2nd NY Lawsuit to Change Teacher Tenure

Daily News breaks the story.

The article spells out the standard for a new lawsuit to change teacher tenure in New York:

"Brown (and Partnership for Educational Justice) has to prove inequity, inadequacy and causation — that the different legal constellation in New York causes the learning issues that we see throughout the state,” said David Bloomfield an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center."

Full disclosure, I'm not a lawyer. Here's my interpretation along with my own direct observations:

Inequity:  Weak teachers are concentrated in the districts where the students come from less means.  In Mount Vernon, New York, where I served on the Board of Education for five years, tenure decisions were often an after-thought.  Some teachers even received tenure by estoppel.  In affluent Pelham, New York, next door, nobody gets tenure without careful observation and consideration.  Although tenure works better in the affluent districts, it's not perfect there, either.


Inadequacy:  "You don't need to worry about the challenge words, honey."  That's what my friend's kid was told in the third grade by her teacher.  That teacher is inadequate.  She wasn't trained properly, she was rewarded with tenure, and a generation of kids won't worry about the hard vocabulary words.  Less words, lower scores, less graduation, less college, less income. Massive impact.  


Causation: The inadequate training, observation and non-accountability CAUSES the inadequacy and the inequity.  It's a circle.  Tenure, as codified in New York State law makes it nearly impossible to rid the schools of inadequacy.  

Thank you - plaintiffs, Campbell Brown, and the Partnership for Educational Justice, for making New York public schools better for everybody.

Tenure On Trial

Tenure On Trial, New York Observer, July 14, 2014

"In a system that employs about 75,000 teachers (the NYC public schools), only 12 were dismissed for poor performance from 1997 to 2007."  

Meanwhile, the teachers union argues that tenure doesn't protect bad teachers.  According to New York's United Federation of Teachers, tenure enables good teachers to "fight for what students need."  The UFT may be right about good teachers, but it masks the underside of tenure, which is that it traps bad teachers and permanently compromises entire school systems.  

Here's how it works in New York State.  

Example 1:  Let's say you get hired to work in a high functioning public school.  You are a young, perky recent college graduate with some experience as a teaching assistant.  The principal observes your work several times over the course of your first year and helps you become a better teacher.  If your classroom abilities are reasonably OK, you will be asked to return for a second year.  The only ways you will not get tenure is if you quit voluntarily or if you are not offered an opportunity to return prior to your third year anniversary.  That's not you, so at the end of year 3, your principal will recommend you for tenure in a form letter to your superintendent.  The school board will approve your tenure at their next meeting, a perfunctory vote.  Immediately afterward, the superintendent will call out your name to congratulate you on your coveted status as a tenured teacher.

That's it.  You are 25 years old, and you have something that closely resembles a lifetime guarantee of employment.  If you want to make teaching your life's work then losing your job is one thing that will NOT keep you up at night for next 25 to 40 years.  Without regard to the depth of your expertise or the skill with which you impart knowledge, you are going to be in a classroom.  You might become Teacher of the Year material, or you might become burnt out and tired of kids.  Once you've got it, tenure treats everyone the same, and that's where the problem begins.

Example 2:  Imagine the school you were hired to work in is on a rough corner of a hardscrabble neighborhood.  The kids have high needs, social problems abound and it's not even safe to park your car.  You're a great teacher and a great person, so you see the opportunity of your lifetime to make a difference.  However, your principal is less motivated than the one in Example 1.  She started out idealistic, like you, but now after many years, she would rather be doing anything else.  She's in a union too, and she already has tenure.  Her teacher observations don't happen as often, or maybe not at all.  The new teachers were placed there by "the district" and the principal is not motivated, intellectually or politically, to care about who can teach well and who cannot.  Nobody's monitoring attendance, professional development is an afterthought.  You receive tenure after three years, but so do a bunch of other young teachers who really don't belong in a classroom.  You will all teach in that system for a generation or more, regardless of ability.  

Here's the secret code to all this.  In high functioning school systems, weak teachers are either coached to improve or let go, before the tenure lock-up.  In awful school systems it's easy to slip through those first three years.  The clock ticks, and a generation of kids pays the price.  At best, current K-12 tenure is deeply flawed, but the Scardales of the world deal with it by hiring carefully and firing within the probationary first three years.  School districts that are addled with financial, social and managerial problems spiral downward because tenure poisons their teaching stock, permanently and profoundly.  The consequence of bad tenure decisions linger and have an incalculable impact on systems with the most needy students.

One Newark

I learned about this one from Whitney Tilson's email newsletter.  School officials in Newark created a voluntary effort to offer universal enrollment for students citywide to all of Newark’s 71 public schools and 21 public charter schools.  That's what I look for, a place where parents have choices and everybody wins as a result.   In my opinion, wherever there are failing school districts, 20% of the schools within the district should automatically be converted to charters with a 5 year term.   Set a rational academic bar, and when a district is below it, an RFP process begins.  This would be a bit like California's parent trigger law, without the dependency on massive grass-roots organizing.

From the article: "charters were eight of the 10 choices most commonly named for seats in kindergarten through eighth grade."

Campbell Brown: Who and Why

Diane Ravitch asks "Who is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure?" in a July 6 blog entry.   It's time to push back against this sort of sensationalism.  Ravitch has written many books about education and she has impressive credentials.  However, on this matter of teacher tenure I think she has a blind spot.  Campbell Brown wants to refresh the way tenure works so it can better support the goals of teaching and learning.  These are the same objectives that Ravitch writes about so forcefully.

The Vergara decision is a step toward updating tenure to include work performance as part of the criteria for granting and maintaining tenure.  The California court's decision might just open the door to making it a bit more possible to remove tenured teachers who really don't belong in a classroom.   If Ms. Ravitch would turn off her firehose, and consider the merits of modernizing what it means to receive tenure, she would see that Campbell Brown values teachers, and she wants to elevate the profession to a higher level.

The Ravitch blog implies that teachers need tenure protection so they won't be fired as a result of false accusations by children.  I doubt Campbell Brown, or anybody else, wants unfair firings.  However, New York's 3020-A process for firing tenured teachers is so complex and so expensive that it's seldom invoked.  When it is used the process is costly to taxpayers, and klunker teachers can remain on the payroll, or even in front of kids, while it rambles on for years.  I saw this when I served on a board of education.

We need a snark-free debate on this matter of K-12 tenure.

Amistad Sends 41 to College

Achievement First Amistad High School celebrates 41 graduates, all headed to college this fall

June 30, 2014 - NECSN

Cheers bounced from wall-to-wall as Achievement First Amistad High School's 41 graduating seniors entered Yale University's auditorium for the students' recent commencement.  There was good reason for so much celebration. With this graduating class, Amistad High School continues to live up to its reputation and mission.

Congratulations to the Amistad graduates.  That's one of the first schools my wife and I visited, in 2009, when we first started researching how to bring a charter school to Mount Vernon, NY.