GOP Takes on Teacher Tenure
The New York Times reports:
Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.
The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama’s call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week’s State of the Union address.
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers’ unions on the defensive.
“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.
Eliminating tenure, Mr. Sandoval said, would allow school districts to dismiss teachers based on competence, not seniority, in the event of layoffs.
Politics also play a role.
“These new Republican governors are all trying to outreform one another,” said Michael Petrilli, an education official under President George W. Bush.
In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has campaigned aggressively for the state to end “last in, first out” protections for teachers. Warning that thousands of young educators face layoffs, Mr. Bloomberg is demanding that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo scrap the seniority law if the budget he will unveil Tuesday includes state cuts to education.
Teachers’ unions have responded to the assault on the status quo by arguing that all the ire directed at bad teachers distorts the issue.
“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”
Tenure laws were originally passed — New Jersey was first in 1909 — to protect teachers from being fired because of race, sex, political views or cronyism.
Public-school teachers typically earn tenure after two or three years on probation. Once they receive it, they have a right to due-process hearings before dismissal, which in many districts makes it expensive and time-consuming to fire teachers considered ineffective. Tenure also brings seniority protections in many districts.
