California Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/california-teacher-tenure-laws-ruled-unconstitutional.html?emc=edit_na_20140610&nlid=58032267&_r=0&referrer=

by _pius • 12 years ago

72 143 12 years ago

nytimes.com

jack-r-abbit2• 12 years ago

But lawyers for the states and teachers’ unions said that overturning such laws would erode necessary protections that stop school administrators from making unfair personnel decisions.
Administrators seeking to dismiss a teacher they deem incompetent must follow a complicated procedure that typically drags on for months, if not years.

Wait... why should they get more job protection than the vast majority of all other workers? I don't think they need any special treatment beyond what every other person with a job has.

forkandwait• 12 years ago

I agree with the court in dropping tenure laws, but arguments in favor of have cited protecting freedom of teachers' conscience and preventing politically motivated hiring. I personally think tenure had its day, but its day is long past....

squidfood• 12 years ago

Don't let the word "tenure" fool you too much, in this case it's just union seniority rules under a different name.

33W• 12 years ago

Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)

alistairSH2• 12 years ago

I've had this discussion with friends and family who teach. None of them can make a convincing (to me) argument that a school administrator is any more likely to be capricious or unfair than managers in the private sector.

Then, the friends move onto the whole "how do you evaluate a teacher?" to which I respond "how do you evaluate a programmer?" Sure, there are metrics for both, but none are foolproof. At some point, managers have to go with their guts.

gress3• 12 years ago

You evaluate a programmer on the coding problems they solve that contribute to the business.

There is nothing so clear for teachers other than their class performance on standardized tests, but standardized tests measure only a very limited part of what a good teacher should be able to offer.

_delirium• 12 years ago

For a variety of reasons, really stupid metrics in tech have mostly not had staying power, which reduces how much of a problem people consider them to be. Plenty of companies have attempted to institute some kind of LoC or normalized-LoC or other such system to measure programmer productivity, and they are mostly ridiculed as laughingstocks of the profession. Whereas the dumb, unvalidated metrics seem to be actually making inroads in education.

To some extent tech benefits from there being giant piles of money everywhere, which limits how much leverage stupid employers have over their employees (where legal, they try to use noncompetes to counteract that effect).

An interesting feature of this decision, though, is that it interprets the "right to education" in the state Constitution as creating an enforceable, quite broad right, rather than merely a general principle: any government policy that stands in the way of students receiving an effective education is (according to this holding) unconstitutional. If that stands as precedent, students may have another way to combat poorly designed metrics: such metrics might also be unconstitutional. (One problem, of course, is that there's no clear limiting factor for this principle; it essentially empowers judges to make policy decisions about what stands in the way of good education.)

opendais27• 12 years ago

The problem with your logic is, what happens when you have one of these people elected to the school board or as an admin?

http://www.christianpost.com/news/kansas-school-board-candid...

I think you are putting your head in the sand if you think people like that wouldn't try to get people fired for "teaching evolution".

Iftheshoefits2• 12 years ago

Why is it incumbent on your friends and family to demonstrate that school administrators would be more likely to be capricious or unfair, and not on you to demonstrate why it's a good idea to subject teachers to any increased level of capricious or unfair management?

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Because sometimes incompetence is offered as an excuse for political dismissal, and education is a highly politicized field int he US. Think of controversies over the teaching of evolution or sex education, for example.

Those edge cases are important, but there are very few of them relative to the number of cases where self-interest and rent-seeking by teacher's unions is the main factor. This is an important decision and one that I welcome.

Domenic_S3• 12 years ago

It's been a while since high school for me, but when I was there parents could opt-out their kids from sex ed and they'd get study hall instead. There wasn't a lot of controversy. Is that different now?

opendais27• 12 years ago

Why shouldn't they have the right to collectively bargain like every other worker and Union in this country?

And more importantly, in the past, teachers were removed for political reasons or for teaching unpopular topics. http://teachertenure.procon.org/

saosebastiao• 12 years ago

Collective bargaining isn't the problem. It is the strike that is the problem. When GM workers go on strike, I can still buy a car from 20 other car companies, as well as ride a bus, bike, skateboard, or walk. When public union workers go on strike, they have a much larger position of power because they have monopoly control over a societal good. When teachers go on strike, the children who rely on public education are the ones that suffer...not the teacher's employers.

GauntletWizard• 12 years ago

Teachers union advocates will tell you that it's a way of convincing people to become teachers, as the job has far more stability. Reality shows that it just discourages new teachers, as nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years[1]. Teaching has become an outdated, slow-moving profession that nobody wants to join because of the entrenched interests and bloated bureaucracies.

1: http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-st...

justizin• 12 years ago

yes, but getting rid of all protection for older, more experienced teachers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

i have often struggled with this issue. i have had some great teachers, i have had some terrible teachers, but if you got rid of all the existing teachers and started anew, who the hell would possibly be a positive influence on the new teachers?

gerbal• 12 years ago

Or no one wants to teach because of low pay compared to equivalent professions, huge classes, and deteriorating working conditions.

ironchef4• 12 years ago

"nobody wants to join" -> I think you mean few want to continue in. There is plenty of fodder heading into the ranks only to have their dreams crushed by the reality of teaching in today's educational system. The numbers of those going into teaching has been on the rise for years (I believe elementary and secondary teacher population has risen about 7 percent since 2002...don't remember if that was DoE statistics or what...i'll try to find it)

smackfu2• 12 years ago

nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years

My guess is because teaching is seen as a fall back job for liberal arts majors who have no teaching experience, and once they get hired, it turns out they hate teaching.

x0x0• 12 years ago

Or, at least in CA, teachers leave because they grow up and need a real job; one that might pay them enough to afford to live in the communities they work in. If you'd like to live in the valley and teach, you better marry well. You can see some of the salaries here [1]; $71k for Belmont means give up any dream of owning a home.

[1] http://belmont-ca.patch.com/groups/schools/p/comparing-the-s...

roc8• 12 years ago

The traditional justification is that teachers need to feel free to discuss ideas that social trends or local political whim may disagree with. They may even need to take a Devil's Advocate during a lesson and argue a pretty unpopular position that they don't personally agree and which would sound awfully impolitic out of context.

E.g. To protect them from being fired for reading from a given book. Or teaching evolution. Or teaching sex education. Or covering a topic like communism or socialism in any way other than demonization.

yellowapple5• 12 years ago

By that same logic, though, teachers are then protected from being fired for reading from the Bible, or teaching creationism, or teaching abstinence-only birth control, or covering a topic like vaccination or astrophysics in any way other than demonization.

Tenure isn't the appropriate approach here. Enforcing Constitutional law - like separation of church and state - is far more useful to actually achieve the desired results. If teachers are being fired for teaching actual fact, then they need to be bringing that to the legal system and turn it into a Supreme Court case. This whole "it protects secular teachers" argument is a silly justification for the negative impact California's tenure-fetish has had on students and younger teachers.

pwthornton• 12 years ago

Tenure was designed for higher education and is out of place in K-12. Tenure's purpose is to protect and encourage academic freedom. Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. Since K-12 teachers do not conduct research and follow fairly strict curricula, tenure is merely a union tactic to guarantee employment.

Domenic_S3• 12 years ago

Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research.

That sounds legit, but the best example I can think of is stem cell research. Can you help me out? I'm not an academic so I don't really know that world.

ironchef4• 12 years ago

Probably based off of some of the origins of tenure. WAY back when they used to fire teachers (for example) when they got pregnant. Nowadays it's protection against (for example) teaching evolution in biology class (which isn't popular in some districts) or "Catcher in the Rye", etc. That all being said there's a reasonable list of pros and cons here: http://teachertenure.procon.org/

EDIT: I should qualify I meant when tenure was coming into K-12. It was originally based off of the professors and the boards of trustees in the universities.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

You take away their tenure, you take away their job protection, you are also taking away their need for a union. A union that can cost an hour, two, or more hours of pay per month. That is a lot of money, a lot of money to buy politicians or hysteria.

to start the hysteria train I will trot out... tenure protects the children, protects us from creationist, protects us from bigots, from racists, from all sorts of bad people.

Best thing to ever happen to the teaching profession and it damn well needs to happen at the college level to reign in those costs.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

They only have those benefits because they collectively bargained for them. And yes, if the courts start gutting negotiated benefits, that does hurt unions.

steven777400• 12 years ago

Tenure makes a lot of sense for research university positions. Research can take a long time to be fruitful, and many avenues of research won't pan out at all. Tenure helps enable researchers to focus on various problems instead of being stuck to what will have the most payout in the shortest term.

It's never been quite clear to me why tenure makes sense for instructor positions, either at the college or pre-college level. I say this as someone who was a tenured instructor at a community college for a number of years.

plg• 12 years ago

I guess one answer is the following: that "academic freedom" (which is one of the motivations for tenure, i.e. it protects one's academic freedom) applies not only to research but to teaching activities as well... but again, you're right, in that perhaps this makes sense in a university environment (in which curriculums can easily vary in many ways, and still be valid) but not so much in elementary schools, primary schools, high schools, etc, in which a curriculum is more restricted in its scope, and pre-defined using standards, etc.

opendais27• 12 years ago

It is because of bullshit like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-ban...

"The word "evolution" will be removed from school books in the deep south of the United States under a new proposal."

How much do you want to bet violating such a ban would lead to immediate dismissal without tenure protections?

This is a school administrator that tried to get such a ban passed.

EDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion, I've italicized the word immediate since people seem to think it was irrelevant.

dlss• 12 years ago

I think the courts are a better solution for that problem.

Having a couple "crazy science teachers" with tenure shouldn't even count as a solution IMO - especially if that causes people to be more careful about who they give tenure to...

EDIT: I said "better solution" not "perfect solution". I would love if you speculate about what a perfect solution is though!

w1ntermute2• 12 years ago

Sounds like the solution to that is to make it illegal to ban these topics (and then firmly enforce that law), rather than giving the teachers tenure.

chamblin• 12 years ago

Isn't it just as, if not more, likely that a teacher would i.e. refuse to teach evolution (or even just be generally incompetent) and irremovable because of tenure? How does that improve anything?

eastbayjake5• 12 years ago

The freedom to teach unpopular ideas also includes the freedom to teach that water has feelings and you can change its molecular structure by yelling at it, or that vaccines cause autism, or that global warming is all a bunch of bullshit made up by the liberal media. Pick your poison.

ameister142• 12 years ago

You make a point in a later comment "Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired."

So tenure protects teachers long enough for such a trial to occur. I understand that. But wouldn't a wrongful termination suit do the same? After a couple of these, the State would pass guidelines on hiring and firing so that they don't get sued.

roc8• 12 years ago

Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply threaten/actually fire teachers until the entire staff was agreeable to their desired curriculum.

AnthonyMouse• 12 years ago

The obvious solution there is to not provide administrators with tenure either.

rrss11222• 12 years ago

Something tells me that would qualify as wrongful termination.

ahomescu13• 12 years ago

Sounds like there's some balance to be struck here. I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old, or other crap like that (and I'd agree with you). Preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher seems like an over-reaction.

Alupis2• 12 years ago

I think we've all been there... had some teacher for some class in some grade that made the students wonder "how on earth are you allowed to keep teaching?".

There are many many very good teachers. There are also some very bad teachers who stop caring about the kids.

Tenure currently enables teachers to "coast" and lose enthusiasm to teach and change lives.

Iftheshoefits2• 12 years ago

Teachers who lose enthusiasm don't lose it because one day they wake up and think, "Man, I'm tenured now; fk all y'all I got mine." They lose it because of the vicious, dysfunctional attitudes taken toward teachers. That attitude being the one in which "we" expect teachers to be babysitters, guardians, mentors, and a variety of other things while at the same time facing a relentless assault on their competence, integrity, and wallets (lower pay, less support for classroom materials, etc.).

I put "we" in quotes because, clearly, I don't consider myself part of that group. Teachers, tenured or not, are as much victims as the students in this mess. They're all victims of--and this isn't going to be a popular opinion here, I bet--the very real, very destructive, anti-intellectual, anti-government, and anti-education strains of conservative politics that have increased sway in matters of the governance of education. This isn't a Democrat vs. Republican thing, either; as far as I'm concerned party affiliation is irrelevant (or, if you like, "both sides do it"). It is ideology that matters here. The destructive ideology I just described is the one most responsible for the problems we see in public schools, and that ideology is deeply entrenched in one party and becoming increasingly more entrenched in the other, to the point where the lines blur.

adrr2• 12 years ago

Tenure prevents teachers from getting dismissed for teaching ideas that may not acceptable with the majority opinion. With creationism being pushed in schools, it seems we moving backwards from the progressive made after the scopes trial.

Alupis2• 12 years ago

I think it's the school administration's job to protect teachers from casual termination... not a contract that makes it impossible to get rid of the worst teachers.

eastbayjake5• 12 years ago

At least at the K-12 level, teachers don't have a right to teach their students whatever they feel is appropriate. There are state and national standards -- backed by assessments -- that mandate what teachers should be teaching and measure whether those teachers are doing a good job.

Teachers are employees like any other employee. At my job I don't get to work on whatever I want whenever I disagree with the majority opinion about how my time should be spent, and most companies would be terrible if employees had "tenure" where they could work on whatever they wanted -- including "working on this sandwich before an afternoon nap." (And if that sounds like a straw man, Google around for videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0)

joeclark778• 12 years ago

In theory, university tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think it does confer that as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term".

Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas.

It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think [tenure] does confer [low productivity] as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term".

Perverse incentives are intense in the research community and they're getting worse as the supply/demand imbalance in the academic labor market continues to grow. My experience is that non-tenured professors tend to dramatically overproduce flashy media-bait ("scientific debt," if you will). Tenure is the only mechanism we have to balance that out, which means it's becoming more and more important every day.

It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.

I find teachers far less objectionable as money-funnling mechanisms than the defense and dirty-energy industries.

ahomescu13• 12 years ago

Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas.

As in my other comment, there's a tradeoff here. Tenure could be used to teach Evolution, or it could be used to teach Nazism.

dubya• 12 years ago

Here in Tennessee the legislature's been fighting hard against tenure for years. At my kid's school an alarming number of teachers are leaving after this year, reportedly due to bad evaluations (not public information, unfortunately) with the gung-ho principal and no recourse. The ones leaving are generally well thought of by the parents. It seems that "team player" is weighted a lot higher than teaching ability here.

I don't know that tenure is really the answer, but currently public school teachers are much more at the whim of administrators than college instructors are. It feels like they're trying to drive the teachers away so they can declare the whole public education thing a failure and kill it.

itbeho• 12 years ago

Under state law here, teachers are eligible for tenure after 18 months...

18 months!?! Something is seriously out of whack with employment in education here in California..

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

If my memory of tenure is correct, "eligible" is not the same as "gets". Limited number of tenure slots available, the same way you may not be promoted in the private sector because there aren't enough slots in the next grade.

darksim905• 12 years ago

Agreed. Glad I didn't get an education there.

VikingCoder2• 12 years ago

I wonder when the Supreme Court will rule that life tenure for the Supreme Court justices deprives citizens of their right to justice under the Constitution of the United States of America.

Substantial evidence can be presented that make it clear that the life term of Justices disproportionately affects young, poor, minority, and / or technologically-minded citizens. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.

datapolitical• 12 years ago

One of the beautiful pieces of the Constitution is that it's allowed to contradict itself. The more specific statement wins out (for example, a section banning gay marriage would beat out a section that said that all people were guaranteed equal rights)

VikingCoder2• 12 years ago

And the most beautiful part of the Constitution is the checks and balances. For instance, the Executive branch is supposed to enforce laws from the most generic to the most specific, as you've indicated. However the Supreme Court Justices are supposed to use their brains, and realize that a law banning gay marriage, written into the Constitution or not, is inherently unconstitutional because the Equal Protection Clause takes precedent.

ColinDabritz• 12 years ago

Teacher Tenure is important for similar reasons as lifetime appointments for judges, especially on the academic research side. It certainly has some trade offs, but it protects our freedoms of expression, speech, and thought in a very fundamental way.

Teachers and researchers need to be free from some influences to be able to teach and research unpopular subjects and views. Consider communist teachings during the "red scare" as a relatively recent example.

"Faculty Tenure in Academe: The Evolution, Benefits and Implications of an Important Tradition"

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/lh62/Cameron...

eruditely2• 12 years ago

In California, teachers do a lot of under-handed lw brainwashing of their kids, at least at the high school I went to in the south bay in NorCal. We would always get told pro union agenda's and I to me as a kid(I am just 21 now), all that meant to me was "My nice teachers are getting hurt by X, X is evil!" or at least it seemed to me. I was never aware that some of it was sometimes underhanded union distortion.

Note I have not implied pro/against for any issue. Just when I was made aware of this agenda which I thought was decentralized agony, it shocked me.

yellowapple5• 12 years ago

I grew up in NorCal, too; that was the opposite impression I got. Most of the teachers I had were relatively young, and hadn't been teaching for a very long time; my conversations with them - especially in high school - frequently included mentions of how often they'd be pink-slipped because the teachers' union - dominated by veteran, tenured teachers - would elect for pay raises instead of hiring more teachers. This meant growing class sizes, and the veteran teachers knew it.

We were certainly taught about the environment, how biodiversity is a good thing, etc., but I was hard-pressed to find a teacher that actually agreed with the teachers' union, and unions in general were typically portrayed in a neutral light at best.

eruditely2• 12 years ago

I guess my perception is somewhat malformed due to memories, but your experiences line up with mine. I guess the f(x)(explanation) for the x I gave was incorrect.

I do remember a lot of my teachers being pink slipped, but I also do remember all the strikes, all the specific agenda pushing. It was covert in the sense that young kids do not have such sharp anti-manipulation senses formed.

parker94• 12 years ago

If you've ever watched the documentary "Waiting for Superman" you'll see exactly why tenure shouldn't be allowed in public schools.

jongraehl• 12 years ago

If teaching in California public schools is messed up, what U.S. state is good for teachers?

eastbayjake5• 12 years ago

Former Mississippi high school science teacher here.

New Hampshire seems great -- affluent state with high quality of life, relatively high teacher pay, educated population, lots of small and culturally-homogenous communities. (Multicultural education in poor areas is a noble and worthy challenge, but it's ridiculously stressful and often demoralizing. I think teaching a chemistry class in a 99% African-American public high school in Mississippi does more good for society, but the chemistry teacher in an affluent district in New Hampshire is probably less stressed about student achievement and job security.)

If thick New England accents and bone-biting winters aren't your bag, Colorado has similar advantages (affluence, high quality of life, educated population) but a more diverse population, more notoriety for education innovation, and more opportunities to serve traditionally underserved communities.

PS - I took this question's "good for teachers" to mean "enjoying your profession" and not "do as little work as possible for as much money as possible." If you meant the latter, the answer is "The Bronx".

California Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional

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