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While school administrators praise a new law that extends the number of years a teacher must work to earn tenure, teachers unions oppose the measure.

Mayor Bloomberg's comments on his Friday radio show that tenure "may have been necessary in the McCarthy era" but is now a relic of the past highlight how out of touch he is with the current realities of the school system.

"Gov. Rick Snyder signed teacher tenure reform into law Tuesday, the final step for some of the most sweeping changes made to Michigan's education system in decades."

"It was determined at trial that between 1 percent and 3 percent-roughly 8,200-of California's 275,000 teachers are grossly ineffective. Yet, only 2.2 teachers, on the average, are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year. Although intended to support the case against tenure laws, these statistics are actually an indictment against those responsible for evaluating teachers effectively."

"Jersey jazzman has another great piece about tenure. He writes: "I can only hope that Campbell Brown's appearance last night on The Colbert Report is typical of what she is going to bring to the debate over school workplace protections. Because if this is the best the anti-tenure side can muster, we teachers will easily win the debate - provided we ever get a chance to participate." "

Education officials lacked confidence in the controversial ratings of teachers who oversaw the city's highest- and lowest-performing students, cautioning schools about considering them in tenure decisions, the Daily News has learned. The city Education Department called superintendents last spring about the shakiness of ratings for teachers at the very top and bottom of the spectrum, which 33% of all ratings, including those of teachers not up for tenure, fell into. And all of the teachers at more than 30 schools fell into this category, a News analysis finds.

In a series of recent blog posts and in a forthcoming article I have discussed the potential problems with using bad, versus entirely inappropriate measures for determining teacher effectiveness.  I have pointed out, for example, that using value-added measures to estimate teacher effectiveness and then determine whether a teacher should be denied tenure, or have their tenure removed might raise due process concerns which arise from the imprecision and potential outright inaccuracy of teacher effectiveness estimates derived from such methods. I have also explained that in some states like New Jersey, which have adopted Student Growth Percentile measures as an evaluation tool, that where those measures are used as a basis for dismissing teachers, teachers (or their attorney's) might simply rely on the language of the authors of those methods to point out that they are not designed to, nor were they intended to attribute responsibility for the measured student growth to the teacher. Where attribution of responsibility is off the table the dismissing a teacher on an assumption of ineffectiveness based on these measures is entirely inappropriate, and a potential violation of the teacher's due process rights. But, the problem is that state legislatures are increasingly mandating that these measures absolutely be used when making high stakes personnel decisions.

A keystone of this reform movement is the replacement of subjective evaluation with quantifiable measures of each teacher's effectiveness. The quantitative method is known as value-added modeling (VAM), a statistical analysis of student scores that seeks to identify how much an individual teacher contributes to a pupil's progress over the years. The use of VAM in teacher evaluations is growing, but the method remains extremely controversial. Critics often claim that it does not and cannot measure actual teacher quality. This paper addresses that claim. Part I analyzes data from Florida public schools to show that a VAM score in a teacher's third year is a good predictor of that teacher's success in his or her fifth year. Having established that VAM is a useful predictive tool, Part II of the paper addresses the most effective ways that VAM can be used in tenure reform."

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

One thing I learned from meeting Gov. Dannel P. Malloy last Friday is that the lawyer-turned-politician requires evidence when confronted with a dissenting opinion. As a columnist and citizen of the state of Connecticut deeply concerned with matters of education, I do too. Let's take a controversial plank of the education reform bill.  "Since 2009, 31 states have enacted tenure reform, including our neighboring states of New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.  It's time for Connecticut to act."

"Nearly one in five U.S. educators say they support abolishing teachers unions, and one in three support ending tenure for teachers, according to a new survey by the think-tank National Center for Education Information." But what's the margin of error in the survey?

For too many years, tenure was granted to teachers almost automatically. Although critics charged that this practice undermined taxpayer confidence about the quality of education in public schools, their complaint never went anywhere. But things are finally changing.

Along comes neo-liberal education reform, built around the idea that the invisible hand of markets and competition can solve educational problems.  A whole raft of activity follows.  Reformers talk about billions spent each year compensating teachers for master's degrees that are disconnected from student outcomes.  Municipalities and school boards balk at funding automatic step raises on the grounds that longevity does not equal quality.  The linchpins of tenure and seniority come under assault on the somewhat contradictory grounds that tenure protects bad teachers and seniority encourages the mal-distribution of good teachers.

Florida's largest teachers' union is suing to block a new state law that eliminates tenure for new hires and links educators' compensation to student achievement.

Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray offered this response to my criticism of how he described tenure in a recent poll of New Jersey public opinion (see my brief reply and Bruce Baker's as well).

The Republican-led Michigan Legislature on Thursday approved changes to the state's teacher tenure system that supporters say would make it easier to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

"Okay, you've won! Tenure has been abolished. There are no limits on charters, and vouchers are available to all takers. Collective bargaining is a thing of the past. The dreaded fire-breathing dragon union now resembles a salamander. Governors, state legislatures, mayors and editorial boards, who've claimed that they can turn around the dismally depressing performance levels in our urban inner cities -- if only these vestiges of the past were abolished -- have had their way. But some questions remain, because as Colin Powell once said when referring to post-war Iraq, the "Pottery Barn Rule" now applies. That is, "you break it, you own it." So it might be useful if we ask the victors some questions about the new education landscape now that the "War on Entrenched Teachers & Unions" has been brought to a successful conclusion."

Jindal applauded state lawmakers for their quick passage of his legislation rewriting laws dealing with teacher tenure, charter schools, school administration and a statewide voucher program that funnels state money to private and parochial schools. Superintendent of Education John White said he will immediately start working on implementing the bills by soliciting private schools to determine capacity and develop lists to distribute to parents so they can file applications for vouchers next fall. But the part calling for local charter operators could take longer since there's a lot of preliminary work that has to be done. Jindal said he is "not declaring victory, mission accomplished" because "we've still got a lot of work in this session," like a bill that grants rebates to individuals and corporations that contribute money for vouchers.

Recently, I responded to an absurd and downright disturbing Op-Ed by a Connecticut education reform organization that claimed that Connecticut needed to move quickly to adopt teacher evaluation/tenure reforms and expand charter schooling because a) Connecticut has a larger achievement gap and lower outcomes for low income students than Massachusetts or New Jersey and b) New Jersey and Massachusetts were somehow outpacing Connecticut in adopting new reformy policies regarding teacher evaluation. Now, the latter assertion is questionable enough to begin with, but the most questionable assertion was that any recent policy changes that may have occurred in New Jersey or Massachusetts explain why low income children in those states do better, and have done better at a faster rate than low income kids in Connecticut. Put simply, bills presently on the table, or legislation and regulations adopted and not yet phased in do not explain the gains in student outcomes of the past 20 years. Note that I stick to comparisons among these states because income related achievement gaps are most comparable among them (that is, the characteristics of the populations that fall above and below the income thresholds for free/reduced lunch are relatively comparable among these states, but not so much to states in other regions of the country). I'm not really providing much new information in this post, but I am elaborating on my previous point about the potential relevance of funding equity - school finance - reforms - and providing additional illustrations.

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.