WHAT does it take to lose your job as a public- school teacher in America?
That’s a question worth asking as state education leaders bat around the idea of appointing a commission to study how school systems award tenure to New York teachers.
One way is to threaten to blow up your school, as a teacher in the Bronx did Friday, reportedly because he was upset about having been disciplined by his principal for assaulting a student.
Another is to be nominated for your state’s Teacher of the Year award — but have less seniority than some other teacher.
Yes, that’s what happened in Hampton, NH, earlier this month. Christina Hamilton, an eighth-grade social-studies teacher, was told she was being terminated as part of a restructuring of her middle school even though she is up for New Hampshire’s Teacher of the Year award. Hamilton earlier was told her job was safe for next year, but then came the dreaded call on her cellphone to inform her it was gone.
The grievance chairman of the Seacoast Education Association (the local teachers union), Kevin Fleming, was unsentimental: “Even though she is recognized as a candidate for Teacher of the Year, they have to go on seniority,” he told Seacoastonline.com.
Luckily for Hamilton, public outcry and a rally of angry parents Thursday night got her and a handful of other teachers reinstated. But the sheer ridiculousness of the situation — a teacher recognized as excellent finding herself on the chopping block because of a lack of seniority — is part and parcel of how schools determine pay, employment and all other manner of reward for teachers.
It’s true across many school districts in America, and it’s an especially egregious problem in New York. The fact is, we simply reward time served, as opposed to performance — whether it’s seniority-based firing, whether it’s the lack of merit pay or whether it’s the essentially automatic granting of tenure at the end of three years.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten seems to think she deserves some kind of medal for even allowing a commission to study tenure to come into existence — even though it was her goons who got the commission killed last year. And even though the whole idea of a commission itself was just a lame compromise when her union pushed a bill through Albany last year banning school districts from using student-testing data to determine whether teachers should be given lifetime job security.
But it really doesn’t matter whether this commission comes into existence: It would be a creature of Albany, and the lawmakers there are Randi’s puppets. Like the clowns on the City Council education committee, they read her cue cards.
But that doesn’t mean the public can’t know the truth about our time-served teaching system.
First, tenure awards are essentially automatic. Teachers spend three years on “probationary” status, a time they could theoretically be let go. But virtually all of them are awarded tenure at the three-year mark. Even under Mayor Bloomberg, who’s committed to tenure reform, the percentage of teachers denied tenure has ranged from 0.9 percent to 6.5 percent a year — and that’s including teachers who merely had their probationary periods “extended.”
It doesn’t end there. You simply can’t get rid of a tenured teacher in this city. Take 2007, when out of 55,000 tenured teachers 10 were fired for poor performance. That’s 0.02 percent.
How are the 99.98 percent of tenured teachers who face no accountability paid? Well, it’s done in lockstep based on (you guessed it) seniority — that is, time served. They can even boost their compensation by obtaining various degrees, all of which the data prove are worthless when it comes to teaching.
When layoff time comes? Yes, those decisions are based on seniority, too. Meaning that, in order to keep the longest time-server around, the most promising young teacher may be let go.
Using student test scores for tenure decisions is a first step. But the truth is that our failure to do so is just a symptom of a system that refuses to evaluate individual teachers based on their merits or performance. A system that rewards one thing and one thing only: time served. A system that doesn’t punish the bad teacher or protect the good teacher — Teacher of the Year candidate or not.
editor@ryansager.com