The Velvet Prison - teacher tenure offers little benefit to students in many cases

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Robert Worth

Tenure reform efforts tend to focus on moving to a system of renewable contracts, such as most private schools use. The past few years have seen a number of state efforts to accomplish that, but they've generally been stymied by the unions. Oregon, for instance, supposedly "abolished" tenure in 1997, moving to a system of rolling two-year contracts. In fact, the new law isn't very different from the old. It has some real advantages: school administrators are now easier to fire, unions can't instantly appeal a school's effort to put a teacher on a remedial plan, and it's easier to ease older teachers out of the profession. But despite the much-ballyhooed end to tenure, teachers still enjoy more or less the same protection after their probationary period. "It takes a long time and enormous expense to dismiss teachers, and this law has not helped it one bit or changed it," says Carol Matorazzo, deputy superintendant for the Portland, Oregon public school district.

Florida won a similarly uncertain victory in 1997 after a ferocious battle between statehouse reformers led by Education Commissioner Frank Brogan and the teachers' unions. The new law does have at least one real advantage over the old: poor-performing teachers used to have two years to improve, and that's been reduced to 90 days. Teachers' salaries are also determined partly by their skill, as opposed to their seniority, the only measure of pay in most states. Still, "tenure lite," as Brogan calls the new law, remains a thick protective layer against real accountability in the schools.

The standard union response to reform is that teachers deserve some due process protection, because without it principals could dismiss them for arbitrary or political reasons. There's some truth to this. My brother taught for several years at a San Francisco public school, where he was widely recognized by students and teachers alike as an outstanding teacher. His principal, who had virtually no administrative experience and was widely disliked, developed a personal animus against my brother and surely would have fired him if he could have (as it was, he deliberately manipulated his schedule in ways that made him, and other teachers in the school, miserable).

Nonetheless, there's no excuse for not finding a better way to remove bad teachers, who can have a devastating effect on morale throughout a school as well as on their own students. The National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, finally acknowledged this two years ago. "No one believes it should take four or five or six years to get rid of a teacher who is ineffective," NEA president Bob Chase declared in a 1997 speech. "If there is a bad teacher in one of our schools, then we must do something about it." Since then the NEA has made small noises about "streamlining" teacher tenure laws, but it has not done anything about them, and its state affiliates continue to resist change with all their might.

Instead, the NEA and its smaller sister, the American Federation of Teachers, have offered up their own approach to the problem of teacher quality: peer review. Essentially, this is a way for teachers to review each other's performance and make recommendations to the district about who should be fired or put on an improvement plan. Teachers who've gone through peer review say it makes teachers and administrators alike more vigilant about the level of teaching in their schools. But the evidence is still pretty thin--peer review is still only being used in a handful of districts around the country, despite the national unions' rhetorical committment to it. Amazingly, many locals still resist the idea that teachers should be subject to evaluation, even though they evaluate students all day long.