The Vergara Decision and Teacher Tenure

The Vergara decision yesterday made teacher tenure unconstitutional in California.  The teacher feeds I subscribe to on Twitter are howling about it... and howling about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's enthusiastic response.  But it reminds me that tenure is not well understood outside teacher circles.  It sounds like some bizarre union work rule designed to protect the jobs of coal shovelers on diesel locomotives.  It sounds as though a teacher who sneaks through the first few years of employment can then have a free ride in perpetuity.  Teacher tenure sounds to outsiders like what the plaintiffs in Vergara claim it is: a way to protect grossly incompetent teachers at the expense of their students.

First it is best to say that teachers with tenure are not invulnerable.  As a New York City public high school principal I could (and did) fire and take the licenses of tenured teachers who weren't doing their jobs or who were otherwise hurting kids.  It took a little longer than I liked, but that is often the nature of due process.  Hell, it took me longer than I liked to fire untenured teachers.

But as you read this you should be wondering to yourself: "Why trust this guy about who should and should not be teaching our kids?  He says they're incompetent; why should I believe him?"

I know of teachers who have been falsely accused of heinous offenses because their principals didn't like them.  And I mean, just personally didn't like them.  There are principals who have thrown away any notion of fairness.  Teachers who speak up against that get accused of incompetence, too.

But look at the current larger political climate.  New York -- like many other states -- has adopted commercial tests as a way of evaluating teacher work.  It's a big profit center for the publishing companies and there have already been financial scandals and grotesque incompetence in both writing and grading the exams.  More importantly, the entire enterprise has been proven incapable of successfully identifying weak and strong teachers.  Results fluctuate wildly from year to year.  Outstanding teachers are marked as failing.  The tests simply fail to do what they purport to.  And so tenure is a protection from politicians introducing a statistically invalid system to fire teachers.

Then there is evolution.  And climate change.  A science teacher who actually teaches science (as opposed to something cooked up by an oil industry lobbyist) needs tenure to protect their students from the junk "knowledge" that circulates in political circles.

Good principals can always get bad teachers out.  Tenure protects good teachers from craven politicians and from corrupt principals.  So why the big push against tenure now?

Well, as I noted at the outset, tenure doesn't sound right to outsiders, so it is a weak spot in the defenses of our system of public education.  Getting rid of tenure is also a way to get rid of the best and most experienced teachers, career teachers, in favor of temps who come and go every two years.  Newbies without tenure certainly cost less.  But would you pick all rookies for your own child?  People who are going on to their "real" careers just as they are beginning to gather clues about how to do the job?

Experienced tenured teachers are the ones who understand how to teach.  They are also strong advocated for our system of public education.  So if you are a Koch brother, or an Eli Broad, or a Michael Bloomberg or a Rupert Murdoch... in other words if you eliminate all public schools and replace them with something you can profit from, then you need to FIRE all those experienced teachers.  They're already doing it in Philly and Chicago.  New Orleans just closed its last public schools.  Getting rid of tenure is how you fire your GOOD teachers, not your bad ones.  It's how you privatize schools.  It's how you destroy our democracy.