Teacher Tenure Changes Are Vital to Lasting School Reform

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) handed teacher unions across the country a gift on April 15 when he vetoed perhaps the most transformative school reform bill any state has passed in a decade. But the short-term political ambitions of a fading U.S. Senate candidate should not derail the vital work of overhauling how teachers are hired, paid, evaluated, and, if necessary, fired in this country.

The teacher unions will howl, but their interests do not always coincide with those of taxpayers, parents, and students. In this case, they’re in diametric opposition.

Ending lifetime tenure for new teachers, overhauling certification rules, paying excellent teachers higher wages, and setting aside millions of dollars to pay instructors with skills in high demand are just the sort of changes that would constitute lasting education reform. The bill Crist vetoed would have done all of those things, and he had said he would sign it. But Crist, who is behind in the polls in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, decided to placate powerful opponents of reform in hopes of blunting their opposition.

Crist’s veto has national implications. Several other states and major urban school districts, including New York City, Detroit, Colorado, and Tennessee, are debating reform proposals resembling Florida’s—and teacher unions are fighting back. Colorado’s teacher unions vowed to withhold their “buy-in” from the Rocky Mountain State’s $175 million Race to the Top application if the legislature passes Senate Bill 191, which would strip teachers of tenure if they fail to meet performance standards weighted by student academic-growth data. The Colorado Senate Education Committee passed the bill April 23.

It’s a scandalous fact that teachers in most states can earn lifetime tenure after three years of “satisfactory” performance evaluations. As the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress shows, reading scores among U.S. 4th graders haven’t improved, and among 8th graders they have improved only slightly, since 2007. The current “satisfactory” standard is anything but.

Those of us who work outside of a government setting understand our paychecks will be determined at least in part by the quality of our performance. Even companies without bonus pools find ways to reward their best workers.

But not public education. The current teacher compensation system lets excellence go unrewarded and punishes innovation. Consider the late Jaime Escalante, who repeatedly ran afoul of union rules while building his highly successful Advanced Placement Calculus program at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, California. Escalante wanted larger classes than his union contract allowed, and he came to work earlier and stayed later than others—habits private industry rewards but union clock-watchers deplore.

Escalante’s impatience with union strictures was one element of his success and that of his students. It was also a big reason for his departure from Garfield in 1991.

What incentive, other than the gratitude of her students, does a great teacher have to boost her performance when her peer in the classroom next door is simply marking time until the end of the year—or retirement—and receiving the same annual raise? Imagine what a system that rewarded the Escalantes of the world could do.

Some teachers object that ending tenure and implementing merit pay would penalize those saddled with disruptive or special-needs students. But continuing to reward ineffective teachers so that a few can babysit kids they’ve written off as “unteachable” is not the solution.

A better approach is described in another bill Florida lawmakers passed with solid bipartisan support, and Crist signed on April 22. SB 2126 expands the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program to provide more private scholarships to low-income and minority students. Seven other states, including Arizona, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, have similar tax credit scholarship programs aimed at fostering choice and competition. It’s a start.

The truth is, a well-designed, well-administered system of teacher rewards can work wonders in tandem with a system that gives parents real choice about where to send their kids to school. These are modest but vital steps toward building a system that frees parents and children to choose the excellent education so many of them want, not the mediocre or bad schooling they too often get.

Ben Boychuk (bboychuk@heartland.org) is managing editor of School Reform News.