“If tenure prevented achievement, Mississippi (no teacher tenure) would have stellar schools and Massachusetts (teacher tenure) would have failing ones. The opposite is true.”
America is the land of misdirected anger. This time, teachers in California are on the receiving end.
That is not to say that public school parents in the state shouldn’t be angry. In the last decade, billions have been cut from California’s K-12 budget. A public school system that used to be the envy of the nation has been starved to death. Budget cuts have meant canceled after-school and summer programs. It has meant rising student-teacher ratios, and in some Los Angeles classrooms, for example, overcrowding that has forced students to find seats atop file cabinets.
If tenure prevented achievement, Mississippi (no teacher tenure) would have stellar schools and Massachusetts (teacher tenure) would have failing ones. The opposite is true.
Now, thanks to the super-sized bank account of Silicon Valley mogul David Welch, who founded the parent group behind the Vergara case and funded the legal team, the court has come to see that students’ rights were not violated by overcrowded classes or budget cuts, but by the rights afforded to the teachers.
The court is wrong — and so is Welch. If teacher tenure is an important obstacle to achievement, Mississippi (with no teacher tenure) should have stellar schools and Massachusetts (with teacher tenure) should have failing ones. Instead, it’s the other way around. Correlation is not causation, of course, but across the country the states without tenure are at the bottom of performance rankings. States with the highest-achieving public schools have tenure (and teacher unions).
K-12 teachers with tenure do not have a job for life. What “tenure” means, for them, is due-process procedures for dismissals with cause, instead of capricious or at-will dismissal from their duties. I’ve spoken to countless teachers from Southern states who are afraid to do the things that New York City teachers do all the time – write blogs, write letters to the editor, even show up to a rally – because they could lose their jobs for speaking out. All working people should have such protections.
If anything, teacher tenure laws need to be strengthened because the country is bleeding teachers — especially in large urban districts. Between 40 and 50 percent of teachers nationwide leave the job within five years. If 40 percent of all doctors or lawyers quit within five years, I’m guessing we wouldn’t be asking why they have it so good. We certainly wouldn’t be trying to figure out what we can do to make their terms of employment less favorable.
Can we do a better job of training and developing teachers? Sure, but removing tenure doesn’t do anything to get us closer to that goal. In the meantime, teachers’ rights are a convenient scapegoat.
It goes something like this: Angry at the conditions in your local public school? Don’t ask how they got that way. Don’t ask who set the budget priorities. Don’t ask who is in charge of hiring teachers and guiding their development. Don’t ask who’s in charge of making sure the conditions of school are optimal for teaching and for learning. Whatever you do, do not look at the million-dollar man behind the curtain of the lawsuit.
Just blame the teacher.
Steve said:
We all have the right to work. Criminal have the right to due process…..so should ALL employees. Yes even those employees trusted with educating your children. They got into education knowing full well they would be rather poorly compensated yet they have a love for teaching young people. Give them the stability with regard to their job, to allow for tried and true methodologies and the freedom to try new ones to help in their quest to reach every child with the state mandated message of assigned curriculum. Get off the teachers backs and start being a parent…not a finger pointer. Back your teachers who back your kids!!!!
5redherrings said:
Reblogged this on Tangerine, Florida and commented:
Who’s behind the Vergara case in California.
Stan Armour said:
And, by the way, if there is a finanicial benefit, I must have missed it…
Pingback: “If tenure prevented achievement, Mississippi (no teacher tenure) would have stellar schools and Massachusetts (teacher tenure) would have failing ones. The opposite is true.” | IEA Voice
Brian Yoder said:
Your premise here is that teachers have a right to a job. Sorry Charlie. Your job teaching my kid ought to be entirely contingent on your doing a good job of it. If you can’t or you won’t or circumstances outside your control prevent you from doing so then you shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of my kid. You have no right to ruin my kid’s life for your own financial benefit.
David Greene said:
My premise is that we all have rights to jobs. If you think teachers are financially wealthy Charlie, you live in another land. Many have two jobs like lots of other people. Compare their salaries to other professionals with masters degrees.
Secondly, you and I both want the best people to teach kids, mine and yours. What incentives do you suggest to draw them away from law, medicine, or finance?
Brian Yoder said:
How can anybody have a right to a job since a job is a contract between an employer and an employee? For there to be such a right then there much be an involuntary obligation for people to hire teachers whether they are any good or not and that’s the situation the court just ruled was unconstitutional.
I didn’t say that teachers were rich, I just said that they have no right to be paid regardless of whether those paying them see any value in what they are doing.
What incentives do I think there should be to get people to teach? How about the freedom to teach as they see fit and not to conform to what politicians think they should teach? How about the ability to be paid what your customers think you are worth? If you are worth a million dollars a year you should be able to make that much. If they don’t then you don’t deserve to make that much. Today’s unions make paying teachers what they are worth impossible. They insist that incompetent teachers be retained and paid far more than they are worth and that extremely competent teachers make no more than the least competent ones. What competent person would want to go into such a profession? Law, Medicine, and Finance are far more attractive because they offer that opportunity. Teaching should too.
David Greene said:
If not for unions teachers would still be making even lower salaries with fewer benefits. Brian. You can disagree all you want but if you don’t listen to the reality , our children will get more and more people les and less qualified to teach, no matter how much you spout your opinion.
Brian Yoder said:
David: What self-respecting competent person who was great at his job would want to be in a union-dominated profession? Unions don’t guarantee highly qualified people are hired and retained, they push out highly competent people and ensure the those who thoroughly reserve to be fired aren’t. Unions are at the root of most of the educational problems in the public school system today.
David Greene said:
Me.
Brian Yoder said:
If you are really at the top of the heap, why would you want to be in a profession where you get paid exactly the same as the worst person with your same time on the job? This is a choice that will cost you quite a lot of money and hobble your career and force you to be held back to the average level of your peers in your career progression not just in terms of money but also in terms of seniority in many other ways. I am not saying that other things about teaching might not be enticing enough for you to ignore these factors, but can you doubt that at the margins these factors push out a whole lot of otherwise excellent people? On the other hand, if you are not very good and at the bottom of the scale of talent and ability to keep your job and rise in your career don’t you think that a unionized tenured position would be very appealing since you get automatic salary increases you don’t deserve, protection from firing that you do deserve, and a progression in your career that you would be unable to achieve in a similarly demanding but non-unionized profession? Come on, this is pretty basic stuff here.
Stan Armour said:
So, other students who do not want to do work, show up for class, or school for that matter, who show up late every time for class and then celebrate their arrival by taking a walking tour of the classroom before finding their seats, come in after having no breakfast meal, don’t have a consistent place to stay, have to take care of their younger siblings because their parent works two jobs to pay their rent, students who don’t stop talking in the classroom along with an administration isn’t allowed to remove them for more than a temporary basis, sleep in class, etc; [all real, by the way – from these past two months o be precise] all have no impact on the teacher, nor the way that the teacher does their job? All these “circumstances” happen every day and are ALL circumstances which then, according to you, prevent the teacher from doing a good job and so, according to you, would indicate that the teacher “shouldn’t be allowed within a mile” of your kid, or any kid – using that logic, right? My guess is you have never evn thought about stepping into a classroom when it matters…
Brian Yoder said:
I’m entirely in favor of schools being able to kick rotten kids out exactly as much as I think they should be able to kick out rotten teachers too. If we care about education we need to enforce the conditions where it is possible, and a school full of kids uninterested in education and impeding the process and full of teachers who are uninterested or incapable of carrying out their duties makes education impossible. If you are opposed schools being empowered to perform this kind of quality control then you are opposed to having good schools that offer an actually effective education.
David Greene said:
maybe we should kick out judgmental commenters too? But I tolerate you.
Brian Yoder said:
As for my thinking about setting foot into a classroom, at one point I considered being a teacher but the bureaucracy, lack of concern with quality, unions, and the rest were such a turn-off I decided to be an engineer instead. I have on occasion taught both young kids, older kids, and high school teachers. I must say that the high school teachers were the worst students…constantly complaining about the work and trying to finagle a high grade rather than trying to learn something.
David Greene said:
So you now deem yourself an expert, after deciding not to teach? LOL. That would make me an expert on engineering?
Brian Yoder said:
David wrote: “So you now deem yourself an expert, after deciding not to teach? LOL. That would make me an expert on engineering?”
This is a lame ad hominem argument. Is that how you teach your students to address challenges? I have been hearing this from teachers since I was a student myself. Not being a teacher does not invalidate what I have to say and being a teacher doesn’t prove that what you say is right. You need evidence and reasoning to prove your point. If you don’t have that you should just concede the point. If you have some kind of actual arguments then present them. Providing fallacious responses doesn’t really strengthen your case, at least not with me.
Addressing the issue of my own competence to tell whether the schools are doing a good job or not however, I can tell whether someone is able to read or not after 13 years of the public school system without being a teacher. Are you saying that there’s some kind of magic about it that only a unionized teacher can see? I can tell whether someone knows basic history, math, history, writing, art, etc. too. I hire the cream of the crop of the public school system in my work and I get to see the results and they aren’t pretty. I also interact with the others in my everyday life and they are even worse.
I also spent 19 years of my life in the public school system personally observing how it works too. I also know how to hire employees, manage projects, and handle people who aren’t performing well too. I do all that sort of thing for a living, and I know that if I evaluated employees on their value for their whole career based on their first couple of years on the job and then gave them tenure my teams would be as dysfunctional as the public schools are. Do you really have any arguments here or are you just going to tell me that I am too stupid to know the difference between literacy and illiteracy because I don’t have a teaching degree again?
David Greene said:
Congrats on having to be right all the time.
Kristen Mendoza said:
No teacher has a right to a job. If a teacher is found to be incompetent by their Board of Education, they will be dismissed. It is incumbent upon the Board to seek action and prove the incompetence. This is how it should be. I agree that more people should have job protections; not less. Why does the middle class, or what’s left of it, keep aligning with forces that are against their own interests? Wake up folks.
David Greene said:
First.Boards do not hire or fire. Their employees do that. Boards approve personnel decisions. Anything more than that is micro managing.
Second, it is in everyone’s best interests to hire the best people, and of course to be able to fire the worst. In most states they have up to 5 years of a probationary period to determine whether or not a teacher should be granted tenure. That gives ample time to decide on whether or not they should stay hired, or be fired…WITH JUST CAUSE.
Brian Yoder said:
I don’t care if you have 30 years of great teaching history. If your next year is not going to be a good one you should be out. Immediately. Before you can harm one child’s future. If you don’t care about that then you don’t care about good education.
David Greene said:
The best know when to leave.
Brian Yoder said:
For what it’s worth, in a lot of schools (like the ones in my state) teachers just need to make it 1.5 or 2 years before they become impossible to fire. It should never happen.
David Greene said:
I agree. It should be 3 years to gain tenure.
Brian Yoder said:
It may well be that the best people know when to leave. What about the worst? They will never leave because they probably (rightly too) know that they will never be able to get a better job than the tenured unionized teaching job they have now. So they cling to their jobs and the union protects them. How exactly can this result in a quality education for our kids? It’s the opposite of a meritocracy.
David Greene said:
I don’t know what spurs your hatred, but I pity you.
Brian Yoder said:
Regarding your notion that you can tell after a few years whether someone is going to be good for the rest of their career, I think that your notion is that there is some kind of “inherent personal goodness” that can be evaluated once and if found to be present then they are guaranteed to be great teachers forever. I think that looking at it that way is contrary to the whole notion of a good education. What matters is not whether the junior teacher is a good person, it is whether they are delivering good teaching services. They can be the most wonderful person in the world but if for whatever reason, be it burnout, a bad divorce, mental illness, boredom, conflicts with peers or superiors, or just a bad attitude the key question should be whether the next student to interact with him will be strongly enriched by the contact or not. If you don’t care about that then you don’t care about good education. You care about the union members getting their portion of the taxpayer’s money and nothing more.
David Greene said:
Good meant ability. Get over your obvious bias.
Brian Yoder said:
So are you saying that if someone has “good ability” when they are 25 years old that means that they are going to be a good teacher for the next 40 years? I have had plenty of people who worked for me who had oodles of “ability” who for any number of reasons were ineffectual at doing their jobs. sometimes the right thing to do is help them get back on the horse. Sometimes the best thing is to cut your losses. Your notion that somehow just because you aren’t a terrible teacher at 25 that’s proof that you will be worth hiring for the next 40 years is obviously absurd.
So you say that I am “biased”? Biased toward what? Educational quality? Intelligent management policies? Responsibility for results? Guilty as charged! What are you biased toward? Union thugs? No consequences for failure? Uneducated kids? Do tell.
David Greene said:
NO I am not saying that. I just don’t generalize as you do. Yes Brian, I am biased , but agains thugs like you. This will be your last approved comment here. I appreciated the conversation. Read my book. Then tell me what I am in favor of.
Pingback: POST VERGARA FALL OUT: Nothing says it any better than this from Brian Jones: – @ THE CHALK FACE