Posted on 07/04/2004 12:21:14 PM PDT by EggsAckley
WASHINGTON (AP) - The decades-old tradition of tenure protects teachers, often frustrates principals and has even surfaced as an issue in the presidential campaign. Now tenure itself is under review. Tenure guarantees that public school teachers who have this protection cannot be fired without legitimate cause and due process, perhaps even a court hearing. Almost every state provides tenure in some form.
Yet with federal law requiring schools to have a top teacher for every core class, more administrators are questioning whether tenure keeps them from getting rid of even a small number of instructors who just are not good enough in the classroom.
Democrat John Kerry, the presidential candidate favored by education unions, wants to make it easier for schools to act quickly against poor teachers, provided that educators are protected from baseless firings.
To teachers, tenure is a coveted and often misunderstood right - not a lock on a lifetime job, but assurance of fair treatment, including intervention for teachers who may be struggling to reach students.
"It's protection against the false accusations, against politically trumped up charges, against people who insist you must teach a certain way or risk getting fired," said Penny Kotterman, a special education teacher and president of the Arizona affiliate of the National Education Association. She spoke during a group interview Sunday with The Associated Press during the NEA's annual meeting.
Tenure is most associated with colleges and universities, where prospective professors earn it by compiling a rigorous record of research, teaching and service.
In the kindergarten through high school world, it is typically granted to teachers after two to five years of at least solid performance in a district, although debate continues over its value as a sign of quality.
Most principals and superintendents say tenure does not mean teachers have proved themselves to be very good, and many teachers agreed with that point in polls by the nonpartisan Public Agenda research group.
But Kotterman said that is off the mark. Tenure, she said, is meant mainly as an assurance of fair review, while certification and regular evaluation of teachers are indicators of quality.
In the polls, most teachers said tenure protects them from district politics and losing their jobs to newcomers who could be hired for less.
David Sanchez, a kindergarten teacher from Burlingame, Calif., said tenure has helped teachers who were being pushed out of jobs in retaliation for union activity.
Charles Hasse, a fourth-grader teacher and president of the Washington Education Association, said tenure helps because schools have fewer people in supervisory roles than many employers, making "the opportunity for misjudgments much greater."
School administrators, who are often former teachers, say they understand the point of tenure. But they say it can lead to frustrating delays in replacing poor teachers, leading some administrators to give up trying.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.tbo.com ...
Recalculate your earnings, and this time include the PERA contributions, the 401k match, health insurance coverage, and other benefits.
I don't know what you teach but here in California even the poorest district pays a beginning teacher $38k a school year...And if you have 14 yrs and are a high school math teacher you are looking at something on the order of 65-75k....Maybe you ought to move
I'd rather be in Texas at $40,000 than NJ at $70,000. [No offense to those who call NJ home.]
BTW, I subscribe to that list. There's whole lot of truth in some of those articles.
I'm talking about the primary grades. Junior High is early enough for the classroom shuffle. When students are ready for higher mathematics and other subjects, then it is a good idea for the teacher to hold a specific degree in that subject.
I agree that there are many unqualified teachers, especially in math. You have to also consider that the younger crop of teachers have been edukatud in publik skools. I've seen the papers that have been graded that my youngest one does. The teacher missed correcting misspelled words. I spend time with her, but I have to wonder what she's doing for 6 hours a day, to warrant the amount of homework she gets.
I (obviously) don't know about you personally, but most teachers spend around 180 days in the classroom. In California, they worked that down to 176 or so by jiggling the bell times.
Then you add in the benefits, which are not trivial.
I realize you spend extra hours preparing, but so do we all.
I would guess -- without knowing -- that your pay is probably equivalent to about $80,000 in private business.
The cost of living here in Texas is probably much lower than California-- of course, I'm sure it depends on which part of California we're talking about.
There's an expression for this. Not one that I can directly use here without my post getting deleted. The abbreviation is FTS.
You have any idea idea how many hours I have spent working "on the job" when I was not physically in the office?
The answer to that is virtually all of them.
You guys cut a pretty fat hog. Where is the product?
$80,000? I think you're out of your mind (she said with a wistful smile). What benefits? Our school district self-insures through a risk pool for health insurance. That comes out of my pay check monthly. We get 5 days per school year for state sick leave-- I never use more than two days-- so I have 50+ days built up. My district doesn't pay social security, so I won't be getting any of that. I do pay into the Teacher Retirement System (which should be there when I retire). What benefits that I don't pay for? The district sure isn't matching any funds that I'm putting in my 403-b. Are you sure you're not confusing Texas with a union state? We don't have teacher unions.
I never got any days. No show, no pay.
You may not have things as good in Texas as the teachers in California do, but I think you have them better than you realize.
You have a dental plan? I can't get one.
Our dental plan is part of our risk pool.
Guaffaw....Sure it is. That's the ticket.
In my experience, this is not the rule. Of course I taught in a district where the teachers union helps elect the school board. Any principal who goes against a teacher is himself/herself targeted by the board. One teacher said she had seen 6 principals come and go in her career.
You are correct about the documentation, you need to document up to three years of bad activities, unless the teacher offered alcohol to a minor or something like that. All a teacher needs to survive is one friend in the board of sups.
In practice, I was let go on a strict senority basis after 10 years. The district was desperate for math teachers, and I was well liked, (BSEE, MSEE, and std credential, also the head soccer coach and senior class advisor and Junior State advisor). but senority trumped everything, and the school moved non math teachers in to cover the void until the situation allowed hiring teachers again. (Three years later).
Now this is not strictly speaking a tenure issue, all 63 teachers who were let go had tenure. The issue is that nothing but senority is left when tenure is universal.
A good friend of mine from college graduated two years ago.
She was hired at 36,000...fresh outta college and 23 years old.
This year she got an additional 5,000 for being the girls tennis coach (she's actually a tennis machine...hehe.)
She's using the extra money to get her stupid New VW Beetle...
it's a tough racket, being a 25 yr old single female teacher making 40,000...hehe.
She is now wanting to come back to graduate school for the school administrator program in a couple of years.
Her reasoning is that the admins make truely ridiculious money, and they have none of the hassles and stupidity the classroom teacher deals with.
Can't say as I blame her.
If she goes back for a couple of years in grad school, she can parking her butt in the admin building for 60-80,000 a year.....what a system!
classic!
NJ:
$93,000/182 days
14 sick days/year-5 personal
Dental Plan
Medical Plan
Full medical coverage when retiring after 25 years of service.
Retirement = years of service over 50 for % of top three years of salary
We all make decisions in life for what we want to do in life. Seems like most people on this thread made the wrong choice . ( or were too stupid to make a logical decision)
You can all eat your hearts out while I bask in the Carib sun this winter ..
My experience differs. I work with principals and teach and do research in ed. admin. and ed. leadership. I find many many cases of principals working to remove poor teachers. It's not easy, but the best principals find formal and informal ways to get bad teachers out. I won't say it's the case in every district, and I can't say it's always true in the worst districts. But I've even seen strong urban principals make life so miserable for their poor teachers that they opted to retire or transfer out.
And, in my opinion, it ought to be fairly difficult to remove a teacher. If it weren't, we'd run the risk of having a lot of good people run out over differences of opinion over pedagogy or other matters.
I can go with you there. My experience with school districts was adversarial; it generally brought me into contact with those that were not-so-good. The good districts didn't come up.
But, boy, the bad ones were bad. You couldn't have blown a teacher (or an administrator) out of one them with dynamite.
I have a particular story there, but it's too late at night to try to tell it. I'm sure you have the idea.
And, in my opinion, it ought to be fairly difficult to remove a teacher. If it weren't, we'd run the risk of having a lot of good people run out over differences of opinion over pedagogy or other matters.
I don't agree with you about this.
I was taught the the goal of management is to recruit and retain qualified personnel.
The obverse side of that is that you get to fire anyone you want to fire. No notice, no anything. Let them pack up their personal belongings, get them out, then change the locks.
The same could happen to you. If you don't do a good job, you're gone. It doesn't take long.
I don't see why teachers or other government employees should be treated any differently.
I spent some years in both public and private schools. There were good teachers in both, but the rules were different. In the private schools, both the teachers and the students could get thrown out at any time. That made a difference in the atmosphere.
I think that is how things ought to work.
Admin in our area start at 75 and top out at somewhere close to 110k....not bad for 185 days of work a year
14 years with a BA gives you 60k. Cry me a river, will ya. The rest of us got mouths to feed and not too much time to listen to your whining.
Give me my taxes back so I can send my kids to a decent school!
Tenure in the public universities is an unfair system; the people who pay for it, the taxpayers, themselves have no security in their jobs. In no other segment of society is a job guaranteed. This is manifestly unfair to the people paying for lifetime employment for others.
It is also an expensive system. Eliminating tenure would surely result in significant cost savings, particularly if the replacement workers were themselves only part-timers, without costly benefits.
Tenure provides security for faculty; why is providing job security a goal for any our of institutions? We can certainly bring down the wage base if we put each faculty member’s job up for reconsideration each year, just like everyone else’s.
Why should any group of people, particularly a self-selected lot feeding at the public trough, not also be faced by the continual terror of losing their means of livelihood, of constantly competing for that ever-diminishing pool of dollars? It is just a matter of fairness that in this day of “flexible” work arrangements that the only remaining pool of safety and security be removed forthwith. Why should the taxpayers fund permanent jobs for anyone, when they themselves have no job security? Why should academicians be afforded any of the dignity that the rest of us have had to surrender?
Just think of the vast savings that could be effected by having no more protected pools of salaries at the university. Instead, if a Teaching-And-Research Employee, or TARE, is clearly not pulling his weight by fees received for teaching and by grants, then let’s replace with him with a cheaper version. This will save the taxpayers and the universities money. Our new goal should be to have TAREs be profit centers rather than cost centers. By having university TAREs compete with everyone around the world for these jobs on a continual basis --- and by a great stroke of planning, universities are already exempt from H-1B requirements --- we can drive real wages down very rapidly, and profits up!
And when new management comes in, these employees should share the fears of their fellow workers about who will be summarily shoved out of the door. All other Americans are subject to the whims of others: CEOs to the whims of corporate boards of cronies; politicians, to the whims of the electorate; workers, to whomever is arbitarily assigned to be their manager.
And if a university wants to toss out an employee with unpopular views, then in a right-to-work state it should be able to, without this silly recourse to calls of academic freedom. No other group has a protected right to express itself and retain employment, and why should we grant university TAREs such special privileges? Everyone except for TAREs have the right to starve; let them partake in that right, and if TAREs want to speak freely, let them have recourse to the same right to starve that everyone else has for daring to exercise their right to express themselves in unpopular ways.
Yes, it is amply clear that a fundamental revision needs to be made to the anachronistic university TARE retention system. TAREs that have long been in the system have often had several raises; by weeding out these expensive TAREs who will no longer be safely ensconced in their positions, we can seed the universities with younger and less expensive TAREs who are undoubtedly, having been freshly educated, much more up on the latest aspects of their field than the older, more stale TAREs that they replace. Since we will be able to use high salaries as a negative weighting factor in the retention for each individual TARE, we can quickly eliminate the highly paid who are not producing maximum revenue.
In fact, since it is cheaper to employ people on a part-time basis --- and this type of partial employment has the fortuitous benefit of engendering very cooperative behavior by the part-timers for fear of losing what little livelihood they have --- larded with the fact that the university will not have to make any type of retirement system payments or health care for part-timers, we will save even more money. We may even safely assume that we can squeeze the same amount of actual work from the same number of TAREs while only paying for a part-timer.
Taking the definition of work one step further to straight “pay for performance”, by linking the number of students in a TARE’s class along with the number of hours the TARE teaches directly to his pay, we can ensure the profitability of the universities. By making TAREs more entrepreneurial in their hunt for grants --- by, again, directly linking their salaries to whatever grants that they can cully, we can ensure that TAREs will anxiously watch the political winds to make sure that their teaching as well as their research is in the deepest part of the mainstream. This glorious working together should give us the double benefit of TAREs teaching very large classes of the most popular classes, along with a strong research emphasis on whatever is popular currently.
The conjunction of grinding more work from lower paid individuals --- and it is more productive since it is bringing more revenue per dollar invested --- we will have the triple global competitiveness wins of paying less for more work that generates more revenue.
In our “race for the bottom” (and for fattening the bottom line!), we can hardly pass up this golden opportunity. It will save the states money at a time when they most need it, provide even more healthy competition for those part-time TARE positions in universities, and surely those who are displaced --- the TARES that are weeded out --- will feel proud that we can all save some money at their expense.
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