Teacher Tenure

[lkb0714]

Originally Posted by nyyfanatic85

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!

My first year as a teacher I taught with another first year teacher who happened to teach physics. He was one of the best natural teachers I have ever seen with both a large knowledge base but also a gift for making a hard subject easily understood. I know this because part of the first year teacher program required us to observe both beginning and master teachers weekly.

He had a board member's child in his honors physics class. Despite his tutoring her and her own hard work she could not pass the class. She was placed in the class not on the merit of her test scores or performance in other honors level work but rather her parents request. When she barely passed the first two terms and then failed the midterm written by the entire department her parents blamed the teacher. When she failed the class they made sure that teacher was not given another contract. Despite protests by scores of children and their parents and the fact that physics teachers are not easy to come by this person was let go because he did not have tenure when he failed a board members child.

Tenure protects against this sort of situation.

[Ivorytickler]

Originally Posted by ambient

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?

When budgets are tight, cutting highly paid teachers and replacing them with teachers at half the cost is a very attractive option. You have to remember that, unlike the business you work for, the school can't develop a new product and make more money. They're given what they have to work with and they have to make that budget work.

Replacing a teacher who is at top pay with a new hire reduces your costs by about $40K in my district and it will take 14 years before that new teacher reaches top pay. You get a big savings for several years then smaller but still significant savings until that new teacher tops out.

The fact of the matter is, an experienced teacher is worth no more to the district than a new teacher. Both teach the same number of students and there is no extra revenue coming in because of a teacher's experience. In this day and age of cuts in education spending, yes, I think that an instant $40k/year savings by getting rid of an experienced teacher and replacing her with a new teacher could look very attractive. In fact, it's so attractive that Michigan just offered incentives to get teachers to retire. Unfortunately, they didn't get as many takers as they wanted. I'm sure many administrators are wishing that tenure didn't stop them from forcing still more to retire.

As an engineer, the more experience I had, the more I could do and the more I was worth to the company. That's not true in teaching. From a budget standpoint, all teachers are worth the same.

As a teacher, I am paid more if I have more education so I am encouraged to get more education. However, I'm not actually worth more to the district by getting more training and education. You're trying to compare apples to oranges. I don't bring in more money if I have more training. However, that doesn't mean I don't get it. I just get it for other reasons. I want to be effective because it makes my job easier. Do long time teachers do the same? The answer to that depends on how effective they are. If they're already good teachers, they, probably don't need the training. They could probably teach the training class. It's not like getting different certs makes me more valuable or more effective. I already have certs in what I'm good at. Getting, say, an English cert would be pointless as I'd never be any good at teaching english no matter what my certificate says. You, however, can learn and market a new skill and make yourself more valuable to the company and more marketable. The steps I could take to make myself more marketable would actually make me less effective as a teacher. I could get a general science cert and then be considered highly qualified to teach all science but I can tell you you don't want your kid in my class if I'm teaching biology. That is not my strong suit. Physical science and math are my strong suits. Any other cert I get, even though they'd make me more marketable, IMO are a waste because I wouldn't be good at teaching those subjects. So, I don't plan on doing anything to make myself more marketable. I don't want someone hiring me to teach chemistry and biology. I can do one but not the other.

As to investing my pay...they take 11% of my paycheck to fund the teachers retirement fund. My guess is that's more than most people invest in their retirments. I just hope I get that back if I don't make it to 10 years in teaching (you have to have 10 years in to vest). I'm going to be really ticked off if I'm let go before I tenure and I've paid 11% of my income into the system for 4 years for nothing.