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The Virginia state legislature has been making headlines for discussing whether women should have to undergo a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion, but the same legislative body is receiving kudos, from the liberal New Republic, for seeking to abolish tenure for teachers in public schools. In backing the proposal, the editors of The New Republic drew a distinction between higher education, where they think tenure is appropriate, and K-12 education, where they want tenure "abolished." Universities are "our country's ideas factories," they write. "And so it makes a certain amount of sense that we would want university professors-the people our society relies on to explore ideas, including unpopular ones-to enjoy protections from ideological or intellectual retribution. But this rationale doesn't apply at the K-12 level." The editorial goes on to say that "there isn't a good" rationale for tenure in elementary and secondary education. "Indeed, tenure is so illogical that it's impossible to see why it shouldn't be abolished."

Now that I have a blog where I can write what I want, when I want, I have the luxury of revisiting some good and bad ideas. In this post, I will revisit a really pernicious idea that appeared about a month ago in The New Republic. You see, the odd thing about our culture is that it is so attached to the present moment that anything that happened or was written about a month ago tends to disappear in the ether. But this editorial was so outrageous that it still annoys me, and I want to explain why. In an editorial called "Making the Grade: The Case Against Tenure in Public Schools," the editors argued that it was a fine idea to remove any job protections from public school teachers because they don't need them. In making this assertion, the editors of this once-liberal magazine were giving support to the far-right Virginia legislature, which was at that moment not only trying to strip teachers of tenure but to require women to have "a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion." The editorial of course condemned the latter as harsh, but thought that the far-right effort to remove job protection from public school teachers as a "halfway decent idea." Indeed, the editorial went on to decry teacher tenure as "the least sane element" in our country's education system.

Gov. Jindal has submitted a legislative proposal that would offer vouchers to more than half the students in the state; vastly expand the number of privately managed charter schools by giving the state board of education the power to create up to 40 new charter authorizing agencies; introduce academic standards and letter grades for pre-schoolers; and end seniority and tenure for teachers. Under his plan, the local superintendent could immediately fire any teacher-tenured or not-who was rated "ineffective" by the state evaluation program. If the teacher re-applied to teach, she would have to be rated "highly effective" for five years in a row to regain tenure. Tenure, needless to say, becomes a meaningless term, since due process no longer is required for termination. The bill is as punitive as possible with respect to public education and teachers. It says nothing about helping to improve or support them. It's all about enabling students to leave public schools and creating the tools to intimidate and fire teachers. This "reform" is not conservative. I would say it is radical and reactionary. But it is in no way unique to Louisiana.

You're Fired! What prevents an unpopular teacher from losing their job for holding firm on class standards, procedures and/or guidelines: Teacher Tenure. It is in many ways vital to the educators ability to work effectively in much the same manner to that of a Justice on the US Supreme Court. The main purpose of life appointments or terms for Supreme Court Justices is to allow them to make decisions based on moral and ethical reasoning regardless of whether it is popular or unpopular publicly. The object of job security is to allow for "politics" to not influence the management of a situation. Educators, while their work does not impact the entire judicial system as that of the US Supreme Court, it does impact the lives of those involved. Many times teachers are faced with having to address or confront others with observations that may be unfavorable. As professionals they cannot avoid confronting these individuals for fear of losing their job. Truthfulness, honesty and accountability in a profession can often times be interpreted in alternative ways that result in retribution toward the educator. Teacher tenure allows instructors to do what is morally correct even when it's results or outcomes are not enjoyable. The other area that is upsetting to the vast majority of the public is the belief that tenure safe guards bad teachers from losing their jobs.

Perry Zirkel filled in for Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet, a couple days ago and wrote a provocative post about the law v. lore in teacher tenure. Perry (who I love is jumping on blogging - what a perfect medium for him) makes some great points that the law of teacher tenure is not as ironclad against dismissing teachers as most educators assume. I teach this to my future administrators all the time. Perry also makes a good point that litigation resulting from dismissal cases frequently goes the district's way. Certainly, as is almost always the case, the law is geared to support the school in these cases. So, as is always the case with Perry, he makes some great points and actually points to data to back it up.  But, I have 2 small issues with how Perry frames this issue and a different recommendation as to how to achieve the desired result. 

"The champions of corporate education reform insist that efforts to strip teachers of the procedural guarantees of due process embedded in tenure are somehow an extension of the Civil Rights Movement. In the latest iteration of this make-believe history, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown and her ally, lawyer David Boies, wax philosophical about how their campaign to end tenure is really "about Civil Rights." While the rhetoric plays well in the press, it deliberately misrepresents the actual history of Civil Rights. In reality, teachers played a critical role in the movement. In some cases, they were able to do so because they were bolstered by tenure, preventing their arbitrary dismissal for activism."

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.

The standard reformy template is that teachers should only be able to get tenure after 3 years of good ratings in a row and that teachers should be subject to losing tenure if they get 2 bad years in a row.  Further, it is possible that the evaluations might actually stipulate that you can only get a good rating if you achieve a certain rating on the quantitative portion of the evaluation - or the VAM score. Likewise for bad ratings (that is, the quantitative measure overrides all else in the system). The premise of the dice rolling activity from my previous post was that it is necessarily much less likely to roll the same number (or subset of numbers) three times in a row than twice (exponentially in fact). That is, it is much harder to overcome the odds based on error rates to achieve tenure, and much easier to lose it. Again, this is much due to the noisiness of the data, and less due to the difficulty of actually being "good" year after year. The ratings simply jump around a lot. See my previous post.

Okay! Okay! I know teachers do not have tenure in the pure definition of guaranteed lifetime employment that was available in some higher education institutions long ago. Instead, teachers have fair employment and dismissal procedures that protect them from dismissal for arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory reasons after completing a probationary period. I have been following with interest the legislative battle in Virginia over the "tenure" issue. It has been a very partisan battle with only a few Republican senators--those with firsthand information from relatives who are teachers--refusing to go down a road that appears punitive and unnecessary in this non-collective bargaining state. These senators' instincts are right, and let me provide some points to support them. First, the reason that the original laws were passed was to protect good teachers.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers are not unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states). 

Tenure is perhaps the most misunderstood topic in public education. Renewed cries to change or abolish tenure have surfaced once again. It is widely believed that tenure provides lifetime job security for teachers. This erroneous belief is almost universal, misunderstood by educators, as well as by the public. The simple fact is no such protection exists. Just the opposite is true.

America's public school teachers are seeing their generations-old tenure protections weakened as states seek flexibility to fire teachers who aren't performing. A few states have essentially nullified tenure protections altogether, according to an analysis being released Wednesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

"New York City teachers' union is firing back at a recently filed lawsuit challenging teacher tenure and due process, asserting that the state's due-process rules end up helping many more tenured teachers leave the profession than critics allege."

"Myths, though not real, are powerful and shape behavior. Thwarting tenure laws is a first step in the larger, well-publicized project of dismantling teacher unions. And if the California case is a harbinger, this aim may not be far off. But what will any of this accomplish? Are teacher tenure laws or their unions the root cause of teacher quality issues and persistent achievement gaps? The historical record offers a resounding no."

"It will be harder for public-school teachers in New Jersey to get tenure and easier to fire bad ones under legislation signed on Monday by Gov. Chris Christie that overhauls the state's century-old tenure law."

"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."

"Tenure is nothing more than a guarantee of due process in disciplinary matters It seems to me the people who complain about tenure for public school teachers have somewhat dictatorial powers.  They are similar to those who complain that police and prosecutors are hamstrung by having to follow the provisions of the Bill of Rights when going after those accused of crimes. We have a system of laws that provide for due process precisely because our Founders recognized that there must be some controls on those exercising power, ostensibly in the name of We, the People of the United States.  They also recognized the danger of a mob mentality, which is why our system removed from being subject to simple majority rule things like our ability to worship or not worship in the religious sect of our choice, how we speak out politically, the ability of the press to act as our eyes and ears, and our ability to gather and organize for political and other purposes.  These are all rights guaranteed in the First Amendment."

But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

Virtually everyone agrees that teacher evaluation in the United States needs an overhaul. Existing systems rarely help teachers improve or clearly distinguish those who are succeeding from those who are struggling. The tools that are used do not always represent the important features of good teaching. Criteria and methods for evaluating teachers vary substantially across districts and at key career milestones-when teachers complete pre-service teacher education, become initially licensed, are considered for tenure, and receive a professional license.  A comprehensive system should address these purposes in a coherent way and provide support for supervision and professional learning, identify teachers who need additional assistance and-in some cases-a change of career, and recognize expert teachers who can contribute to the learning of their peers. This report outlines an integrated approach that connects these goals to a teaching-career continuum and a professional development system that supports effectiveness for all teachers at every stage of their careers.