Another interruption to the Calculus series (I know, we just got back from intermission) for this important message …
Teacher tenure is in some parts of the news as of late, end teacher tenure, right? Ok. How about we think about ending teacher tenure when the following:
- teacher performance isn’t tied to the performance of students who don’t care
- teacher performance accounts for things like, oh I don’t know, students’ access to resources, school funding, number of students in classroom (one teacher, N students … only so much attetnion can go around — that’s not called teacher apathy, that’s called, that teachers are people — how effective of a manager would you be if you had direct responsibility of 25+ people with no “team leader”, “project leader”, etc. to manage the lower level work flow? Teachers don’t have this. ), etc.
- students are allowed to learn without the albatross of a test every three weeks to measure their synchronized swimming skills
- teacher salaries are not on an asinine step program
- progress on that asinine step program has less to do with longevity and more to do with something else … like, oh I don’t know, actual performance / merit, inflation rate (local, national, global), etc.
- that asinine step program is replaced with something closer to merit pay (fix teacher performance measures first)
- you and all your cohorts, who want to end teacher tenure, are willing to work for YEARS with a changing audience who hasn’t quite yet figured out the difference between right and wrong, sometimes know the difference but for a few moments want to be sociopathic, and is going through rapid hormonal changes (or kids who want to run around rather than be forced to sit in confined quarters …)
- teachers aren’t coming out of pocket for, say, classroom supplies because there’s not enough room in the budget
- you recognize that the summer isn’t “time off” — sure it’s not time in a classroom, but see the comment about the audience that teachers work with — summer is healing time, planning time, professional development time, learning time, etc. for the teacher; they’re still working, but technically not getting paid for it, or if you argue that they are getting paid for it, then you can’t argue that their nine-month salary should be pro-rated as a twelve-month salary because the summer is “time off” which it necessarily isn’t.
- you recognize that the evenings and weekends go to things like grading (see #3), writing letters of recommendation, writing exams, etc and that’s also technically not part of their salary either. And once again, if you argue that that is part of teacher compensation, then here’s a metric for you: dollars per hour.
- teachers earn a monetary bonus that isn’t a heartfelt thank-you letter from students and parents. Though teachers will appreciate those sentiments, they aren’t going to eat the letters; they still have to buy food.
- Are mandatory union dues tax deductible? Remember, every industry that has a worker’s union, deserved that worker’s union … Did people never learn about Spartacus in — wait for it — school?
I understand (that does not mean I agree with) at least two of the arguments for why teacher tenure should come to an end:
- bad teachers stay in the system
- once a teacher has tenure they don’t care about their job and just want to collect a paycheck and well … bad teachers stay in the system
It’s a somewhat remarkable reaction to a problem that occurs in just about every profession. There are people who just don’t care. However, I grant that it is true in almost every other profession, there isn’t a notion of tenure. Or maybe there is …
Why are comics, and TV shows, and movies about the dysfunctional office environment so funny? Other than the fact that the writing and acting is reasonably good, the topic is also a bitterly amusing one. We’ve all had the know-nothing boss who is the “dinosaur” who’s just been promoted up because of longevity. Go work at any reasonably large organization and you’ll find an abundance of incompetence that just doesn’t leave / can’t leave and which ultimately gets promoted.
This is combinatorial fact. Once an organization reaches a certain size, there will be incompetent members. Government is the easiest target — hey how about term limits! But even highly vaunted institutions and corporations have their share of incompetent or apathetic workers that take some while to remove from the system. That’s tenure in the corporate world (and not every company in every industry, but generally speaking) — stay under the radar, do the bare minimum, jump through a hoop every now and again, and legally it will be an uphill battle to remove you.
The teaching profession isn’t any different in that way. There are going to be incompetent teachers and it is heroic to assume / want zero incompetence in a profession consisting of millions across the country. And associating being tenured with being incompetent or apathetic is one-way thinking. In my experience, one-way thinking is typically political thinking — that is, pushing an agenda. And before I go off on too many tangents, let me just say that political thinking isn’t necessarily bad. There are some agendas that have to be pushed — like the many rights-based and equality-based movements that we have seen over the last 120 years.
But back to trying to fix the “bad teachers stay in the system” problem. Can anyone please tell me what proportion of teachers in the system are bad? How was this computed? How were these teachers evaluated? Remember, we’re talking about something not at an individual level, but at a state / national level. So if we’re going to have this conversation at that level, we can have it first at a philosophical level (pros, cons, etc.) and then at a numerical level that goes beyond a collection of anecdotes.
If you’ve been a regular reader here, you know that I try to take a mostly agnostic stance on things that people classify as good or bad. So, I neither believe that teacher tenure is good nor bad. It comes down to how it is used.
It is worth looking into what it means for someone to be tenured. If it means that the teacher can act with impunity and not lose their position or even get reprimanded, then this is tantamount to abuse. If it means that, “Hey, for your hard work and tireless dedication to the profession (read: tireless dedication to the students, promoting positive school culture, becoming a positive fixture in the local community, etc.), our school wants to let you know that we want you to stay and thus we are granting you tenure.”, then this is a well-earned, well-deserved recognition and bonus. Key word here is “a”, not one and only one forever and ever.
The sticks and carrots idea of retaining talent can’t be, “Hey, here’s a stick and over there is an ogre with a stick who is guarding the carrot, go fight for your carrot that you already fought for.” It’s the surest way to release talent and prevent new talent from coming in.
Do you know how people work when they have to fear for their livelihood? They don’t become enthusiastic, bold, daring, energetic, exploratory, caring, empathic — all the immeasurable qualities we would want out of people entrusted with educating our youth. Instead, they become conservative and legalistic. Is that how we want our teachers to teach? Legalistically? Only the facts ma’am. It’s bad enough that math education has, by and large, gone that way, we don’t need every other subject to go that way.
In a bit of irony, the idea that dropping teacher tenure will somehow produce fewer poor-quality teachers is the same approach that some education reformers take to “fixing” schools / classrooms. Namely, it’s a one-sided quality control / management approach that sacrifices / cannibalizes high quality teachers in the interest of reducing the spread. That is, overall, we can actually have lower quality teachers, but at least we’ll have consistency. In econo-statistico-math speak that’s, “lower the standard deviation even at the expense of expected value, if it means that our reward-to-risk metric \(\frac{\mu}{\sigma}\) has increased.”
In all but a few extreme cases, this is the wrong way to do it! Rather than focusing on getting rid of the bad, focus on bring in the good. Getting rid of the bad and calling it a success, is like a company saying that profit is up because they cut expenses without growing revenue. While the cost cutting is good, the more worrisome thing is that they aren’t getting any more business! At some point, there has to be a cost-cutting phase, but it can’t always be cost cutting. Eventually, the system is as lean as it is going to reasonably get.
Now, the education system isn’t necessarily lean. It’s probably a bit on the fat side. But hey,
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” — Oscar Wilde
If we’re going to take a cost-cutting approach, then perhaps we should expend more energy tackling other matters with public primary and secondary education that are of higher precedence than teacher tenure. I’m less concerned about the negative side effect of tenure than I am about the negative side effects of pension raids, cuts to funding, over-filled classrooms, public vs private schools, school choice, socio-techno-economic divide, performance metrics for students, teachers, admins, and schools, etc. And remember the list at the top of this article.
Another thing to look into, if we really want to address the concern of incompetence / apathy, is the reward system. What are the carrots? If we want to compare teaching positions against non-teaching “industry” positions, how long can one feed off “Great job! Here’s a plaque.”, “Great job! Do it again next year!” in any other job? In any other profession, “Great job!” comes with a financial award. And in some jobs, that financial award is in excess of 100% of base salary and those base salaries are in excess of $250,000.
And again, I have to say this, explicitly because of what people want to infer — I’m not vilifying high-income earners or their pay packages. What I am saying is that there is a financial reward system in place in other professions that, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t exist for public school educators.
Herein lies the difficulty and contradiction in such comparisons. There are public jobs and there are non-public jobs. And they are governed by different rules. Trying to apply a “corporate” incentive model to schools is nonsense. A corporation’s profit is measured in dollars. A school’s profit isn’t measured that way at all. Nor should it ever. In fact, an educated workforce is the lifeblood of innovative corporations. Heck, that’s a common line in some politico-economic circles: “We’ll innovate our way out of national <insert calamity>.” Innovation requires education, otherwise we’re re-innovating the wheel! We can’t innovate our way out of national education calamity if we’re focused solely on methods of removing people from the system!
So, this brings us back to incentives. Tenure is an incentive and one that makes sense. We can’t throw the baby out with the bath water because of cases of abuses / misuse of what it means to have earned tenure. Instead, look at how tenure is earned. It can’t simply be longevity. Bring with tenure a sense of leadership and mentorship for struggling teachers. There may be “lifers” in the education system, but don’t treat as collateral damage the many other dedicated, passionate, and effective educators that exist.
Also consider some other preventative measures. Take a good hard look into teacher certification programs. There are good programs and then there are certificate mills. If I were to speculate, I’d speculate that the teachers who are in it just for summer vacation, drill-and-kill, and all the things that make for bad teaching likely went through certificate mills. Again, I will overexplain for fear of logical misunderstandings … there are, almost surely, plenty of good teachers who have gone through certificate mills. And they’ve done it mostly because they recognize what the certification process really is — bureaucracy.
If we want certified teachers, make the certification mean something. Equivalently, if we like standardized tests so much and if there is a desire to manage schools the same way corporations are managed, then scrub the classes entirely and give standardized teacher certification tests. There are professions where passing a test is all that’s needed and classes are optional as they are geared towards exam preparation.
Also, many companies provide on-the-job training. Why not just scrub the certification process and stick with the first part of “alternate route”, which is to teach at the school that’s interested in you? We can call it “non-bureaucratic certification” or “field certified teacher” or the more sales-y “battle-hardened teacher”.
In any case, snarkiness aside, we really ought to look at fixing the bureaucratic barriers to entry rather than innovating new ways to exit. That alone would attract new talent. I’m sure of it. Heck, I would consider teaching K-12 then. But am I talented? My talent, like most other people’s talents, depends on the environment. Give me an environment where I have to document every breath I take and my students take and yes, I will fail miserably at teaching, mostly because I won’t be teaching. Give me an environment where my current teaching experience, my work experience, my education background, etc. are trusted and you’ll see talent. Give me an environment where I’m respected and my audience is ready to learn and is not scheming for points, then yes, you’ll see real talent and your precious standardized tests will be used against you because I’ll demand a material pay increase and tenure …