Laying Siege to Seniority

By Sam Allis/Boston

Tenure for 2.3 million public school teachers, one of the sacred cows in American education, is under attack. For decades, thanks to strong union contracts and ingrained notions of academic freedom, underpaid schoolteachers ! could at least console themselves with the fact that they were pretty well assured of job security for life. But after years of dismal school performance, and under the strictures of shrinking budgets, legislators are suddenly reneging on the deal. "Professionalism and tenure are antithetical," says Chester Finn Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education and a proponent of free-market solutions to educational problems. "Teachers can't have it both ways."

In Massachusetts first-term Republican Governor William Weld and Democrats in the state legislature are mounting a frontal assault against tenure. Weld wants to allow school principals free rein to make hiring and firing decisions without reference to tenure or job seniority. Weld is also calling for teachers to be recertified every five years after taking competency tests. "This isn't anti-teacher," says Weld. "It's anti-slob teacher."

Kentucky has already moved against tenure as part of sweeping school-reform legislation enacted there last year. Individual schools are held accountable for improving student performance. If an institution fails to achieve results over a two-year period, a team of educators will be able to lift tenure and fire anyone on the school staff regardless of previous job guarantees.

The anti-tenure drive has inspired fierce opposition from the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. "I don't ever want it to be cheap to lay off an incompetent teacher," says N.E.A. president Keith Geiger. "But I don't want it to be impossible, either." He stresses that tenure was never meant to be a lifetime sinecure but was intended as a guarantee against dismissal without just cause. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "An elected politician can't say, 'I'm going to fire you because you didn't support me in the last election.' "

Teachers call tenure a red herring raised by politicians to avoid dealing with the real problems plaguing American public education, like poor curriculums and overcrowded classrooms. Shanker argues that tenure is strongly rooted in countries routinely cited for their superior educational systems, like Japan and Germany. The issue, says Shanker, is not job security but the ethos in countries that prize educational achievement. "Mothers and fathers in those societies know there are serious consequences for not doing well at school," he says. "In Germany, if a student doesn't pass a national exam, he can't go to college. Not here."

The problem is that the job security that makes sense in theory has become a nightmare in practice. The process for removing an incompetent teacher is often long and expensive, due largely to the numerous hearings and appeals required. Part of the difficulty is that the probationary period before tenure is granted, a mere three years in most states, is too short. Also, administrators generally do a poor job of scrutinizing tenure candidates. Henry Bangser, superintendent of New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Ill., estimates that it can take more than three years from the time a tenured teacher is judged incompetent by a principal until that teacher has exhausted the appeal process.

What are the alternatives? The most qualified -- and the toughest -- judges of classroom competence are usually other teachers. Thus one of the most interesting programs for evaluating classroom performance is one established by the Toledo Federation of Teachers 11 years ago, which has been copied in 15 other communities around the country. Each year more than a dozen of the best Toledo teachers leave the classroom to work full-time as mentors for new teachers and to intervene with veterans experiencing problems. "We had been constantly locked up in long and damaging struggles with management over dismissing teachers," recalls Toledo Federation of Teachers president Dal Lawrence, who created the program. "Now that pretty much has disappeared." When teacher competence is called into question, 90% of the complaints are triggered by other teachers, not by parents or administrators. "Teachers don't want to work next door to an incompetent colleague," says Lawrence.

Some opponents of tenure argue that the collective-bargaining process is the root problem. Peter Greer, on leave as dean of Boston University's School of Education and now acting superintendent of schools in Chelsea, Mass., the troubled system that the university agreed to manage two years ago, says the "tyranny" of collective bargaining dooms any school-reform effort. Greer is currently being sued by Chelsea teachers for hiring four untenured teachers over tenured ones for a program to prevent high school dropouts.

"This is not the Salvation Army," snaps crusty B.U. president John Silber, arguing that the need is for results. At a time when schools are being challenged to improve education or make room for private-sector solutions, the need to reward excellence and punish mediocrity is likely to carry the day, in the classroom as much as outside it.