Judging by the rhetoric of some legislators and wonks, it may come as a shock that public policy is not the stuff of magic whereby just the right regulatory language will, like one of Harry Potter’s spells, instantly reduce a monster of a problem to dust. Instead, policy is about the careful consideration of a series of tradeoffs. Education reformers in particular have been accused of leaping from one panacea to the next, rather than carefully considering practical alternatives. That doesn’t mean, however, there aren’t still a number of critical ingredients that must be a part of any witch’s brew to cure what ails our education system. One of them is the reform of, if not removal of, tenure.
Everyone has his or her own list of prerequisites to a great education system. For some, it might be small class sizes and wraparound services that reach the “whole child.” In my view, it includes parent-empowering school choice, a reduction of the compliance culture to promote innovation, and strong standards and accountability. The other essential items on the list? Staffing policies that allow us to recruit, retain, and reward the best and brightest would-be educators and leaders.
We have countless teachers who would meet anyone’s definition of “outstanding,” but we are missing a great deal more due to illogical policies that exist in nearly every state, for example, those that protect bad teachers and get rid of great ones. The all-but-automatic granting of tenure (and other union-serving staffing policies) in most states demoralizes great teachers who don’t want to be treated like cogs in the machine, erodes the confidence the public has in schools and entrusts with its children, and simply denies all of us an ingredient necessary for the education system our communities deserve.
According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, teachers in the vast majority of states are often a) awarded tenure without taking student outcomes into consideration and/or b) awarded tenure before student outcomes possibly could be taken into consideration. While my colleague Brandon Wright is probably right that California’s policies are among the worst in the nation, even a state’s middle-of-the-road teacher policies are far outside what most of the working world experiences. (It is expected, for example, that millennials could hold easily upwards of ten different jobs over their career, which is inconsistent with the notion of a job for life).
Moreover, these policies are doing a disservice to kids. Sure, New York waits three years and Michigan, an entire five years to grant tenure (compared to California’s eighteen months), but what if, after ten years, at the age of only thirty-two, a teacher decides to start coasting or worse? Should the local school district have no recourse? Brandon also notes that “only ten states” mandate so-called "last in, first out" layoff policies, but the vast majority of the rest allow the subject to be collectively bargained at the local level, where unions fight fiercely for the right to decide how schools are staffed. Only a handful of states explicitly prohibit tenure or the use of seniority-based layoffs.
Reformers have known all this for years, but have mostly lacked the ability to strike at the heart of the matter. Charter schools were designed to grant flexibility not available in the traditional public schools with the most important element being staffing autonomy. Sure, some wanted to use state teacher-evaluation systems to enact merit pay (though few actually have), but, for many, these systems were a shortcut to identifying and, if needed, removing the very worst teachers. Unions incorrectly argue this removes teachers’ due-process rights. There are light-years of space between, on the one hand, a job for life that can only be taken away if a school district prevails in a lawsuit or an expensive, lengthy, and bureaucratic nightmare or, on the other hand, simpler protections like those enjoyed by most other government and even some private-sector employees.
This all might be changing and there seems to be a movement afoot to finally adapt these policies to the twenty-first century. Recent polling from Education Next shows a supermajority of the public supports getting rid of tenure and even ultra-left-wingers like Whoopi Goldberg are on board too. The Vergara case in California, and a similar one in New York, might have the potential to undo some of those near-automatic tenure protections, even in deep blue states. To be sure, California lawmakers, with union donations in hand, will have the opportunity to rewrite the law to be as generous and open-ended as they think they can get away with—and then some. But the battle will continue and, hopefully soon, teachers will be treated more like the professionals they truly are.
