Delaying teacher tenure for education's good.

In its Jan. 2, 2006, issue, New York Magazine, whose views normally parallel those of the political left, carried a column by political commentator Joe Klein praising California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his efforts to reform California politics and public education by delaying the granting of teacher tenure from two years to five years.

We know what happened to that referendum and the governor's poll numbers --down, down, down! The state's unions beat it and him. It was another lost opportunity to recognize the changing world of American education.

Though I totally disagree with one-dimensional, high-stakes testing and believe strongly in multiple assessments, the politics of our decade is clearly one of accountability through test scores. No Child Left Behind, local/state/national politics, the business community and international competition won't permit us to avoid placing "results" at the top of how we are evaluated and how we evaluate, our staff.

As such, lifetime teacher and administrator tenure cannot continue in its current form.

The practice of granting lifetime tenure, after a probationary period as brief as two or three years, is an anachronism. Schools need significantly more time to observe and evaluate their new teachers' effectiveness, and the effective ness, of new principals in leading schools to higher achievement can't be judged in only three years.

While we expect our teachers and administrators to prepare students to be emotionally, psychologically and socially healthy contributors to the future of our American democracy, as a country we now emphasize students' academic preparation to meet the internationally competitive world they will inhabit. Effectiveness has become defined as measurable student success.

And, that's not all bad.

A Sorting Process

Until recently, teaching and learning were measured solely through the subjective lenses of the observer. The sum of assessment of a teacher's effectiveness consisted of the teacher's own perception of her or his performance, the supervisor's observation of the teacher inside the classroom and any parent comments.

As professionals, we are beginning to acknowledge that student learning is more influenced by teacher qualities (experience, educational credentials, certifications, licensure scores) and by teacher effectiveness than by class size or per-pupil expenditure. Yes, all students are entitled to comprehensive curricula and updated textbooks, as well as modern classroom technology and schools free from health code and safety violations, all of which cost money. But, as statisticians say, these conditions are adequate but not sufficient to ensure all students have a comparable opportunity to learn.

Historically, students were placed in different classes and courses (college bound versus vocational) and assessed by different tests. Thus, there was no way to establish if all students were truly learning. The sorting and tracking system, accompanied by low expectations, were the norm for all too many students.

In my first year as a superintendent, I asked a 7th grader why he was leaving school without books (and presumably no homework) at the end of the school day. He immediately responded that he was in a modified class, and his teacher didn't trust the students to not lose their books. The students hadn't been assigned any homework because the teacher didn't expect anyone to do it!

Premature Decisions

So, what makes for an effective teacher?

It takes excellent collegial mentoring, formal supervision by knowledgeable professionals, trial and error, experiences with diverse students and populations of students, preparing and redoing scores of lesson plans, devising strategies for integrating technology and analyzing student test results to identify learning gaps for a newly minted college graduate to become an effective teacher.

These experiences are as much an art as a science and thus take time to be perfected.

They cannot be learned and then implemented within three years. But, that's all the time we're given by New York state--and in California my colleagues have only two years--to decide whether a teacher should receive lifetime tenure.

In my school district, we now place greater emphasis on student test scores prior to making a tenure decision. We've already faced a few situations where all the subjective factors felt right, only to then learn the probationary teacher's students performed miserably on the year-end state test and far worse than colleagues with a comparable class composition.

Grant or deny tenure? What if students do well one year and poorly the next? It's unfair to the new teacher, as well as the community that will have that teacher on its payroll for the next 30 years, to fire or grant tenure with such limited information.

The traditional reasons that justify the public policy of awarding tenure are still powerful; thus the answer is not to eliminate tenure but to extend the probationary period to five or six years.

Marc Bernstein is superintendent of the Valley Stream Central High School District, 1 Kent Road, Valley Stream, NY 11580. E-mail: [e-mail]