PD Editorial: Room for a compromise on schools

In June, a Los Angeles judge invalidated large portions of California’s teacher tenure and dismissal laws.

Judge Rolf M. Treu ruled that tenure and seniority protections make it difficult to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. Bad teachers, he said, violate a right to quality education enshrined in the state constitution. He also concluded that poor and minority students are disproportionately affected.

“The evidence is compelling,” Treu wrote in his decision. “Indeed it shocks the conscience.”

What happened next was predictable. The teachers unions appealed the decision, joined by the state. They’re waiting for a court date, and a final decision could be years away. With the main event on hold, the primary combatants - teachers unions and reform groups - allied themselves with like-minded candidates in the November election.

Something unexpected happened, too. A survey of California teachers measured their views on tenure and seniority. The results deserve serious consideration.

Indeed, the survey points toward a compromise rather than a legal and political war of attrition that ignores the most important - and most frequently overlooked - constituency in this withering fight among grownups: children.

The online survey of 506 public school teachers, sponsored by a Boston-based nonprofit called Teach Plus and conducted in December by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, found that teachers value tenure and job protections. That’s not surprising.

But maybe this is: A substantial majority of teachers believes that tenure comes too quickly and without adequate assessment of on-the-job performance. Most teachers also believe that layoffs shouldn’t be determined by seniority alone. And most teachers believe that teachers should play a role in assessing classroom effectiveness and that more needs to be done to help teachers improve.

What stands out here is nuance, something that’s often missing in litigation and political campaigns.

For instance, slightly more than four out of five teachers said they value tenure protections. But more than half believe that tenure is granted to ineffective teachers, and 69 percent said they have seen instances in which tenure prevented the removal of an ineffective teacher. Two-thirds say there are ineffective teachers at their present school, and 70 percent said it should take no more than two years to fire an incompetent teacher.

Two-thirds of teachers believe it should take three to five years to earn tenure. In California, it often takes less than two years. More than 90 percent of teachers believe they should be required to demonstrate classroom effectiveness to earn tenure. And 71 percent said classroom effectiveness should be a factor in layoff decisions, which are now driven by seniority alone.

Teachers believe they should have a role in assessing effectiveness. Seventy-five percent believe qualified teachers should play a role in tenure decisions, and 75 percent said it is possible to develop a fair method of evaluating teachers.

Taken together, the survey finds that teachers, parents and reformers have similar goals, and that teachers see many of the same shortcomings that Treu found after a two-month trial last year. The question now is the same as it was after the court ruling: Are the warring parties willing to build on their areas of agreement, or is this battle destined to drag on for years in the courts?

You can see the Teach Plus survey results at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1501270-teacher-vergara-teachplussurvey011215.html