General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWill California's Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools?
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/california-rules-teacher-tenure-laws-unconstitutional/372536/?n7094r
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From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major citiesincluding Los Angelesa $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they werent scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores.
Principals have known about this problem for ages. In Chicago, economist Brian Jacob found that when the citys school district made it easier for principals to fire teachers, nearly 40 percent of principals, including many at the worst performing, poorest schools, fired no teachers at all. Why? For one thing, firing a coworker is unpleasant. It takes more than a policy change to overturn the culture of public education, which values collegiality and continuous improvement over swift accountability. That culture is not a wholly bad thingwith so many teachers avoiding the poorest schools, principals have little choice but to work with their existing staffs to help them get better at their jobs.
The lesson here is that Californias tenure policies may be insensible, but they arent the only, or even the primary, driver of the teacher-quality gap between the states middle-class and low-income schools. The larger problem is that too few of the best teachers are willing to work long-term in the countrys most racially isolated and poorest neighborhoods. There are lots of reasons why, ranging from plain old racism and classism to the higher principal turnover that turns poor schools into chaotic workplaces that mature teachers avoid. The schools with the most poverty are also more likely to focus on standardized test prep, which teachers dislike. Plus, teachers tend to live in middle-class neighborhoods and may not want a long commute.
Educational equality is about more than teacher-seniority rules: It is about making the schools that serve poor children more attractive places for the smartest, most ambitious people to spend their careers. To do that, those schools need excellent, stable principals who inspire confidence in great teachers. They need rich curricula that stimulate both adults and children. And ideally, their student bodies should be more socioeconomically integrated so schools are less overwhelmed by the social challenges of poverty. Of course, all that is a tall policy order; much more difficult, it turns out, than overturning tenure laws.
Bigmack
(8,020 posts)...but I found that tenure - actually job security - really was the only thing that protected the most innovative and experimental teachers.
The innovative ones are usually the boat-rockers and are the ones who are quick to call bullshit on some hare-brained scheme by the Administration.
The suck-ups never have a problem.
Poor teachers...? A problem totally unrelated to tenure. ALL contracts I dealt with had a specific set of steps to take to remove a bad/nonperforming teacher. None ... NONE... of the cases I was involved with were handled properly by Administration. Invariably, Admin skipped steps, fudged evidence, didn't document.... etc. We ended up defending teachers we knew were losers because the Admin simply didn't follow the contract.
It's interesting to see how things are shaking out for teachers. People used to laugh at our pension amounts.... hell, people used to laugh about our pay. Now that the Teapublicans have had their way with our economy, teachers are somehow the problem. Pay, pension, job security... all of that is now up for grabs by people with no experience in education.... and downright hostility from those who hate the idea of public education.