Tenure is not about a job for life

Tenure is not about a job for life. Tenure exists to create a formal structure for the removal of a teacher who has been accused of misbehavior or of a crime. The contract spells out the steps that need to be taken and is not a way for the evil teachers' union to keep incompetent people.

The concept of tenure and the wording of the contract work together to prevent one-sided, wrong-headed, or patently false accusations from being used to get rid of someone who really did nothing wrong other than refuse to be a sycophantic lapdog.

And sometimes, it helps people like Rafe Esquith, who otherwise would have been summarily fired.

"There are no suggestions that he has harmed any children. But as many of the great teachers I have written about over the years have told me, if you work hard and show administrators how much better our schools could be if they took their responsibilities seriously, you are going to become a target for abuse." - Jay Matthews.

A Few Random Thoughts about the Time article.

Maybe you've read it.

A few things jump out at me. Here's a big one:

One research team relied on a "a controversial tool called value-added measures (VAM)" to measure teacher effectiveness, and they "found that replacing a poorly performing teacher with an excellent one could increase students' lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom."

That's a pretty big number alright, almost big enough to make you lose sight of the details ... if you're a low grade moron or someone with a axe to grind who doesn't mind being disingenuous.

Lifetime earnings of $250,000 per classroom works out to $10,000 lifetime earnings difference per kid.  Assuming the average person works for about 40 years, that works out to a difference of $250 extra dollars per year, a whopping extra 12.5 cents per hour ... and that's if you replace a poor teacher with an excellent one for all twelve years of schooling.

This is what is known in mathematical and statistical circles as an "insignificant" increase for which we have to use a tool that the Vermont Commissioner of Education (and pretty much everyone else) has said is a "broken measurement system" that "does not work". She went on to say that it would never be used in Vermont because of it's ineffectiveness. "It would be unfair to our students to automatically fire their educators based on technically inadequate tools."

And where, besides a hole in the ground, did that number get pulled from?

Let's not ignore the dubious premise that thousands of "excellent" teachers are just waiting to be hired ... ready and eager to take the place of the losers.


Funny thing is, we're doing pretty well despite the fact that we have been forced to label every single school in the state as "low performing": 

 In 2013, the federal Education Department released a study comparing the performance of US states to the 47 countries that participated in the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, one of the two large international comparative assessments. Vermont ranked 7th in the world in eighth-grade mathematics and 4th in science. Only Massachusetts, which has a comparable child poverty rate, did better.

So Time magazine interviewed a couple of billionaires about their opinions of public education and teacher tenure. "Shocking!" they said. "You can't fire a bad teacher."

Really?  Have they ever tried? The usual reason that principals can't fire a "bad" teacher is because the principal has no way of knowing which teachers are "bad" teachers - the new evaluation procedures are long on typing every word but very short on actually listening to the teacher teaching the class. If you are focused on typing every word said, then you aren't paying attention and you aren't "taking notes" - the inability to multitask is something I warn my students of constantly. Incidentally, and ironically, so does the principal.

The other reason that most "bad" teachers can't be fired? They're not "bad" teachers. Most of the time a teacher who is labeled "bad" is someone who has spoken up at a faculty meeting, stood up for themselves or others, worked against the desires of the principal.

The truly bad teachers are the ones who don't get noticed because they never improve, who hand out the same worksheets year after year, who don't say anything controversial, who allow students to wallow and get mired in an academic mudpit ... but who somehow get As so their parents don't say anything, who have a degree from a prestigious university but who are universally reviled by their students as lousy teachers, who dutifully fill out the silly paperwork and follow every administrative whim with fervor, never considering the best interests of the students, doing just enough to placate but never enough to teach.

Here's how to get yourself fired in public schools WITHOUT tenure:

• Be gay/lesbian, or any other LGBTQ. (Seen it.)
• Be Experienced in a cost-cutting era. (Big pressure)
• Be Muslim, or Black or Latino or other "minority" who is "uppity" or in some other way "doesn't behave" (actually has an opinion and isn't afraid to say something).
• Get pregnant. (True story)
• Speak up for the Rights of the students/ disagree with admin is any way.
• Actually do something bad or criminal.

Except for the last one of course, that will never be the reason on the form letter. That would be discrimination. Rather, you'll find vague job performance metrics and "documented tardiness issues". You'll find overwhelming but never specified "evidence" of misconduct. You'll find everything but the actual discrimination.

Here are some ways you can get fired from a school WITH tenure:

• Do something bad or criminal.
• Be a bad teacher.

A call for parental input.

Not from me, actually. I'm not that enamored of the idea of "massive" parental input. If you're not a teacher, you don't have much that you can base your judgment on.

I can't remember all the times I've heard a parent tell me I should "use flash cards" or "not give homework" or "don't use flash cards" or "give more homework." Parents haven't been teaching high school for years and can't generally discern the good teaching from the bad, too often basing their judgments on fleeting or non-germane criteria.

"Is he passionate about teaching classes"? "Is the flow of his class natural"? "Does he maintain discipline at all times?" "Does he have a complete knowledge of his subject area?"

How is a student (with no actual classroom experience except for sitting in the back trying to see that girl's boobs without being noticed) supposed to answer these questions? How is the parent supposed to do any better?

Parental input should only go so far. For a parent to have "massive and sustained input" is simply a bad idea.

The Athens Banner Herald editorial, however, seems to like this idea a lot:
Frankly, what's missing in the tug of war between legislators and teachers over school funding versus classroom accountability, except for a passing mention in Senate Bill 521, are the voices of the people who are most qualified to speak out on the quality, or lack thereof, of the state's public schools and teachers. Any meaningful assessment of schools and teachers must include massive and sustained input from parents. (emphasis mine)

Highly Qualified or Effective?

Mike Petrilli on Education Gadfly writes about HQT and how terrible it is:

Everyone knows it’s a meaningless designation. Nobody will defend its focus on paper credentials. The conversation has moved on to teacher “effectiveness” as measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators. Yet in the real world of real schools, HQT is still the law of the land, wreaking havoc every day. It continues to make teachers jump through unnecessary hoops. It continues to tie the hands of charter schools that have to demonstrate that their teachers have requisite “subject matter knowledge”—never mind the autonomy charters are supposed to receive. And now it’s causing material harm to Teach For America, one of the best things our education system has going.

Awesome. and Stupid. and Inconsistent.

HQT makes teachers hop or skip through low-lying hoops, like certification and demonstrating that you actually know what you are trying to teach. The praxis test is required. Not much more. The checkboxes for HQT are so incredibly easy to tick off that 93.8% of Vermont teachers are HQT. The obvious response is "You want to be a teacher. Teachers have paperwork. This is easy. Get over yourself."

Mike wants "teacher 'effectiveness' measured by student learning and other meaningful indicators." So, if I understand this, he wants the teachers' effectiveness measured by students taking a meaningless high-stakes test instead of the teachers taking a meaningful one. That's silly. The teachers should take the tests. After all, if they fail, it'll be their college professors' fault.

Sports and Pay-to-Play

Coach Brown is talking about the ACLU going after pay-to-play in schools. Snarky political commentary aside, his points are the usual ones and deserve repeating because the current climate of cost-cutting is driving schools to make some tough decisions.

First, PTP is illegal in California (specifically mentioned in law) because it prevents equal access to education. I'm not so sure equity applies here but we Americans have always had trouble with the decision of whether sports (as opposed to PE) are an integral part of school for every student or not.

BYU women's soccer team.

PTP changes the game to "support the GOOD teams." Freshmen sports will go first and then any sport whose attendance is "parents only." Football is way too important because of the "We need to beat Westside" factor and long term psychological investment of the fans in the team.

Parents and lawyers will pit girls against boys with the high-school version of the Title IX conflict. You can't cancel the 9th grade softball if you don't cancel the 9th grade baseball, even if one is undermanned and the other is full. Tournaments are out. Travel monies? Ha! (Forgetting that the travel costs are roughly the same as the cost of officials for home games - but home means you keep the gate. Decisions need to be made, but lawyers always suck cash and influence choices.

For many participants, sports provide "some of the most influential lessons they might learn in school." Very good point, bringing us back to the question of whether sports or PE is integral to education. I find that PE classes are pretty lame. Sports coaches talk about academics, morals, attitude, sportsmanship. Team building is important. PE teachers run classes that kids stand around in and tune out. 

You can make any number of correlations between the rise in importance of PE classes and the increasing emphasis on health education to the expanding waistlines of American schoolchildren, but I think there are confounding factors here. We need to overcome those confounding factors, though, and having the kids do half-assed archery, bowling, walking, pickleball, dodgeball isn't having much long-term effect.

I agree with Coach when he suggested that "physical education needs to reprioritized near the top," but I disagree that it should be "classified as an Advanced Placement style course." That's too much for PE. I can make a case (and have) for allowing a full season of a sport (including cheerleading) to count as a 1/2 PE credit. That makes sense in terms of time and effort.

That'll mean a loss of PE enrollment and at least one PE teacher would go. I'd be okay with that, but the Union wouldn't. It would also mean that the sports teams would experience a boom enrollment since most kids hate the standard pickle-ball games and would do most anything to get that PE credit playing a real sport.

That may be the real difference. The PE games and exercises are too varied and scattered and feel as if the teacher pulls something out of his butt for the day. No one has a chance to get truly good at anything and you have the ultimate in heterogeneous grouping. Sports, on the other hand, are "tracked." Contrary to most educational current demagoguery, students like homogeneous grouping and thrive in it.

Besides, coaches are cheaper than teachers. If it's just about the money, of course.

Value-Added Teacher Evaluation

The Value of Value-Added By Rick Hess Original
I've been meaning to do a longer postmortem on Florida's Senate Bill 6. As I've noted before, I enthusiastically supported it even though I thought it a deeply flawed bill. The flaw? Its ham-fisted attempt to strip out one set of anachronistic strictures (governing tenure and step-and-lane pay scales) only to replace it with a set of test-driven processes that were almost equally troubling.

Don't you love it? He spends most of the post pointing out flaws but he was for it anyway. I can almost hear him say "Yes, Russian Roulette is a dangerous game, but let's play anyway. Here's my automatic. You go first."

Actually, Rick, I have a better idea. Let's run this model on your paycheck first. Then we can talk.

Tenure and The Bogeyman

In a response, of sorts, to Joanne Jacobs's note that tenure protects the bogeymen - the "bad" teachers - whether they be senile, incompetent, mean, racist, overly religious, megalomaniac, stupid or just plain lazy. Well, no, tenure doesn't protect really bad teachers. These administrators can't evaluate their people properly before they're hired nor evaluate them while they're on the job. Why should we expect them to be able to follow the steps outlined in the contract to get rid of someone?

More importantly, tenure doesn't just protect bad teachers. It also protects the good teachers

• who dare to disagree with the "Administrator of the Year." (by which I do NOT refer to any award, but only length of service), who find said admin's pet theories to be absurd, who resist the ridiculous reforms that said admin is championing and who happen to know the correct way to teach. Regardless of merit, the "nail that sticks up is hammered down." Students and education are not part of the consideration.
• who happen to be staunchly Republican in a faculty that is not. As the wit has it, "the reason educational politics is so petty is because the stakes are so small." I am dismayed to admit it, but more often it is the liberal side of the hallway that collects like piranha, trying to get the unwanted declared incompetent. (This is probably because more faculty are liberal than not) Allow the students to badger any opinion out of you and someone will find offense.
• who happen to be devoutly religious (any flavor) and hold those feelings and opinions dear. Again, faculty have what seems a unique tendency to discover and grossly (if not grotesquely) magnify small "slights," opinions, habits or improprieties that offend the collective. If I were being cynical, I would assume that many teachers are vampires or the undead when I consider how much they hate the sight of a cross.
• who happen to be pro-military. Some leeway is given to mothers of soldiers but rarely to veterans themselves or members of a military family. Salute the wrong President, face the music. Likewise recruiters. I even witnessed an alum being denied entrance to the building to visit a teacher - because "he was in uniform and that promoted guns and violence." Gob-smacked, I was.

Let's think long and hard about tenure before we all dismiss it.