I will always advocate for teacher tenure. Quality teachers should have their jobs protected and not be released on an administrator's whim or an influential parent's complaint. The original reason for tenure was to protect teachers' freedom of speech after the Scopes Monkey Trial. With today's climate in American society, views on what is or is not appropriate change at a moment's notice. And the truth is, while most teachers are happy to have tenure, they do not worry about it because they are high-quality educators.
Where tenure becomes a problem is when a bad teacher needs removal, the timeline and effort required are significant. In Illinois, a teacher must be found unsatisfactory in their summative rating, meaning one to three years of bad teaching have occurred. Within 30 school days, the remediation plan starts, and it must last for 90 school days. There are about 180 school days in an academic year, so the timeline moves into the second semester before a change can be made. This means that more than one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half years of bad teaching have been allowed before a replacement can be hired. And the new teacher is brought on midway through the second semester into an already bad situation, so the rest of that year is a wash, too.
I have had to complete this process twice thus far in my career, and it is a time- and energy-sucking process. Once, the teacher did not successfully remediate and was let go the week before Thanksgiving. They never truly tried to improve, and thanked me at the end for making the decision they knew they had to make for themselves, but couldn't. Getting out of teaching was the right thing for them and their students, but that process started one and a half years before dismissal, leaving the current students without a teacher until we could hire one in January. The sad reality is that this teacher had been ineffective for several years before we started this process. A previous supervisor had granted tenure to this teacher back when it was a two-year process. A dozen years later, the teacher was removed. The teacher's quote at the end of the process was, "If you think I am bad now, you should have seen me when I first started."
The second teacher had earned tenure in a different building and transferred to mine. By the end of that first year with me, after earning tenure the year before from a wholly different scenario, they were put on remediation. We met weekly to review lesson plans throughout the next year, with weekly classroom observation and feedback. They were one of 35 teachers I directly supervised, but they took up well over half of my time. In the end, this teacher cared deeply and wanted to improve. They did enough to no longer qualify as unsatisfactory. They never reached teacher of the year status, but they became at least an average quality teacher.
Doing the math for an ineffective high school teacher, at a minimum, it takes one year of bad teaching (but most likely two+), then the 30 school days of creating the plan, and 90 school days of the plan. Call that a minimum of 2 years through the process. That teacher will have at least 5 sections, with 25-30 students per section. Going at a minimum of 5 sections * 25 students per section * 2 years = 250 students receiving an unsatisfactory educational experience.
Studies have shown that students with one year of ineffective teaching have lasting negative impacts, and two consecutive years set students who were already behind further back, and students who were proficient or advanced to regress proficiency levels. In 2017, Harvard economist Raj Chetty argued that one grossly ineffective teacher can cause a student to lose $50,000 in lifetime earnings. Other research by Chetty, as cited in Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential, shows that replacing a teacher in the bottom 5% of student gains with an average one would increase the undiscounted lifetime earnings of a classroom of 28 students by $1.4 million. Pair that with a state report from Tennessee that the majority of ineffective teachers can be found within schools with high poverty and/or high English Language Learner populations, and one can see how the cycle of poverty continues.
With this, leaders must ensure that the teachers in their classrooms are of the highest quality they can find. Then, those teachers need support. Support does not need to cost a lot of money. Effective observations, strong teacher collaboration, and effective in-house professional development are all possible without any added cost. One bad teacher can create years of struggle for students and other teachers, and the best teachers become jaded when the bad teacher is allowed to continue to cause harm. As a former principal of mine said, "First you coach them up, and if that doesn't work, then you coach them out." As difficult as it is to make hard personnel choices, the entire community benefits from upgrading teacher quality.
Sources:
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2633–2679. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633
Grant, Adam. Hidden Potential. Random House, 2023.
Podesta, Kristina. Students in Tenessee instructed by consecutive ineffective teachers. Office of Research and Education Accountability. March, 2019
$1.4 Million. The potential lifetime earnings difference for a class of elementary students based on teacher quality.
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