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 Teaching
without Tenure
CTA protecting incompetence...
[Lance T. Izumi] 9/21/05
The California
Teachers Association (CTA) has announced it will spend $5 million
to fight Governor Schwarzenegger’s ballot measure to
lengthen the probationary period for teacher tenure. The CTA
claims that reforming tenure policies won’t improve education.
The hard evidence on teachers and tenure does not support the
CTA or its allies.
Data on improved
performance at some charter schools strongly suggest that the
improvement is due, in part, to the fact that teachers at these
schools receive no tenure at all.
Contributor
Lance T. Izumi
[Courtesty of Pacific Research Institute]
Lance
Izumi is Director of Education Studies for the Pacific
Research Institute and
Senior Fellow in California Studies. He is a leading expert in education policy
and the author of several major PRI studies. [go to Izumi index] |
Under the
governor’s initiative, the current two-year
probation period for beginning teachers would be extended to
five years. While CTA pretends that the governor’s proposal
presages the end of the world, the reality at the Fenton Avenue
charter school in Los Angeles is that teachers – like most
working Americans – are happy without tenure and perform
very well. As profiled in the Pacific Research Institute’s
recently released book, Free to Learn: Lessons from Model Charter
Schools, Fenton is not part of the local teacher union’s
collective bargaining agreement. Teachers are retained on the
basis of performance evaluations – chief among them the
well-being of the children in their charge – and not on
mere years of seniority.
When it was still
a standard public school, Fenton had a tenure system which
protected many incompetent teachers. Irene Sumida,
Fenton’s director of instruction, cites one veteran teacher
who had her students spend most of their time doing crafts such
as making Snoopy dogs out of styrofoam cups. Worse, this teacher
was one of the school’s resource specialists.
"I was appalled," says Sumida, "She was old and
crabby and she had no skill whatsoever: no classroom management
[skills, and] she had no idea how to teach anything except handwriting.
She was a very strong union person and I’m sure that somewhere
along the line someone realized that she was not a teacher. That
was the caliber of a lot of the teaching for a lot of the teachers."
Things changed dramatically
in 1993 after Fenton became a charter school, got rid of tenure,
and instituted a rigorous and comprehensive
teacher evaluation system. The system is based on Charlotte Danielson’s
work on effective practices which identifies four areas of good
teaching:
• Planning and
preparation
• Classroom environment
• Professional responsibilities
• Instruction
Sumida writes formal teacher evaluations based on these four
areas. For a teacher to receive a satisfactory evaluation, he
or she cannot receive an unsatisfactory rating in any one of
them.
Failing teachers receive
assistance for a year. If a teacher improves to the point where
he or she is satisfactory in all
areas, then that teacher is retained. "If they don’t
improve at all,” Sumida says, “they’re terminated
no matter how many years of experience they have."
Out of Fenton’s 79 teachers, only seven from the school’s
pre-charter days remain.
The result has been
a total change in the school’s culture.
According to Sumida, " the high standards and expectations
weren’t just words on paper, they are things that are going
to be put in place here." Fenton’s students have benefited
from this new culture of performance. Test scores regularly exceed
the growth targets set for the school by the state.
"I think that in every school, excellent teachers are the
key," says Sumida. Fenton Avenue charter school demonstrates
that when done correctly, tenure reform should be encouraged
rather than feared. CRO
copyright
2005 Pacific Research Institute
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