This does not include criminal code and may not include policy related to teacher licensure or misconduct. Click on the metrics below for State Comparisons showing how all states approach these policies.
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Donna Housman. Preparing emotionally competent early educators. Chad Aldeman. The scarcity mindset that plagues education news. Stay up to date on the latest news, research and commentary from Kappan. Under The Law Julie Underwood Originally enacted to protect against potential evils in state and local employment systems, such as nepotism, arbitrary dismissal, and political favoritism, tenure has become a common expectation of teacher employment.
Reference Thomsen, J. Underwood wisc. One Comment. Richard Bramer. February 19, Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Measles outbreaks motivate change March 26, Language access: Not just for students January 27, Balancing free speech and student safety November 25, Student suicide and school liability October 28, Tenure protects teachers with high standards from the wrath of parents angry that their children received poor grades or were disciplined for misbehavior.
Tenure also allows teachers to stand up and openly disagree with a boss pushing a faddish but unproven educational practice, without the fear of being fired. In Holyoke, Massachusetts, for example, administrators asked teachers to post student test scores on the walls of classrooms. When an untenured English teacher who was also a union official objected publicly in that this was an unsound tactic and was humiliating to students, he was fired, despite having previously received excellent ratings.
More generally, tenure empowers teachers to become more involved in school decisions. Research finds that when teachers have a say in how schools are run, they are more likely to be invested in the school and to stay longer, and are more engaged with colleagues in cooperative work. Eliminating tenure reduces teacher voice in a very direct way.
It takes all the powerful people a teacher must deal with and arms each one with a nuclear device. Teacher tenure is an important feature of American public education for yet another reason: it is a significant carrot for attracting qualified candidates to the teaching profession. In the s, female teachers earned more than 70 percent of all female college-educated workers, while male teachers earned slightly more than the typical male graduate.
Today, teacher pay is in the 30th percentile for male college graduates and the 40th percentile for female college graduates. Part of what offsets low American salaries—and allows American schools to continue to attract talent—is tenure.
But the basic law of supply and demand suggests that if you take away tenure, school districts would be faced with one of two choices: accept a diminished pool of applicants, or significantly increase salaries in order to keep quality at its current levels. Abolishing tenure would make it especially hard to recruit in schools with lots of low-income students—the purported beneficiaries of the Vergara litigation.
Under current accountability standards, teaching in a high-poverty school is risky because low-income students face extra obstacles and so, on average, perform less well academically than middle-class students. Strong tenure laws allow dedicated, high-quality teachers to know they are unlikely to be fired.
For all these reasons, it is not surprising that states with strong tenure laws and strong unions to back up these laws tend to perform better than those with weak laws. If tenure laws are fundamentally sound, that does not mean the statutes in all 50 states are perfect. Reasonable reforms are underway, but they are needed in more places in two areas: the process by which tenure is earned, and the procedure by which ineffective tenured teachers are removed.
To begin with, getting tenure should mean something, so teachers need a sufficiently long period to demonstrate skills and not everyone who tries should succeed. With respect to the rigor of tenure, there should not be a set percentage of teachers who fail, but neither should success be automatic. In , 97 percent of New York City public school teachers who applied got tenure. However, over time, a set of reforms was instituted in New York City making tenure more rigorous.
By the — school year, 60 percent of New York City teachers who were eligible for tenure received it, 38 percent were deferred, and 2 percent were denied.
How could the procedures for removing inadequate tenured teachers be improved? With nearly 3. Teachers realize this. In a poll, almost half of teachers said they personally knew a colleague who should not be in the classroom. Union heads also acknowledge the situation. These leaders serve not only the relatively small number of incompetent teachers in the system but the far greater number of strong teachers who want underperforming colleagues out of the profession.
We are about keeping qualified people. In a poll, 66 percent of teachers said they would favor their local union playing a role in guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession.
So what is to be done? Many of those who believe that eliminating tenure is out of the question, and that defending teacher incompetence is equally intolerable, have converged around a third way: tenure combined with peer assistance and review.
First used in Toledo, Ohio, peer assistance and review involves master teachers evaluating new and veteran educators, providing assistance, and in some cases recommending termination of employment. Six votes are required for action. At first, peer review was hugely controversial. When Shanker endorsed the concept in , he estimated that only 10—20 percent of teachers supported the idea. Peer review weeds out bad teachers in a way that enhances, rather than diminishes, the status of the teaching profession.
Peer review and assistance is common among professors, doctors, and lawyers, who police themselves, as Shanker argued, and it strengthens the case for teacher involvement in other areas, like textbook selection and curriculum development.
While some critics liken union involvement in terminating teachers to the fox guarding the hen house, in practice, teachers have been even tougher on colleagues than administrators have been in several jurisdictions.
In Cincinnati, which was the second city in the country to adopt peer review, The same has been true in other places. Unfortunately, peer review has not spread as widely as it should have. The up-front costs of hiring new teachers to cover classes while expert consulting teachers provide peer assistance and conduct reviews can also be substantial.
Fortunately, districts often recoup costs by increasing teacher retention and reducing costs of dismissal. Progressives need to redouble efforts to address the root problem at the heart of why poor kids often have less-qualified teachers: rising school segregation by race and, especially, by economic class.
There have always been heroic, excellent teachers in high-poverty schools. But for many teachers, the working conditions in such schools are intolerable, and the burnout rate is high.
Department of Education affirm the powerful link between concentrated poverty and lower teacher quality. In New York state, for example, students in high-poverty schools were 22 times more likely than those in wealthier schools to have an unlicensed teacher.
Why do high-poverty schools have a hard time attracting and retaining strong teachers? Because they often provide difficult working conditions. In such an environment, teachers can feel overwhelmed. Also, the use of value-added measures, under which schools with low test scores can be closed, and the obsession with testing in general, add to the pressure on teachers because low-income students tend to perform less well than their more-affluent peers on standardized tests used to calculate such measures.
As a result, teachers become frustrated with unfair evaluations of their students and themselves and so tend to leave high-poverty schools at higher rates. In recent years, for example, when Charlotte, North Carolina, schools terminated a racial integration program, researchers found that teacher quality suffered as once-integrated schools morphed into high-poverty, mostly minority schools.
So how can policymakers connect poor kids and great teachers?
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