From Traverse City to Bloomfield Hills to Detroit, dozens and dozens of Michigan school districts face significant budget trouble.
For years, former state schools superintendent Tom Watkins has pointed to legacy costs as a major factor for schools’ budget problems. “We might as well change the name of the Michigan Department of Education to the Department of Pensions and Health Care,” Watkins recently told Interlochen Public Radio.
Make no mistake, many of the educators in the schools are eager for transformation, too.
The Center for Michigan brought the Michigan’s Defining Moment Community Conversations program this week to the annual conference of the Network of Michigan Educators, a statewide organization of recognized top-rank teachers and administrators. In our two-hour conversations, educators raised many ideas for innovation, including expanded internship programs, collaboration between schools and health care centers to improve pre-kindergarten learning for at-risk children, and greater collaboration at the intermediate school districts to reduce bureaucracy and increase the focus on learning in individual school districts.
More than one teacher also took on the tenure system, suggesting it’s time to have a serious debate in Michigan about whether tenure is protecting mediocre educators without rewarding top-rank educators.
This flicker of debate about tenure in Michigan is stoked by bold and controversial moves this year by the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C, as reported recently by the New York Times…
Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire. So Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure. Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Ms. Rhee’s bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers’ Union has divided over whether to embrace it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary firing…. Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal… “Tenure is the holy grail of teacher unions,” she said, “but has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults. If we can put veteran teachers who have tenure in a position where they don’t have it, that would help us to radically increase our teacher quality. And maybe other districts would try it, too.”
4 Comments
I disagree that teacher tenure has no benefit for children. The debate often overlooks this key point: teaching positions in public schools are controlled by locally-elected school boards. Tenure is what prevents these positions from becoming political appointments.
If tenure were abolished and local school boards had the authority to fire and replace teachers at will, it would not be long before advocates for various political viewpoints began running for board positions to further their own causes rather than for the general good of education, as most board members do now.
In my years of teaching, I never had to worry about whether my views on politics, abortion, censorship, or the environment, for example, reflected those of school board members. Political views were irrelevant, as long I kept them appropriately out of the classroom. Remove tenure, and it would not be long before activists of various stripes began to compete for board positions in order to reshape the schools by firing teachers of opposing views and hiring teachers according to their narrow interests.
Furthermore, in my years of teaching, I never had to worry if the superintendent’s nephew was newly certified in my area of expertise, or whether the principal belonged to my club or church. Tenure protects public employees from unfair dismissal in the same way that the civil service laws protect other government employees, and it helps schools remain apolitical, a benefit to all children.
I have agreed for many years that tenure has shielded a small minority of teachers who should have been dismissed for incompetence or negligence. The solution, however, is not to eliminate tenure, but rather to improve teacher evaluation tools and processes available to administrators and to revise the rules of tenure hearings so that it is less burdensome for school districts to remove teachers for true incompetence or negligence.
Eliminating tenure is likely to have terribly negative, unintended consequences on the political neutrality of local school districts.
Both Ms. Rhee and Mr. Griffin make important points. I tend to side with Ms. Rhee, but, in lieu of tenure there has to be an absolute system in place that would provide consistent state wide procedures for dismissal process, including specific avenues of appeal, possibly above the local School Board level.
Mr. Griffin does err in attributing tenure as a way to keep School Boards from being overtaken by special interest groups. The MEA has tremendous operations in place that make it difficult for citizens unsupportive of unions to be elected. Virginia had politically appointed School Boards until the early 90’s when State Law mandated elected Boards. SO there are ways to institute checks and balances.
In the end it still relies on an educated AND interested electorate; and school board elections have some of the lowest turnouts – that is a much more serious problem.
If you have the time I highly recommend reading
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/fkittle/Primer.pdf
It is 20 page discourse on education that proposes a vast change to how schools operate.
As observers praise the changes in the Kalamazoo system I think it needs to be pointed out that teachers in the system are now, and were in the past, represented by MEA and work under Michigan’s tenure system. Unions and tenure don’t seem to be obstacles to reform in Kalamazoo.