TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223120.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 64

Laying Siege to Seniority


Faced with dismal school performance and tight budgets,
politicians are reneging on the idea of teacher tenure

By SAM ALLIS/BOSTON


    Tenure for 2.3 million public school teachers, one of the
sacred cows in American education, is under attack. For decades,
thanks to strong union contracts and ingrained notions of
academic freedom, underpaid schoolteachers could at least
console themselves with the fact that they were pretty well
assured of job security for life. But after years of dismal
school performance, and under the strictures of shrinking
budgets, legislators are suddenly reneging on the deal.
"Professionalism and tenure are antithetical," says Chester Finn
Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education and a proponent
of free-market solutions to educational problems. "Teachers
can't have it both ways."

    In Massachusetts first-term Republican Governor William
Weld and Democrats in the state legislature are mounting a
frontal assault against tenure. Weld wants to allow school
principals free rein to make hiring and firing decisions without
reference to tenure or job seniority. Weld is also calling for
teachers to be recertified every five years after taking
competency tests. "This isn't anti-teacher," says Weld. "It's
anti-slob teacher."


    Kentucky has already moved against tenure as part of
sweeping school-reform legislation enacted there last year.
Individual schools are held accountable for improving student
performance. If an institution fails to achieve results over a
two-year period, a team of educators will be able to lift tenure
and fire anyone on the school staff regardless of previous job
guarantees.

    The anti-tenure drive has inspired fierce opposition from
the National Education Association, the nation's largest
teachers' union. "I don't ever want it to be cheap to lay off
an incompetent teacher," says N.E.A. president Keith Geiger.
"But I don't want it to be impossible, either." He stresses that
tenure was never meant to be a lifetime sinecure but was
intended as a guarantee against dismissal without just cause.
Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of
Teachers: "An elected politician can't say, `I'm going to fire
you because you didn't support me in the last election.' "

    Teachers call tenure a red herring raised by politicians
to avoid dealing with the real problems plaguing American
public education, like poor curriculums and overcrowded
classrooms. Shanker argues that tenure is strongly rooted in
countries routinely cited for their superior educational
systems, like Japan and Germany. The issue, says Shanker, is not
job security but the ethos in countries that prize educational
achievement. "Mothers and fathers in those societies know there
are serious consequences for not doing well at school," he says.
"In Germany, if a student doesn't pass a national exam, he can't
go to college. Not here."

    The problem is that the job security that makes sense in
theory has become a nightmare in practice. The process for
removing an incompetent teacher is often long and expensive, due
largely to the numerous hearings and appeals required. Part of
the difficulty is that the probationary period before tenure is
granted, a mere three years in most states, is too short. Also,
administrators generally do a poor job of scrutinizing tenure
candidates. Henry Bangser, superintendent of New Trier Township
High School in Winnetka, Ill., estimates that it can take more
than three years from the time a tenured teacher is judged
incompetent by a principal until that teacher has exhausted the
appeal process.

    What are the alternatives? The most qualified -- and the
toughest -- judges of classroom competence are usually other
teachers. Thus one of the most interesting programs for
evaluating classroom performance is one established by the
Toledo Federation of Teachers 11 years ago, which has been
copied in 15 other communities around the country. Each year
more than a dozen of the best Toledo teachers leave the
classroom to work full-time as mentors for new teachers and to
intervene with veterans experiencing problems. "We had been
constantly locked up in long and damaging struggles with
management over dismissing teachers," recalls Toledo Federation
of Teachers president Dal Lawrence, who created the program.
"Now that pretty much has disappeared." When teacher competence
is called into question, 90% of the complaints are triggered by
other teachers, not by parents or administrators. "Teachers
don't want to work next door to an incompetent colleague," says
Lawrence.

    Some opponents of tenure argue that the
collective-bargaining process is the root problem. Peter Greer,
on leave as dean of Boston University's School of Education and
now acting superintendent of schools in Chelsea, Mass., the
troubled system that the university agreed to manage two years
ago, says the "tyranny" of collective bargaining dooms any
school-reform effort. Greer is currently being sued by Chelsea
teachers for hiring four untenured teachers over tenured ones
for a program to prevent high school dropouts.

    "This is not the Salvation Army," snaps crusty B.U.
president John Silber, arguing that the need is for results. At
a time when schools are being challenged to improve education
or make room for private-sector solutions, the need to reward
excellence and punish mediocrity is likely to carry the day, in
the classroom as much as outside it.