Opinions
Opinion: Myth of teacher tenure
- Details
- By Jack Minore
- Thursday, April 07, 2011
- Hits: 2475
In recent months there have many attacks on teacher tenure. Most have been based on false premises. Tenure is not a guarantee of a job. It only guarantees a process. And about 90 percent of all teacher firings are upheld by the Teacher Tenure Commission. It is not the teachers who fail — it is the failure of administrators to do their job that keeps the bad teachers employed.
Let me give you an example — a relatively extreme case, but one that is replicated time and again in Flint and in other districts. We had a really bad teacher. Not just a lazy or mildly incompetent one, but a really bad teacher. Our teacher colleagues knew it — but they were powerless.
Susie, we'll call her, taught for nine years in Flint. She was transferred from school to school eight times. I was in the office of an elementary principal when he received a call from her previous principal.
"What the hell were you thinking when you transferred Susie to me?" the principal asked.
I could actually hear her former principal laugh as he replied, "I sure didn't want that bitch at my school! So I gave her a good evaluation and transferred her."
Finally, a responsible principal actually evaluated her. He followed all the appropriate steps.
He visited her classroom. He cited problems. He provided some steps for help. He re-evaluated her three times. And, since she didn't improve, he fired her. The union, knowing how bad she was, actually appreciated the principal.
But, when she appealed, we had an obligation to "defend" her. We made sure that all the appropriate steps had been followed. They had been. But Susie pointed to her nine years of good evaluations by eight different principals and added that she had a tough previous year because her mother had died the previous fall.
The Tenure Commission, citing the death of her mother and her history of good evaluations, ordered her reinstated.
Our union rep, on returning from the tenure hearing, commented, "Damn it, we won!" He was less than pleased.
So Susie went back to the same school and the same principal who had fired her before. He repeated the process, carefully adhering to the contract and the steps required for an appropriate evaluation. He fired her again.
This time it stuck.
But this clearly incompetent teacher was given tenure and kept in the classroom only because principals failed to do their job. Finally, one principal did his job and the system was rid of a clearly incompetent teacher.
I taught for 31 years under seven different principals. Only three ever really evaluated me during about seven of my 31 years. In one case, even before I had tenure, the principal entered my room for the first time to hand me my evaluation.
"How," I asked, "could you be giving me this glowing evaluation when you have never been in my classroom?"
"Well," he responded, "I walked down the hall and your room was quiet, so that was good enough for me."
When I tell these stories to teachers everywhere, I get the same kind of story in return. Bad teachers should be fired. They can be if evaluators simply do their job.
I repeat, about 90 percent of all firings are upheld by the Tenure Commission. Most of the other 10 percent are the "Susie cases."
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I invite you to e-mail me if you would like to comment, seek clarification, complain, etc. I'm at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . But don't bother to e-mail me if you are unwilling to identify yourself by name and address, or at least, neighborhood. If you're unwilling to identify yourself, I will delete them automatically. I'm insisting on you identifying yourselves because I really don't want to receive the same kind of "idiot talk" that seems to fill the Flint Journal blogs.) — Jack.
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Jack Minore is a retired teacher, former long-serving city councilperson, former legislator and active in a number of political and environmental groups — notably the Flint River Watershed Coalition and Friends of the Flint River Trail. Jack was in the original group that formed East Village Magazine.
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