like you or liked his niece who has the same cert you do better.
If they kill tenure in Michigan, I'm going back into engineering. I may be an at will employee but I'll be a well paid at will employee and all you have to do to keep an engineering job is be more valuable than your salary to the company.
There is just too much financial incentive to getting rid of long term teachers without tenure. When you can hire three new teachers for the price of two now in the classroom, it can get very tempting to just decide not to renew the contract of the long time teachers and replace them with cheaper new hires.
1. Tenure is essential. Otherwise teachers would be subject to dismissal for arbitrary reasons, including politics, popularity, religion, voicing disagreement with misguided management policies, and a million other reasons.
2. Anyone who tells you that tenure means schools can't fire bad teachers is lying.
3. Teaching is a hard job and not everybody can do it. Newly hired teachers should be observed, evaluated, and supported to enable them to do the job. If they can't do it they should generally be removed before they get tenure.
4. Many schools fail to do the evaluation and documentation required to fire bad teachers, either while they are in probationary status or after they receive tenure. That's not the fault of the teachers or of the tenure system, it is the fault of bad management.
5. Politicians who make a big deal over the tenure system and use it to attack teachers and teachers' unions are demagogues.
There's a start.
Consider the fact that an administrator must notify a teacher by mid-March of being terminated for cause; that teacher has 2+ months to polish his/her crown in the teachers' lounge and bad-mouth the administration, which has a drastic effect on staff morale and school culture.
You call it bad management, but the reality is that many school administrators do not have the time to do all of the necessary documentation to release an ineffective teacher. Plus, you make great points about the beginning teachers receiving guidance, but what if they begin slacking off after they receive tenure? There has to be recourse at the hands of the administration.
I have always said that great teachers do not need tenure and have nothing to be afraid of. Administrators will not, in nearly all cases, fire a very effective teacher for arbitrary causes!
Again, it's not tenure that is at fault. It's administrators who don't do what they need to to document that a teacher is a bad teacher. Administrators who take the easy way out. Tenure has nothing to do with this.
Without tenure, one would be a fool to stay in teaching. You'd be at the whim of any administrator who came through who didn't like you or liked his niece who has the same cert you do better.
If they kill tenure in Michigan, I'm going back into engineering. I may be an at will employee but I'll be a well paid at will employee and all you have to do to keep an engineering job is be more valuable than your salary to the company.
There is just too much financial incentive to getting rid of long term teachers without tenure. When you can hire three new teachers for the price of two now in the classroom, it can get very tempting to just decide not to renew the contract of the long time teachers and replace them with cheaper new hires.
There certainly is a lot of fear of big, bad administrators in this post. Can I ask you this, do you think that all bosses in the private sector like their employees? If they don't, is it reasonable to expect that they just can them and hire their relatives?
The notion that any school administrator will just randomly fire people he doesn't like, even if that person is an EXCELLENT employee, is absurd! Tenure should protect effective teachers of every salary...if they are excellent. This should make it impossible to get rid of a teacher just because they are too expensive or because they make a few waves in their quest for excellence.
The private sector doesn't have tenure. How does it survive then? How do any workers in the private sector survive without it if there is no protection from the big, bad administrator?
1. Tenure is essential. Otherwise teachers would be subject to dismissal for arbitrary reasons, including politics, popularity, religion, voicing disagreement with misguided management policies, and a million other reasons.
I work a pretty responsible white-collar job that is arguably of a greater degree of intellectual difficulty, hours, and stress than your average grade / high school teacher. I don't get tenure. I can be subject to dismissal at any moment for a variety of arbitrary reasons. Where's my job for life? Why do I only have to rely on my own skills, network, and resume to find and maintain employment? It's just not fair.
There certainly is a lot of fear of big, bad administrators in this post. Can I ask you this, do you think that all bosses in the private sector like their employees? If they don't, is it reasonable to expect that they just can them and hire their relatives?
The notion that any school administrator will just randomly fire people he doesn't like, even if that person is an EXCELLENT employee, is absurd! Tenure should protect effective teachers of every salary...if they are excellent. This should make it impossible to get rid of a teacher just because they are too expensive or because they make a few waves in their quest for excellence.
The private sector doesn't have tenure. How does it survive then? How do any workers in the private sector survive without it if there is no protection from the big, bad administrator?
The budget is a strong motivator. One way to cut costs quickly is to cut higher paid teachers. It's no secret we have a glut of teachers and they'd be, easily, replacable with cheaper teachers. Michigan just did this by offering incentives to retire but did not get as many takers as they wanted. I am CERTAIN they'd be letting long term teachers go to fix the budget right now if they could get away with it and they'd be letting them go for only one reason, because they're highly paid.
The private sector is different. Job security there rests on your value to the company not whether or not you're liked. As long as what I do for the company earns money for the company, they're unlikely to fire me because they don't like me. It's more costly to retrain someone else to do my job than keep me even if I have a higher salary.
A 1 year teacher and a 10 year teacher bring in the same revenue (based on the $ attached to students heads in the classroom) but the 10 year teacher costs more. The only way the 10 year teacher is more valuable to the district is if experience is more valuable to them than the budget.
One way districts can get around this is to seek out and hire people out of industry. If you hire older workers, they spend fewer years at top pay before they retire and they retire with fewer years in service. I will teach 15 or so years before I retire. My pension will be based on 15 years in service. The other teachers who hired in with me are in their early 20's. They will teach 30+ years with most of them at maximum pay.
All you have to do is do the math to see a very attractive savings to be had if you can replace teachers shortly after they reach max pay. Two teachers each working 15 years to cover a 30 year span are paid an average of around $61,000 a year (using high school minimums and maximums for my district) while a single teacher working the same 30 year span is paid an average of around $72000 per year. The two teachers together covering the span spend very few years at top pay. The single teacher spends most of his career at top pay. And then there are their retirements. While you do have two retirements instead of one for the two teachers, they are spaced 15 years apart and based on a lower pay average (here they use the average pay for the last 5 years) so there is a savings there too.
There is only one thing schools can do to increase revenue and that is to increase the student to teacher ratio. If you want to compare teachers to workers in industry, the only way an experienced teacher is worth more to the district is if she can handle more students in her classroom and brings in more revenue as a result. She doesn't. A worker, in industry, can do more with more experience and is, therefore, worth more with more experience. Since experienced teachers don't bring in more revenue, the only way to balance the budget now becomes making cuts. One cut you can make is to replace older more highly paid teachers with new hires fresh out of college. An average pay difference of $11K per year is nothing to sneeze at and, IMO, would be very tempting. I think that administrators wanting that $11k might be tempted to go looking for reasons to get rid of good teachers just because they are the more highly paid teachers.
The savings to a district would be incredible if they could limit teaching careers to 15 years in length. That is not true in industry. An employees worth is based on the value of what they do for the company. My last boss and I never got along but he complimented me every performance review. I completed more tests and lab reports than anyone else in the lab. In the end, it was the fact I was a jack of all trades master of none that led to them choosing to let me go when staff reductions were ordered. Everything I did could be absorbed by someone else in the lab except one thing and I trained someone else to do that before I left. (He also knew I was ready to student teach and that my severance pay would cover my student teaching. Not that that was supposed to have anything to do with the decision but I find it interesting that the two people let go were the two people who were ready to start second careers and just needed a financial shot in the arm to make the jump. A severance package worked nicely for me.)
You can't compare teachers to industry workers. As an engineer, the question was was the job I did worth my salary. Did I bring enough in to cover my salary and let the company make a profit? As a teacher, each passing year results in my costing more to the district while I bring in no more than a 1st year teacher does. I think we need a little protection against those who'd like to shorten teaching careers to save money. If you look hard enough and long enough, I'm sure you can find a reason to let someone go if you really want to.
I'm fortunate that I'm in a district that values quality of education and I'm seen as highly qualified. Still, if an equally qualified new candidate came along 10 years from now, it might be tempting to replace me with him because he's cheaper and can do the job.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 03-05-2011 at 06:28 AM..
I work a pretty responsible white-collar job that is arguably of a greater degree of intellectual difficulty, hours, and stress than your average grade / high school teacher. I don't get tenure. I can be subject to dismissal at any moment for a variety of arbitrary reasons. Where's my job for life? Why do I only have to rely on my own skills, network, and resume to find and maintain employment? It's just not fair.
See my post before this one. Your job security lies in your ability to earn money for the company. Theoretically, if you get the right experience, you can earn more and more and more, year after year after year for the company. THAT's your job security. Making sure you earn your keep. Teachers can't do that. They don't give us more money per student because we have more experience. It doesn't matter if there's a 1 year teacher or a 20 year teacher standing in front of that classroom the state funds that classroom the same.
In industry, as I moved up the ranks as an engineer, I took on ever more difficult assignments and larger workloads. That was worth more to the company. My added experience made me more valuable to the company. If it hadn't been for the recession and major downsizing, I'd still be there. I survived the first 5 reductions and two of them were huge. I had more financial value to the company because of my experience as an industry worker. I do not have more financial value to a district as an experienced teacher than a new hire. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
If the administration wants rid of somebody, they will get rid of them. It is that simple. I have seen it done with a couple people (that I know of) within the last couple years. They tend to target the older teachers who have worked past retirement age and they wanted rid of them. They made it so hard on them that they just went ahead and retired.
The tactics I saw included:
They find some little something they are not doing right (that generally nobody else is doing to suit them either) and pounce. They come up with a "corrective plan" for that teacher. This "corrective plan" is basically an unreasonable list of demands and expectations with target dates for completion. If they do not meet ALL of those demands by the target dates, they can be fired for incompetence. Therefore, they just go ahead and hang it up at the end of the year.
As a non tenured teacher you can be let go for no reason, any reason, at any time with 60 days notice.
As a tenured teacher you can be let go for reduction in staff, elimination of a program in your area of certification, or poor teaching. To be dismissed for poor teaching is fairly straightforward. Several observations, an improvement plan, a decision. It works for those teachers who are a detriment to education, regardless of their years of experience. If department heads, principals, and superintendents see evidence of poor performance as a teacher, and no significant improvement as part of the plan, you're done.
Tenure protects teachers from being let go for more than just poor teaching; if there were no tenure, teachers would be able to be fired for their church affiliations, lifestyle, political stances, personal relationships outside of the school day, and their activities outside of school. Believe me, I've seen all of the above tried to be used against teachers and failed because of the tenure system and efforts of the association or unions to which they belong.
Teachers who commit a crime or violation of their contract are removed from the classroom, reassigned while investigated and scrutinized for their "infraction" until a decision is made by a group of people as to whether or not they are a "good" teacher.
There are good teachers who are not good people and good people who are not good teachers. Tenure allows them a fair chance for improvement before they are terminated. I've seen veteran teachers be given as little as 30 days for improvement over one issue and removed from the classroom on the last day of their "plan". It's not as ironclad as people believe.
See my post before this one. Your job security lies in your ability to earn money for the company. Theoretically, if you get the right experience, you can earn more and more and more, year after year after year for the company. THAT's your job security. Making sure you earn your keep. Teachers can't do that. They don't give us more money per student because we have more experience. It doesn't matter if there's a 1 year teacher or a 20 year teacher standing in front of that classroom the state funds that classroom the same.
In industry, as I moved up the ranks as an engineer, I took on ever more difficult assignments and larger workloads. That was worth more to the company. My added experience made me more valuable to the company. If it hadn't been for the recession and major downsizing, I'd still be there. I survived the first 5 reductions and two of them were huge. I had more financial value to the company because of my experience as an industry worker. I do not have more financial value to a district as an experienced teacher than a new hire. You're trying to compare apples to oranges.
I hear what you're saying... I don't disagree with the entire premise of tenure, especially at the university level.
It sounds like the argument is that tenure is a necessary defense against public school systems that only look at budget / cost when evaluating a teacher's performance. That, to me, reflects a broken system. If I'm to support tenure, I want to see it more effectively managed, especially at the lower education levels. I want it to somehow reinforce incremental performance, not just the fact that the teacher sat in the chair breathing for a number of years without any major blow-ups. I want tenure to defend the good teachers but not give a pass to the bad ones because it's so difficult and burdensome to actually try to fire them. But I'm sure this would require large structural changes in education, starting with administration. Experienced teachers should be adding more value in terms of their incremental effectiveness and efficiency in the classroom and the institution as a whole (mentoring novice teachers, assisting in various other administrative aspects, etc.). That should be reflected in the handing out of tenure.
By the way, my job performance is measured in much the same same way. I'm not a sales rep or a customer-facing project manager. In a corporate finance guy. That means I'm in the non revenue-generating overhead cost bucket. My work is necessary, but any company would like to keep my costs as low as possible and preferably ship my work to India. I'm on my fourth company by my early 30s thanks to mergers, a few changes of my own, and a layoff back in 2009. I'm sure it won't be my last. I can walk into work tomorrow and be told it's my last day. There is no union to negotiate on my behalf, either. It's just me on my own.
My only defense is to save a significant chunk of my pay for the rainy days and continually reinvest in my skills, my network, and my work results to ensure that I have the most competitive resume possible when the inevitable time comes to look for something new. I have to stay agile and sharp so that I can convince the next company that I'm worth the cost. THAT'S how my job security works.
Does the average public school teacher tenured years ago under the current system share these same motivations to reinvest in his or her skills and performance?
Last edited by ambient; 03-06-2011 at 03:00 PM..
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