The Michigan legislature is finally in the process of setting a new standard with the current teacher tenure reform bill. The House passed the bill this past week and it is now up to the Michigan Senate to move it forward to Governor Rick Snyder. The teachers have held the upper hand for quite some time now and finally some of the focus is shifting back to the students.
The bill would lengthen the time for earning tenure from four years to five. However, “top teachers” can earn it faster. Another part of the bill would allow a school district to put a teacher on probation after two consecutive years for sub-par evaluations (based partly on the student success rate). However, this probation is only the first step toward dismissal, and with unions and other regulations in place, the questions have to be asked: how long the dismissal will actually take and how much time do we actually have?
Another big part of the bill, and arguably the most significant, is that school districts will now no longer be restricted in assigning or laying off teachers simply because of seniority. While you can take this for what it’s worth, the direction with the most impact is quality. By allowing a school district to shift around their teachers, they actually have the capability to provide their students with a quality education, not just the quantity or “seniority” that may or may not meet bare minimum standards.
I personally think that this is a move in the right direction. While the Michigan Education Association, teachers unions and other organizations serve their purpose, their effect is lost when the quality education disappears. I don’t care how long you’ve been there, what your resume looks like, or how many kids you’ve taught in your career, if you’re not educating kids to the highest level possible, you don’t deserve your job. Just as with any job, if you’re only doing half the work, working half the time, or half-assing everything you do, you should be fired – it’s no different when it comes to education.
The United States used to be globally ranked as #1 in the world in education for many decades… now we’re down to #14 in reading, #17 in science and #25 for mathematics. Are you kidding me? On top of that, out of the 34 ranked OECD countries, the United States ranked third from the bottom in the percentage of 15-year-olds who are enrolled in school, ahead of only Mexico and Turkey!
Take a stand. Move in the right direction. Educate your kids, call your school boards, and push your local politicians to increase effective educational spending. I urge you.
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Tagged with: education, Governor Rick Snyder, michigan, reform, teachers, tenure, unions
The entire point of teacher tenure is to provide teachers the freedom to teach, without fear of dismissal for rocking the boat a bit. History is filled with examples of great teachers being punished for what/how they taught. For example, Galileo Galilei was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life for teaching that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and Socrates was sentenced to drink hemlock (death sentence) for his teachings that supposedly corrupted people. While teachers today don’t face such threats for teaching, their jobs are still at risk if they anger someone in power. Tenure helps to protect them from that. Sadly, it also protects teachers who fail to perform, intentionally mislead, or commit other forms of misconduct. We can’t simply fire teacher for not “performing well,” however, as performance is subjective. A teacher may really inspire students and teach them about life and ethics and other necessities, but still be seen as a poor teacher based on standardized test scores. If you threaten a teacher’s job for the students not getting good standardized test scores, then you end up with people who teach only what is on the test, and nothing deeper or outside of the boundaries of the test. As it stands the government involvement with test score requirements and funding restrictions have turned our kids into robots, spewing exactly what they were instructed. They end up unable to think, understand, reason, critique, and question. I’m not sure what the solution is, but teachers need protection to enable them to teach, while still being able to be dismissed for gross misconduct. It’s bad enough as it is, we don’t need to make the students even more like zombies and robots. Brainlessly spewing nonsense that they’re regurgitating word for word without a thought of questioning what is being taught to them. Perhaps we should get the government out of schools, and let schools succeed or fail on their own. Thoughts?
I agree with most of what you said but you have to keep a few things in mind. Letting a child, especially at a younger age, “go off and think on their own,” for lack of better words, can also be detrimental to their education. They need guidance the entire way, especially in the middle school and high school years. That being said, I think having more openness when it comes to creativity is extremely important at an even younger age, elementary and earlier, while the receptiveness of their “deeper thought” freedom should be heightened in the college years and later. Now, of course everyone matures at different rates so those are just my initial thoughts/guidelines for such a topic, but I think it can hold true for the most part.
As for the government involvement, that’s one of the things that make our country so great – the ability to privatize sectors like education. While one could make the argument that a private school may have a “close minded” approach to education depending on the religious background, moral standards, etc., I don’t think the public schools are doing it any better. Quite frankly I would like to see every organization in every sector be allowed to succeed or fail on their own. Then again, where might we be today without GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, AIG, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc. etc. etc. A better place? Possibly. A worse place? Potentially. It again begs the question, how “free” really is this country?