A School Chief Takes On Tenure, Stirring a Fight

[n2doc]

By SAM DILLON
Published: November 12, 2008
WASHINGTON — Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire.

So Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure.

Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Ms. Rhee’s bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers’ Union has divided over whether to embrace it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary firing.

“If Michelle Rhee were to get what she is demanding,” said Allan R. Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation, “it would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan change.”

Last month, Ms. Rhee said she could no longer wait for a union response to her proposal, first outlined last summer, and announced an effort to identify and fire ineffective teachers, including those with tenure. The union is mobilizing to protect members, and the nation’s capital is bracing for what could be a wrenching labor struggle.

Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal.

Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay increases but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more-junior teachers if their school closes or undergoes an overhaul. If they were not hired by another school, their only options would be early retirement, a buyout or eventual dismissal.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/education/13tenure.html

[Teaser]

1. eh, I just wish some profs would retire...

give us poor postdocs a chance.


fuck academia.

(although this article is about secondary school, the same principles apply).

[n2doc]

2. To me, bigger problem is the pool isn't growing

We have Universities content to increase student levels by hiring "lecturers" at poverty wages, discarding them at will. We have funding agencies with so few funds relative to the pool of applicants that getting a grant is largely luck or who you know. And these same Universities and Agencies still push for training more and more Ph. D. students! It is idiotic and a waste of resources. We should not be training people in areas with large pools of "permanent" postdocs.

I have a non-tenured (and non-tenurable) academic job. It would be fine except that there is little margin for error or pursuit of cutting edge science.

[Teaser]

3. I'm part of the problem

'hiring "lecturers" at poverty wages'

That's me. I've been trying to build my teaching cred through this. I think all I'm doing is helping the universities shaft someone else.

Seriously, this line of work has got me seriously down.

I could do better science in my basement.

[Nevernose]

4. I'd jump at this opportunity

I'm not worried about my supervisor(s) picking on me for the wrong reasons, I'm a damn good teacher, and I'm broke.

Of course, in most districts you can hear gripes about administration. And that's the purpose of tenure -- to protect good teachers from bad administrators. My district is especially bad about this. "Notorious" might be a good word for it. My district has a higher rate of turnover than average in a field with an already high rate of turnover (one could use the word "notorious" again), and one of the biggest reasons cited is bad administration. It's like a cross between Dilbert and The Office with a liberal seasoning of the Peter Principle, all baked in a government funded oven. I think many districts, if they really want to see a change for the better, need to start by eliminating administrators. Then they can work on the bureaucracy, followed by a policy of making decisions for pedagogical reasons and not political reasons.

I can dream, can't I?