Where art thou, Tenure?

I attended a small Kansas town high school: West Mineral, Kansas, population around 300. A coal mining town at the start of the 1900’s, by the 1950’s it had shrunk to a few homes, a church on either side of town, and a K-8/9-12 school combination.  The high school was the center of “cultural” life in the area and, occasionally, state football championship.  Into this traditional warren of 50’s thinking stepped Mr. Black, a talented musician and producer of remarkable performances. He considered himself just a short distance off-Broadway—and we almost believed him.  A full production of the Mikado with grand costumes and all convinced many of us that there was more to life than main street West Mineral.

One evening Mr. Black appeared in downtown West Mineral (less than a block in length) in Bermuda shorts. That night, the school board convened and fired him.

This experience with capricious power over people’s lives is not an isolated one. Kansas had long been among the most creative states in colonizing teachers into feudal systems.  Such immoral acts by teachers as getting married stayed on the books for years; teachers unions fought for all of us to overcome political favoritism, sexual discrimination, and tyrannical administrators.

Yet, in the intervening years, since the enactment of teacher tenure in the late 50s and 60’s, unfortunately …tenure has become the coat of armour providing protection for both terrific and poor teachers. Many argue that apathy has accompanied predictability and that commitment wanes by knowing that no matter how good you are it will not improve your standard of living or your capacity to send your children to a good college. Bill Perkins at the famed and highly successful Harlem Success Academy says that success happens “when you remove three ingredients from public education: the union, big-system bureaucracy, and low expectations for disadvantaged children (NY Times, May 23, 2010).”

Times are a changing.  Tenure as we know is will soon be a thing of the past. While Florida Governor Charlie Crist recently vetoed a Florida bill to eliminate tenure; Washington, D. C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee has managed to encourage a majority of teachers to relinquish tenure for higher salaries.  Last week, Colorado Governor Ritter signed legislation modifying tenure in ways that may become a national model. This legislation calls for 50% of evaluations to depend on test scores and that tenure can we earned—then lost—after two years of low student performance.

Colorado, like other states, is running faster in the President’s “Race to the Top.” Educators can help define and shape it, or be run over by new legislation designed to remove tenure as an obstacle to student success.

I recommend that you read the New York Times magazine article today entitled “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” by Steven Brill.

Also, post your questions for me and I’ll respond to one to three each week.

More later, Linda

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.