Tenure Travails

One of the issues raised by Chancellor Klein in his permanent structural revolution was the question of tenure. Says Klein, in his speech to the business Partnership for New York City:

[W]e intend to make tenure a well-deserved honor, not a routine right. Today tenure is nearly automatic. About 99% of teachers receive it after three years as a matter of course. Indeed, it is the “default mode.” If no action is taken, a probationary teacher is awarded tenure automatically. We want as many teachers as possible to become tenured, but because that status makes it very difficult to remove a teacher for poor performance, we want to make sure that teachers earn it with good teaching not just the passage of time. Accordingly, principals will receive a new set of supports and tools to ensure that this decision is made in a rigorous, thoughtful, and fact-based manner. We look forward to collaborating with the UFT in this effort.

Because an affirmative decision on tenure affects not only an individual school but the entire system, we will also insist that a principal’s recommendation be reviewed by appropriate personnel outside the school, notably the Community Superintendent. Indeed, so critical is the tenure decision that Mayor Bloomberg will meet annually with each group of newly-tenured teachers to celebrate their accomplishment.

The UFT agrees that teacher tenure should be a “well deserved honor,” and looks forward to the Mayor’s celebration of this accomplishment.

To attain this end, an intellectually honest discussion of the tenure process is necessary. To suggest that 99% of teachers receive tenure, as a matter of course, is extraordinarily misleading. In fact, a little less than two-thirds of all new teachers receive tenure.

How could these numbers be so different? The tenure process is analogous to the awarding of a doctorate. In a properly functioning graduate school, almost all candidates who make it to the final stage, the defense of the disseration, are awarded the degree. Since the degree requires a substantial investment of time and work, the university has a responsibility to counsel out of the program candidates who are clearly incapable of making the grade. Rather than letting a person dedicate a number of years of their lives to a fruitless pursuit, a good graduate program and a conscientious graduate advisor will encourage only those candidates with the capacity to successfully conclude the process. Other candidates drop out of their own volition, as the process convinces them that this is not the career for them. To examine that awarding of degrees only at its final stage, the defense of the dissertation, would give a misleading portrait of an extensive winnowing process which precedes that conclusion.

In the case of the tenure process in K through 12 schools, the responsibility of the supervisor is even greater, since the education of young people, as well as the time and work investment of the candidate, is at stake. A conscientious supervisor works with every novice teacher, making sure that he or she receives the mentoring and the professional development which will allow him or her to master the fundamental skills of the craft. A diligent, caring supervisor does not wait until the conclusion of the three year probationary period to counsel out of the profession or terminate the employment of a novice teacher who, after being provided all of the appropriate supports, is still clearly not going to be successful in the classroom. Indeed, when it is clear that a new teacher will not succeed, it is in the interest of both the teacher and the students to make an earlier decision. Sometimes new teachers themselves recognize that teaching is not their calling, and they make the decision to leave on their own. And sometimes, unfortunately, new teachers who could become great teachers leave out of frustration with a system that fails to provide them with the supports they need.

In New York City, approximately two out of every three new teachers achieve tenure. By the end of the fifth year of teaching, a significant number of the teachers who have achieved tenure leave New York City public schools, as only one in every two new teachers remain. The drop out rate is even greater in the system’s flagship recuitment program, the Teaching Fellows. The critical problem that we face in New York is not unqualified teachers achieving tenure, but the failure to retain qualified, accomplished teachers. With half of New York City public school teachers having five years or less of teaching experience, the retention crisis is paramount.

Teacher unions have no interest in unqualified teachers achieving tenure. Rather, our concern is that new teachers receive all of the supports, especially quality mentoring, necessary to achieve success and tenure, and that the process of awarding tenure be a fair and rigorous professional process.

It is in this latter regard that we oppose the substitution of students’ standardized test scores for the professional judgment of an experienced educator supervisor as a standard for awarding tenure. The problem here is not simply that a great many factors go into determining a student’s performance on any standardized test, and that teachers have control only of a relatively limited portion of those inputs. Just as disturbing is the extraordinary disincentive such a standard would create for teachers to take on the most academically needy students and to serve in the lowest academically performing schools, for clearly one would be far more likely to achieve tenure, deserved or not, if one taught students and taught in schools which had consistently high test scores. Given that the highest statistical correlation is between the socio-economic class of students and scores on standardized tests, with students from wealthier backgrounds scoring higher, such a policy would be driving public education in exactly the wrong direction. Instead, we should be figuring out professional and financial incentives to recruit experienced, accomplished teachers to teach the most needy students and to serve in the most needy schools.

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