More Thoughts on Teacher Polls, Tenure, and School Funding
Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers arenot unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states).
Critics of tenure will say the system shouldn't exist at all. But it takes a long time to shift opinion within a profession, and the polls show teachers have already evolved significantly. What's more, huge policy changes on tenure are already underway. Since 2009, the majority of states passed legislation significantly weakening tenure protections. In Colorado, for example, teachers will lose their seniority protections if they receive a bad performance evaluation two years in a row.
The big remaining question is how these new evaluations will work, and teachers are worried student
Critics of tenure will say the system shouldn't exist at all. But it takes a long time to shift opinion within a profession, and the polls show teachers have already evolved significantly. What's more, huge policy changes on tenure are already underway. Since 2009, the majority of states passed legislation significantly weakening tenure protections. In Colorado, for example, teachers will lose their seniority protections if they receive a bad performance evaluation two years in a row.
The big remaining question is how these new evaluations will work, and teachers are worried student