Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?

Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?
by Alan Greenblatt
NPR
April 29, 2010

Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.

"Teacher effectiveness" has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children's education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.

"There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure," says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. "Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective."

Action All Over

This is not merely an academic debate. A bill in Colorado that would change tenure rules and tie them to student performance passed out of a Senate committee last week and has the support of Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter. A Florida bill to abolish tenure was vetoed this month by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, but a similar bill is pending in Louisiana...

Less than 1% fired

Firing teachers is hard. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have each fired fewer than 1 out of 1,000 of their tenured teachers in recent years. Those numbers are not unusual.

Administrators complain that the process is too draining. Reviews of dismissal cases can take years to make their way through the system, costing tens of thousands of dollars each.

Teachers say that administrators are themselves at fault for performing perfunctory, "drive-by" evaluations. One study of selected districts in four states found that 99 percent of teachers receive "satisfactory" ratings.

Sometimes, bad publicity can curb the worst abuses on either side. The Los Angeles Times found last December that L.A. schools deny tenure to fewer than 2 percent of probationary hires, with evaluations often amounting to nothing more than a single, pre-announced classroom visit lasting 30 minutes or less.

Following the report, Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines pledged greater scrutiny. In February, the district announced it would fire more than 110 nontenured teachers for performance -— three times the annual rate in recent years...

"The Cartel" wins Independent Film awards; Documentary is about the huge amount of money we spend to get bad schools

This movie is about the problem that Karen Horwitz refers to as "White Chalk Crime."


Washington DC Independent Film Festival just announced last week:

* The Cartel -- Winner, 2010 Visionary Award

"2010 Visionary Award goes to a film that embodies our theme this year of 'making a difference' in our world. These films and their filmmakers are risk takers, as they explore social, political issues that are important to all of us."


* The Cartel -- Winner, 2010 Audience Award, Best Documentary

"Audience Awards – before each session, our audience members were given a ballot which listed all the films in a session, they were then asked to cast their vote: Excellent, Good and Fair. The ballots were then calculated on a percentage of excellence."



'Cartel' documentary explores NJ schools
Local filmmaker studies tenure, vouchers, and counting Benzes in the parking lot
Hudson Reporter
by Timothy J. Carroll

Is your school sub-par? Are costs for education still high? Bob Bowdon can connect the dots. And he can tell you a story about a janitor making a six-figure salary.

Bowdon is a documentary filmmaker from Hoboken. In "The Cartel," he wants to show "How American public education primarily serves its employees, not its children."...

LA Times: School district doesn't effectively evaluate teachers

At Chula Vista Elemetnary School District, principals seldom observed me or other teachers, but they did fill out evaluations. If I were a principal, I'd want to hear teachers' thoughts and ideas about teaching. In almost 3 decades of teaching, I never had such a conversation with an administrator. If the district had some idea of what was really going on at Castle Park Elementary, it could have saved $100,000s in legal costs. It had no idea how confused and disturbed certain teachers were when it allowed those teachers to dictate decisions at the district office.


Bar set low for lifetime job in L.A. schools
Los Angeles Unified often hands out tenure with little or no review of novice instructors' ability or their students' performance.
By Jason Felch, Jessica Garrison and Jason Song
December 20, 2009

Altair Maine said he was so little supervised in his first few years of teaching at North Hollywood High School that he could "easily have shown a movie in class every day and earned tenure nonetheless."

Before second-grade teacher Kimberly Patterson received tenure and the ironclad job protections it provides, she said, "my principal never set foot in my classroom while I was teaching."

And when Virgil Middle School teacher Roberto Gonzalez came up for tenure, he discovered there was no evaluation for him on file. When he inquired about it, his school hastily faxed one to district headquarters.

"I'm pretty sure it was just made up on the spot," Gonzalez said.

There is nothing to suggest these teachers didn't deserve tenure, but the district did little to ensure they were worthy.

A Times investigation found that the Los Angeles Unified School District routinely grants tenure to new teachers after cursory reviews -- and sometimes none at all.

Evaluating new teachers for tenure is one of a principal's most important responsibilities...