Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

by Diane Ravitch

  What about tenure? Does it prevent schools from getting rid of bad teachers? Is it an obstacle to high student performance?

  The first thing to realize about tenure is that teachers demanded and got tenure long before there were unions. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teachers could be fired for arbitrary or capricious reasons. No explanation was required when supervisors and school boards decided to fire teachers. They could be fired because of their color, their ethnic background, their accent, their religion, their looks, or for any other reason. They could be fired because someone on the school board wanted to give their job to his nephew or his friend’s wife. Women could be fired if they got married; when they fought and won the right to get married, they could be fired if they became pregnant. If they were active as teacher leaders, they could be fired for their activism. Teachers fought for tenure—and won it—long before they had collective bargaining and unions. Until the 1960s, teachers had no political power and their unions were disorganized and weak, but they agreed on one principle: they needed to be protected from unjust firing. And they won these concessions from courts and by making persistent demands on their employers. The fact that they won anything at all is even more remarkable when you consider that most teachers were women and most women did not have the right to vote until 1920 and lacked political power.

  It is important to bear in mind that tenure in K–12 education does not mean the same thing as it does in higher education. A professor in higher education who has tenure can seldom, if ever, be fired. Only the most egregious behavior would be grounds for dismissing a tenured professor. Tenure in higher education is close to ironclad.

  In the public schools, however, tenure means due process. There is no ironclad tenure for teachers. A teacher who has tenure is entitled to a hearing before an impartial arbitrator, where the teacher has the right to see the evidence and the grounds for the charges against him or her and to offer a defense. Critics say that the dismissal process is too cumbersome and too costly; they say it takes too long to remove an incompetent teacher. In some states and districts, that is true. It is the job of the state and the district to negotiate a fair and expeditious process to handle charges and hearings. The hearings should be resolved in months, not years. After a fair hearing, teachers found to be incompetent or guilty of moral turpitude should be removed without delay.

  Critics like to cite the small number of teachers who have been fired for incompetence as proof that more should be fired. What they never admit, however, is that many teachers are asked to leave (that is, terminated) without ever winning tenure. About 40 percent of those who enter teaching leave the profession within the first five years. In some urban districts, where class sizes are larger and teaching conditions are more difficult than in suburban schools, the attrition rate is even higher. Some leave because they are asked to leave. Some leave for easier jobs in the suburbs; some quit because the job was too hard for them, they didn’t like their assignments, or they didn’t get the resources and help they needed.3

  After a teacher has been on the job for three or four years, depending on state law, the principal decides whether he or she qualifies for tenure. By that time, the principal and her assistants or department chairs are supposed to have observed the teacher repeatedly, seen the conduct of the classroom, reviewed the kinds of assignments the teacher’s classes were turning in. By that time, the teacher should have gotten support and help to improve at the job. Only after observation and positive evaluation by supervisors—and sometimes peers—do teachers receive tenure. When the principal awards tenure, he or she has determined that the teacher is well qualified to teach and deserves the protection of due process. If the award of tenure is made without careful deliberation, then the principal and the central administration should be held accountable for failing to fulfill their responsibilities.

  Once the teacher has tenure, he has a measure of job security. He knows that he won’t be fired except for just cause and that he will have a chance to defend himself if accused of misconduct. For many who enter the teaching profession, the prospect of having job security is part of what makes the profession attractive. Many are willing to work for less money because they have the possibility of job security. The job security is a form of real income to teachers. It signals to them that they are part of a team and a profession. Once the teacher has tenure, he has professional autonomy; a new supervisor can’t compel him to adopt the latest fad. With tenure, the teacher is free to exercise his best professional judgment in the classroom without fear of political reprisals; with tenure, he can take the risk of being a whistle-blower if he sees administrators or other teachers abusing children or changing test scores or doing something else that is wrong.

  What does it mean if teachers don’t have tenure? At the very least it means they will be insecure in their jobs. Without tenure, experienced teachers might be laid off to cut costs and replaced by inexperienced and less costly teachers. Without tenure, teachers will worry about running afoul of the principal or their other supervisors. If the principal is zealous about a particular method of teaching—say, phonics or whole language—teachers had better comply and not risk the principal’s displeasure. They will worry about offending parents, such as the parent who thinks her child should have gotten a higher grade and who might complain to the principal. If they see wrongdoing or cheating, they will be reluctant to report it for fear of getting into trouble. They might hesitate to teach evolution or global warming for fear that someone in the community might object. They will think twice before assigning a novel that any parent might find offensive, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the Harry Potter books (fundamentalist groups do not approve of magic and witchcraft) or a novel by John Steinbeck or some other classic author. Just take a look at the American Library Association’s list of the hundred most frequently censored books to see how easy it would be for a teacher to arouse the ire of a disgruntled parent or pressure group. Without tenure, teachers would be wise to stick to the blandest, least controversial books and topics, or to the textbooks, which have already been carefully screened by review panels to eliminate anything remotely controversial.

  So, if reformers succeed in eliminating tenure, they will eliminate teachers’ academic freedom as well. This is not a wise trade-off. Teachers are being asked to assume more risk (lack of job security) without any assurance of additional compensation; this is not even good market economics. A veteran superintendent recently said to me, “The reformers want to get rid of a few rats by burning down the whole barn.” Indeed, the reformers are moving from state to state, attacking tenure even in the high-performing states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They claim that eliminating tenure will make it easier to fire teachers and thus to close the achievement gap. Yet they cannot show any connection between tenure and academic performance. Teachers in the highest-performing schools have it, and teachers in the lowest-performing schools have it. Tenure does not cause low academic performance; taking it away won’t cause academic performance to rise. But one thing is sure: teachers see the attack on their job security as an economic and psychological loss, a betrayal, a punishment inflicted on them for being teachers. The removal of tenure, now advancing from state to state, is profoundly demoralizing. It is impossible to say what the benefits are or might be.

  The other prong of this two-pronged attack is the effort to remove any seniority rights. Reformers demean the importance of experience. They point to studies by Eric Hanushek and Robert Gordon as evidence that experience does not produce higher test scores. This is one of those instances where the findings of economists do not concur with the wisdom of teachers. I have never met a teacher, other than the handful paid by foundations to advocate otherwise, who discounted the importance of experience in teaching. All the teachers I know say that they are constantly learning, constantly working at improving their lessons and strategies. And young teachers express gratitude to
ward the experienced teachers who helped them learn the ropes. Teaching is such a labor-intensive and demanding job that it is impossible to imagine that experience doesn’t matter. Not every veteran teacher is first-rate, but that is no reason to discount the importance of experience.

  Many experienced teachers were educated in a different era, before No Child Left Behind, and they remember a time when standardized tests were not the measure of everything. Many came into teaching with the expectation that it would be their career and their profession, not a way station while they decided on a different career. Veteran educators do not like to be lectured to by non-educators or by those with only two years in the classroom. Call it human nature.

  Some history might be helpful here. In the absence of any tenure protections, teachers in the late nineteenth century created their own informal seniority system. In the big cities, there was an informal understanding among teachers that the oldest had the most stature. The longer a teacher stayed in a school, the higher her rank on the staff. Where such systems arose, as they did in New York City, teachers would not transfer to another school, because they would lose their seniority and their status.

  In some districts, seniority was taken to absurd lengths. The date a teacher was appointed governed how much seniority she had, and those with the most seniority got choice appointments. Even the difference of a day or a week could affect the teacher’s place in line to get an assignment. Seniority as such had nothing to do with competence; there was no way of ascertaining that a teacher with twenty-two years of experience was better than a teacher with fifteen years of experience. And then there is the problem of the teacher who clings to the job long after she has lost her sharpness and even her wits.

  So unlike tenure, which protects academic freedom and professional autonomy, seniority should be restructured. Experience matters, but beyond a certain point it’s not possible to weigh and calibrate the value of more or fewer years of experience. Gray hair in and of itself is not a virtue.

  Seniority becomes a major issue when there are budget cuts and teachers are laid off. Traditionally, teachers are laid off based on seniority: the teacher with the least seniority gets the first pink slip. There should be a better way to do it, but it’s not obvious what the better way is. There ought to be a way of gauging the need for a specialized teacher—for example, a teacher of mathematics or science or a teacher of special education or bilingual education, all of which are fields with shortages—and finding a reasonable weight for a teacher’s contribution to the school as a student adviser, teacher mentor, or in a position with other responsibilities. Consideration must also be given to a teacher’s contribution in supporting the culture of the school, the teamwork and collaboration that schools need to function effectively.

  Such issues require human judgment, professional judgment. Seniority became prevalent as a supposedly objective way to decide who gets the first pink slips and who gets the best assignments. Teachers don’t like principals to be able to pick and choose their favorites. And they are fearful that the most experienced teachers may be laid off not because they are bad teachers but because they have the highest salaries and are expensive.

  The reformers’ answer to this dilemma is to use student test scores as the definition of “effectiveness.” But teachers know that this measure will favor those who teach the “easiest” students and will punish those who choose to teach or are assigned to teach the most challenging students. They know that only a minority of teachers teach in subjects and grades that are regularly tested. They also know that the variability in test scores is not necessarily of their making. And they understand that putting so much emphasis on the tests will lead to negative consequences, like teaching to the test.

  No teacher should win tenure automatically. Even tenured teachers should be regularly evaluated by their supervisors. The principal and the assistant principal should regularly observe teachers, not to judge them, but to provide them with useful feedback about how to improve their lessons. To do this, the principal and the assistant principal must be master teachers themselves. If they are not master teachers, they cannot give advice to other teachers. The primary job of the principal is to be “head teacher.” That means he or she should be an excellent teacher and an excellent teacher of teachers.

  The evaluation process should include peer review. The school should have a team of excellent teachers available to visit classrooms and provide feedback and support. Teachers who are new or who are struggling should get help promptly. The administrators and the peer reviewers should be responsible for providing help in a timely fashion. I recall sitting next to John Jackson, the president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, at a conference in New Orleans. When the discussion turned to teacher evaluation, Jackson said he had recently concluded visits to several other nations to meet with their ministries of education. At each stop, he asked the question: “What do you do about bad teachers?” And each time, he got the same reply: “We help them.” And then he asked, “What do you do if you help them and they don’t improve?” And the answer was everywhere the same: “We help them more.”

  In the present climate, there is hardly any public official in the United States who would give the second answer. At this point, I would be happy if they were willing to give the first answer. “We help them.”

  The current reform narrative emphasizes the importance of firing “bad” teachers. But the reality is that our current system is hemorrhaging teachers. Since the adoption of No Child Left Behind, teacher retirements have accelerated. Federal data reveal alarming facts: In 1988, there were more teachers with fifteen years of experience than any other group. By 2008, “the modal teacher was not a gray-haired veteran; he or she was a beginner in the first year of teaching. In 1987–88, there were about 65,000 first-year teachers; by 2007–8, this number had grown to 200,000. By that year, a quarter of the teaching force had five years or less of experience.”4

  Can a nation expect to have a good educational system without a stable workforce of experienced professional educators? The greatest imperative we face as a nation with regard to teacher quality is not to find and fire teachers but to find and develop a highly skilled professional teacher corps. We must improve the recruitment of good candidates into teaching, prepare them well for the challenges of the classroom, support them as they begin their teaching careers, provide good working conditions, give them the public respect they deserve for the important work they do, ensure them the professional autonomy they deserve in their classrooms, and treat them as professionals.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Problem with Teach for America

  CLAIM Teach for America recruits teachers and leaders whose high expectations will one day ensure that every child has an excellent education.

  REALITY Teach for America sends bright young people into tough classrooms where they get about the same results as other bright young people in similar classrooms but leave the profession sooner.

  It’s hard to be critical of Teach for America (TFA) because the idea is so positive and the young people it attracts are so terrific. Who could possibly object to an organization that recruits thousands of smart young college graduates to teach for two years in some of our nation’s most distressed urban and rural schools? Who could question the sincerity and idealism of these young men and women?

  It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the young people who join TFA and the organization itself.

  Wendy Kopp conceived the idea of Teach for America as her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University in 1989. This organization, she proposed, would attract the nation’s top college graduates into teaching for a two-year stint. It was akin to the Peace Corps in that it would enlist the idealism of young people and give them an opportunity to serve the less fortunate members of society. Even before a single new teacher had entered a single classroom, major publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and Time lauded TFA, and corporations offered millions of do
llars to launch the new program. College students responded enthusiastically. The two-year commitment gave them time to think about what they wanted to do next, whether to go to graduate school or enter business or even stay in education.

  The earliest cohort had 500 recruits; the next year’s had 750. As TFA became established, the number of applicants grew, and it had more applicants than places available. It screened applicants and tapped those it considered the best. TFA developed a reputation among college students as a highly selective organization, as indeed it was. TFA became its own brand. Not only was it a feather in your cap to be accepted as a corps member, but having TFA on your résumé was like getting a gold star, a signal to future employers in the corporate, legal, and financial sectors and to graduate school admissions committees that you were one of “the best and brightest.”

  Kopp proved to be a genius at marketing, organization, and fund-raising. She built a high-powered board made up of superstars from the corporate, financial, and media sectors, and she established partnerships with leaders in each field, both for fund-raising and as valuable connections for TFA corps members. TFA provided entrée for its alumni to a powerful and influential network and a path to professional success. When TFA convened a party in 2011 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, its corps members of the previous twenty years rubbed shoulders with corporate titans, education leaders, well-known journalists, major financial figures, think tank intellectuals, and top government officials.