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Money Talks

By Dr. Gregg Dimkoff
Professor, Grand Valley State University
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Part of Gov. Snyder’s plan to improve K–12 public education outcomes is to revise the state’s outdated tenure laws. Most people agree that changes are needed to better prepare high school graduates to compete in a global economy. By many measures, we are failing miserably. Here are a few of our embarrassing measures:

• According to the University of Michigan’s Black Male Project, African-American males in Michigan have the lowest high school graduation rate in the country.
• The American Legislative Exchange Council’s Report Card on American Education ranked Michigan 49th worst out of the 50 states based on 2009 achievements scores.
• Only 16 percent of graduating high-school students are college-ready in all subjects based on their spring 2010 ACT scores.
• In 238 of Michigan’s high schools, not a single graduating student was college-ready in all courses in 2010.
• Math and reading skills at various grade levels place Michigan students 33rd to 39th from the top based on results from the 2010 National Assessment of Education Progress.
• Less than 50 percent of students across all grades are proficient in writing.

You get the idea. Something is wrong, and continuing to do nothing is no longer an option. Gov. Snyder’s plan to change the rules for tenure reflects the thoughts of many school board members, school administrators, teachers and legislators across the country. The same discussion is taking place in many states including California, Florida, Missouri, New York and Tennessee.

The Governor’s plan calls for these basic changes:

• Tenure will require a five-year probationary period and that the teacher be rated effective for the three most recent annual evaluations. Receiving tenure after four years is the norm currently. A new teacher can be tenured if rated effective after the first three annual evaluations.
• Annual teaching evaluations are to be based on multiple measures with at least 40 percent of the weighting based on student achievement growth.
• Ineffective teachers will enter a probationary period if they have two consecutive years of ineffective teaching.
• Schools must change their processes to more quickly and less expensively dismiss ineffective teachers.
• School districts will no longer be restricted in assigning or laying off teachers simply because of seniority.

We all know the devil is in the details, but as a set of broad principles, who in their right mind could be against these changes? Yes, most teachers and their unions, but their concern is how they will be able to adapt to a tougher standard and remain good teachers. It’s a natural human reaction to react negatively to anything that may be threatening.

A strong argument can be made to eliminate tenure altogether. Tenure first spread across U.S. colleges beginning in the late 1920s. Prior to that time, professors were at-will employees who could be fired for most any cause. Yet, most dismissals occurred because a professor irritated an important donor or violated a college’s religious principles.

Standards for granting college tenure developed by 1940, and today to earn tenure, almost all colleges and universities require seven years of effective teaching, continuous output of scholarly activity (a euphemism for publishing) and adequate service to the academic department, college and public. A candidate’s publishing record usually dominates the tenure decision.

Tenure supposedly protects college faculty from capricious firing based on different beliefs, unpopular areas of research, grading too harshly or too easily and so forth. The American Association of University Professors — a national organization promoting interests of college professors — reports that it investigates an average of two to three violations of tenured faculty rights per year. That’s not many, suggesting the greatest impact of tenure is to protect poor teachers, those who don’t meet publishing expectations or in short, aren’t productive employees.

K-12 public teacher tenure is an entirely different animal. Public teachers don’t have to worry about offending donors — funds come from taxes. They also don’t have to worry about violating religious principles because of the church-state separation. Further, there are no publishing requirements. Instead, tenure hinges almost entirely on teaching effectiveness, and that bar may not be set high enough. New York City opponents of archaic public school tenure rules characterize them as “tenure for breathing.” In other words, virtually every new teacher is tenured as if the only requirement is to be alive and breathing. It’s not greatly different anywhere in the U.S. and that’s what Gov. Snyder’s plan aims to change.

Are the proposals extreme? Hardly. Extreme is what Oregon did in 1997. It abolished K-12 public school tenure, replacing it with two-year renewable contracts and that’s working well. After all, teachers have their unions and a wide variety of anti-discrimination laws to protect them from true injustices.

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