At a recent Save Our Schools rally in Washington DC, the actor and son of a teacher, Matt Damon stood up for teachers and tried to set the record straight about tenure and teaching. A little later on in this interview the interviewer (who I am reluctant to call a journalist because she had an agenda, asked incredibly leading questions and had clearly not done her homework) asserts that it is nearly impossible to remove a bad teacher from their position. When asked what she based this opinion on, she cited her time as a student in the LA school district. Much has been made of this interview, but one thing was made clear to me, the public has an elevated the notion of "tenure" to the level of "job for life". While each state has its own standards for teaching certification and the classification "highly qualified", I thought it was time to set the record straight about how "teacher effectiveness" is determined in our state, whether their is such a thing as "tenure". Who it applies to and how an ineffective teacher can be removed.
According to the WA State OSPI site the current tenure laws state that a teacher must teach for two years in an accredited public school before receiving tenure. What that amounts to is a two year probationary period. After which, a principal has to go through several steps in order to fire a teacher. The steps include a review and remedial measures that allow the teacher to improve. None of these measures will take more than a year and if the teacher doesn't improve, they will be removed. If you look at the private sector, the probationary period is usually 90 days and most employers will review the employee and attempt remedial measures before they fire him or her. There is legislation being offered at the state legislature that would extend probation for one more year and tie teacher evaluations to student test scores. So the idea that a tenured teacher has a job for life is simply not true.
The real problem for most new teachers on the ground is that principals have figured out they can hire substitutes for long term assignments, saving their school money on benefits while having complete control over hiring. Simply put, if they don't like you they can simply replace you with no notice. The second big problem is, when budgets get cut, it is the new teachers that are let go regardless of their tenure or effectiveness. This can create a catch 22 for principals with good teams when they have to let go one or two of their best and brightest because they have a teacher who is eligible to retire in a year. Even if they had the legal option to pick and choose, which option is the least damaging? Those with tenure get put on the sub list and I think I have already written about how difficult it is to stay in the field when you are making 300 dollars a week and no benefits.
What I ask parents and community members to realize is that we teach because we love to teach. We believe there should be standards and we want to help every student in our classroom exceed them. It has become increasingly more difficult to do a job when we can't count on it being there for us from year to year due to spurious unattainable benchmarks for evaluation and budget cuts. Being a tenured teacher doesn't mean you have a job for life, it only means they can't fire you simply because they don't like you. In other words tenure only guarantees that you will be treated fairly if your work is called in to question. If any of you think tenure means "a job for life" just ask any one of the five hundred teachers in this state who won't be back in the classroom this September.
