Joe - Thanks for such a detailed and thoughtful response. I think you correctly highlight that evaluating teacher effectiveness is one of the keys to this issue (and ed reform generally), and that it’s not a simple thing to evaluate. But there is a body of emerging research suggesting that teacher effectiveness is the factor most dispositive to student outcomes, regardless of all the factors that make it hard to close the achievement gap.

I’m less persuaded by the argument that tenure protections are crucial to prevent chilling effects on teaching controversial topics. “Teacher disciplined for giving students X book” makes a good headline, but I don’t think that problem occurs on the same scale or with the same frequency and harm as the grossly ineffective teacher protected by “uber due process”. I wasn’t able to find any data on the phenomenon, but I think that story just fits a little too tidily into the progressive enlightenment via public education v. scopes monkey narrative..

Finally, I’m not sure why veteran teachers deserve a presumption of competence and good faith, but administrators do not. My view is that an administrator’s most important task is putting the best teachers possible in front of students. I agree with Ceci - it’s never a mystery who the grossly ineffective teachers are (I personally think student surveys are essential to any kind of comprehensive teacher evaluation.) I agree that test scores are a sometimes perverse incentive, but I think this problem too often is twisted to support the view that “holding teachers and administrators accountable for their results is messy and often unfair, so we better not even try.”

Miles, I agree that we have to consider this issue against the larger problem of at-will employment; you and I have both experienced the terror, I think, of a classroom observation in a high-stakes charter environment. But as Ceci points out, there is a balance between firing for no cause and prohibitive due process for removing flagrantly bad teachers. Ceci, I like your characterization of the “lemon dance”, and it’s not clear what would result from a victory from the Davids plaintiffs - my hope would be that it forces both sides to the table to negotiate a process for terminating teachers that does a better job balancing accountability with security.

Which leads to Ceci's “package deal” point. Right now, the deal is, low compensation, high security, zero accountability. I'd be willing to sacrifice security for higher compensation and accountability; this industry is, after all, unique in that the quality of the work product probably actually outweighs the interests of the workers, from a social justice perspective.

I think part of why I’m drawn to the tenure issue is that it seems like low-hanging fruit from a reform perspective: that is, I feel like even as a first-year law student I have a general sense of what words I would have to say to whom to make there be fewer really bad teachers in front of kids who need really good teachers. I also think one way to pressure governments into actually paying teachers more is to deny them the ability to dangle deferred or non-monetary benefits as bargaining chips.

But I also think that pro-union people seriously discount the harm of allowing grossly ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom. Joe, this partially gets to your point about the devaluing of the profession - why are we willing to tolerate gross incompetence from teachers, but not from lawyers, doctors, or accountants?

The harm that they do is, I think, at least as bad. It’s not that their interactions with students are a waste of time - they are actively harmful. You can maintain order in a classroom a lot of different ways, but if you’re not going to engage students in learning then your options are pretty much bullying the students yourself or tacitly encouraging them to bully each other. As my former principal once half-joked, teachers could expect to receive high ratings “as long as there’s no blood on the floor of the classroom.” Individual students sustain lasting psychological harm, and all of them internalize the same message: school is bullshit, and the powers that be think that I am not worth teaching. Really bad teachers are also toxic to schools and, I think, teacher unions in general, because they sap the morale of hardworking staff and are overrepresented in unions, hijacking their agendas to lock in their own benefits at the expense of students and non-veteran teachers and to insulate themselves from accountability.

At least, that's what I've witnessed. Reforming tenure is obviously not a panacea, but I think it’s something that people who want to improve education by improving teacher quality and compensation should not reflexively dismiss.

-- ZaneMuller - 18 Apr 2018

I think we may be oversimplifying things a bit here. It seems like the discussion is about yes-tenure or no-tenure, when really there is room for a gradient. I don't think teachers should be at-will employees, but I do think we need to address the "lemon dance." Bad teachers get shuffled from school to school within a district because no school wants them, so they all keep pawning off the "lemon." Alternatively, they get put on some kind of administrative leave. I agree that it may be very difficult to accurately identify and reward good teachers, but I disagree that it would be difficult to identify the bad ones--or at least the real lemons in the bunch.

At the same time, relaxing tenure can't happen on its own; other reforms have to be put in place at the same time to incentivize actual quality performance rather than teaching to the test, and also to make it realistically possible to teach--meaning more and better resources and less students per class. But that means more money and more teachers. Speaking of which, we should pay teachers more--not just because they're ridiculously underpaid for what they're being asked to do, but also because it's the most visible way to "revalue" teaching (addressing Joe's point about the devaluation of teaching).

My point is, we're having a discussion about "is tenure good or bad," when in the real world any tenure reform would have to be part of a package deal. I have my opinions about relaxing tenure, but it only works if there is a comprehensive plan.

-- CeciliaPlaza - 12 Apr 2018

Hi Zane -- thank you for the thoughtful post. One point that lingers in the background of this issue, which was mentioned briefly in class, is the baseline posture of our "At Will Employment" system in the United States. It's a default that we've all come to accept and expect without question. It might create flexibility in hiring and changing one's role, but it undoubtedly feeds into the inherent disparity of bargaining power between employer and employee. Unions help tip the scale back to the employee, and I'm okay with the thumb on the scale being heavy in this case. Unions fight for and have obtained security of tenure for their members, which changes the working dynamic and prevents economically expedient firings. Teachers deserve this protection and this protection arguably creates much more benefit than it does abuse. It's a shield that protects a teacher's daily decisions and allows for some healthy creativity and perhaps some necessary "insubordination" to go against bad administrative policies without fear of being sacked for no cause. Unions also serve as a sword, but my intuition tells me that they are still the David going up against Goliath. At the end of the day, empowered teachers will led to empowered students.

-- MilesGreene - 11 Apr 2018

The question is what, exactly, would teachers be pressured to do if they did not have tenure. If we assume that teachers without tenure would be pressured to do a better job providing an education to students, I would probably agree with you. However, I am not comfortable making that assumption.

I was not a classroom teacher in public schools myself. But I coached High School Speech and Debate in several public schools prior to law school, and many of my close friends and colleagues in this field are classroom teachers.

It is rare for administration, particularly in low-performing schools, to be targeting the actual performance of teachers in providing a holistic, rewarding education to all of their students. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, it is extremely time-consuming to get this kind of holistic information as to how teachers are performing, and most principals have access to little more than grades and standardized test scores. Grades are stupid and standardized test scores are of limited validity. Removing tenure, particularly for veteran teachers, will often result in sacrificing real education and learning, like discussing careers, life experiences, and the realities of the surrounding community in favor of doing repetitive and soul-crushing exercises for the purpose of boosting test scores. This is the first reason I believe this is a poor idea.

Secondly, removing teacher tenure tends to make the imperative not to do anything controversial in the public school system even stronger than it is already. And it is strong. Just this week I had a student tell me her history teacher said she could not comment on the morality of Indian Removal in the United States. At the point where discussion of literal, honest-to-god ethnic cleansing and genocide in anything other than state-approved terms is prevented, the chilling effect on speech is clearly too strong for too much real education to happen.

Some teachers are poor at their jobs, but for removing tenure to remedy this, you would need to have extremely well-informed and competent administrators who targeted the right things in deciding whether to fire teachers. And I am more confident in the skill and desire of veteran teachers to do actual education than I am of administrators to not seek the career incentives of higher test scores and less controversy which are clearly placed in front of them. Given this, I believe there are better options for dealing with poor teachers, like collaborative learning communities between educators, sabbaticals, optional assignments, and more freedom for teachers to choose their own curriculum which would better improve teacher performance than allowing administrators to more easily threaten termination.

On a side note, a friend of a friend just did a piece in the Guardian today mentioning that teaching at the pre-collegiate level has been systematically deskilled, devalued, and bureaucratized in the past 100 years in the United States partly because of how it became gendered labor - which was itself a strategy in part to deskill and devalue it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/10/women-teachers-strikes-america

-- JoeBruner - 10 Apr 2018

-- ZaneMuller - 09 Apr 2018

I want to continue a conversation from office hours this past Friday around the issue of teacher tenure. The essential question is whether removing or changing some of the laws that protect teachers from being fired is likely to improve student outcomes, especially for the poorest students attending the most segregated schools.

In 2014, a California court ruled in Vergara v. California that the state's tenure laws "were unconstitutional because they ultimately translated into a disproportionate amount of ineffective teachers working in schools that served primarily poor black and Latino students." This holding was, however, reversed on appeal, and the CA Supreme Court declined to hear it. (Reading about this case was one of the reasons I left teaching and came to law school, having seen this kind of thing firsthand.)

There's a similar case, Davids v. New York, currently working its way through the New York courts. It rests on a similar theory to Vergara, and a little over a week ago survived an appeal of a denial of summary judgment.

I am instinctively sympathetic to unions and believe that teachers generally are in need of a lot more respect, support and compensation than opprobrium, but my working theory is that the Vergara and Davids plaintiffs are basically right, and that weakening some of these protections would be in students' best interests (and most teachers' best interests in the long run). But it's not so simple, as opponents of the decision Erwin Chemerinsky and Richard Kahlenberg illustrate.

What do you all think?

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