President's Perspective
Tenure: Mine, yours and theirs
Apr 10, 2008 1:33 PM
As I told you when Ed McElroy, the current AFT president, announced his retirement, I wanted to take a couple of months to wrestle with whether to run for the job of our national union’s presidency. I asked for your input and reached out to a number of AFT leaders across the country. This week, I decided to run. If I am elected, I have promised to continue in my present position here in New York, just as my predecessors, Al Shanker and Sandy Feldman, did before me.
This was not an easy decision. I begged Ed to stay on, but he declined. What you may not know is that he was considering retirement several years ago, but stepped up to the plate when Sandy had to retire for health reasons. Ed has done a fabulous job and the AFT will miss his leadership.
If I sound somewhat conflicted, it is because I am. I love our local, the UFT, and mostly I love you, my members, who are no doubt the smartest, grittiest, most caring and best educators in the world. (And that’s an unbiased view!) It’s been 10 years since I became president, and I am still learning so much, mostly from you. While some of it has been as frustrating for me as I know working in the school system has been for you, no one could be luckier than I to have the honor to lead our fights for economic and professional dignity and respect and to help all our children not simply dream their dreams but achieve them.
I made the decision to run because the threats nationally are more challenging even than here. All across the nation, public education is being threatened and unions are under attack. I feel an urgency — indeed, a compulsion — to act. No local is an island, and if we don’t respond strongly and proactively, I fear for the future of all of us, most of all America’s kids. Only a universal, common public education system and legions of dedicated, outspoken educators stand between us and less democratic nations. And when I visit schools — I still try to get to three a week — especially in immigrant and poor neighborhoods, or in striving working-class neighborhoods, and I see you engaging and encouraging the youngsters in your classes and schools, I know your voice must be heard so your kids — both those in your classroom and those in your family — can thrive.
Another thing I know — which, like so much else, I learned from our collective experiences — is that with the proper resources and supports, just about every teacher can make a difference in the lives of children. (It’s one of the reasons I get so angry at the attacks on teachers that seem so commonplace these days.) Now, a new report bears this out. A study of a much-touted turn-around district in Tennessee concludes that what was most responsible for the impressive results was the district’s investment in helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction. Despite “reconstitution” of the staff (that resulted in hiring all but 20 of 300 teachers back) and costly “incentives” to recruit and reward so-called “better” teachers, the Education Sector study credits three initiatives that caused the “value-added” of Chattanooga teachers to soar: mentoring, added support for curriculum and instruction, and more collaborative leadership at the school level.
What a shocker! Three things we have been advocating for years, with varying degrees of success, depending on resources and the belief system of the school system’s leadership. Educators like Chancellors Crew, Cortines and Fernandez got it, but never had the resources to build sufficient capacity. Chancellor Klein, who has had the resources, would rather build a culture of fear than build capacity.
So a new study that may seem obvious to us is important because it comes from an independent think tank. Are you listening, Chancellor Klein?
Apparently not. Joel Klein is a believer in the Jack Welch method of improving your work force: Fire the bottom 10 percent! And if you can’t fire them, make their lives miserable. Just watch his rage over our victory in this budget’s tenure fight. In the chancellor’s view, which is totally contrary to the Ed Sector study, if a teacher doesn’t raise student test scores, get rid of that teacher.
We thought that the issue of tenure was resolved after we beat back the chancellor’s many previous attempts to weaken it, first in the 2003 round of negotiations that led to the 2005 contract, where he tried to get rid of an independent arbitrator who was hearing tenure cases. (That was rejected by the fact-finders.)
The second time was when we agreed in the 2006 contract to squarely address the issues of tenured teacher competence and arbitrary principal evaluations with the introduction of the PIP-plus program. This peer review process, elected by either the principal or teacher, provides an independent assessment of whether a teacher is satisfactory. The results can be used in a tenure due-process hearing.
Klein’s third attempt was last spring when the governor and legislature agreed that actual student test scores should not be a basis for granting tenure. Instead, the tenure process was amended to include not only supervisor observations, but peer review and the teacher’s use of data (including student test performance) to inform instruction.
But the chancellor would not be satisfied. He tried to undercut that language all year and then went on a rampage when NYSUT sought to make last year’s tenure agreement more explicit. Forget for a moment about his relentlessness and let’s address his deceptions.
First, he raked up the old canard about tenure being “lifetime job security” that virtually everybody gets. He ignored the fact that tenure — which has been in New York State law for more than 100 years — doesn’t “guarantee” anybody anything — except a fair hearing before they can be disciplined or fired. And he ignores the thousands of new teachers who leave every year and who never come up for tenure. They leave because they are disappointed with the lack of support and resources, with the quality of leadership, with the failure to enforce discipline and with the lack of professional respect they are accorded. Some, of course, are terminated, and many more leave because the job is much harder than they thought and they realize they are simply not suited for it.
He also once again completely subverts current mayoral responsibility and authority. Last time I looked (and that was yesterday) principals hire their teachers, evaluate them and recommend them for tenure. They have three years and at least 18 observations to judge them in 20 categories of performance. If the teachers’ performance doesn’t warrant a tenure grant, surely the principal shouldn’t need a complex and opaque statistical formula to know it.
Here are some of the arguments the chancellor made. The assertions tell you how little he respects teachers.
The Chancellor Prevaricates
- Teachers don’t want to be accountable for their students’ achievement.
- The bill we supported prevents principals from evaluating teacher performance.
- Standardized tests tell us whether students have learned. If they have not performed well on the test, it’s the teachers’ fault.
- It is possible to isolate the teacher’s effect on student learning from the myriad other factors that may play a role, like “where students start academically, class size and demographics.”
- The “racial achievement gap” is caused by the union and our allies “protecting grownups.” So is the dropout rate.
I am waiting for the chancellor to next accuse our union of responsibility for poverty, war and all the other plagues that afflict mankind. And the scary part is that many in the media bought into this demagoguery. No paper but the New York Sun was willing to print our side. And the New York Post this week talked about our “buying” the Legislature when we devoted countless hours this year fighting to keep the budgetary promises to children and it was the mayor who recently wrote a half-million- dollar check to the Senate Republican Party.
The truth is, teachers embrace accountability, as long as the measures are fair and accurate. However, for reasons I have described previously in this column and in my columns in The New York Times, the measure the chancellor wants to use, based on student test scores and adjusted to extract the teachers’ “value-added,” is neither fair nor accurate. Most academic researchers have concluded that it is impossible — especially given our midyear exams — to accurately and reliably isolate the contributions of an individual teacher to a student’s learning from the other myriad factors that play a role and are beyond the teacher’s control.
The final legislation addresses that issue. It makes explicit that a “teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data.” The section on new tenure criteria (meaning peer review and the language on data) will sunset in two years. Meanwhile, an independent commission will study whether it is even possible to accurately and fairly use value-added processes to measure schools or the impact of an individual teacher on the academic progress of her students. Those conclusions would give us all some independent guidance, instead of making teachers the guinea pigs in another of Chancellor Klein’s educational experiments.
I am deeply grateful to the governor and the legislators in both houses for their understanding of the complexities of this issue.
The saddest part of this story is that all the noise coming from Klein on tenure only underscores his utter silence on the real problem facing our schools right now. If he spent half the energy fighting the budget cuts that he spends fighting teachers, our children would be much better off.
