Donors to Education Seek Ways to End Teacher Tenure
October 18, 2010, 1:02 pm
Amelia Island, Fla.
For many donors who want to improve the education system, the question isn’t whether teacher tenure needs to be abolished but how to do so.
In a session at the Philanthropy Roundtable’s annual conference entitled “How to End Teacher Tenure,” nonprofit leaders discussed how philanthropic dollars could be spent to help get rid of teacher tenure, which protects teachers from arbitrary dismissal.
Critics of tenure for public schoolteachers argue that it has made removing bad teachers far too difficult, if not impossible.
Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit in Brooklyn, N.Y., that recruits and trains teachers to work in needy schools, said that making teachers more accountable won’t happen until there are good data to evaluate teacher performance. Collecting such data have been a focus of his organization and others.
“If we want to change the culture and make it more performance-oriented, the key point is that we have to generate information about performance that means something,” he said. ”Until we have real information on teacher performance that we can employ in this conversation, we’re just arguing with one another and chasing our tail.”
