Viewpoints: Eliminating teacher tenure will not improve public education
Published: Sunday, Jun. 22, 2014 - 12:00 am
Eliminating job security for teachers is not going to attract better teachers or do much to improve the quality of public education. If you’ve shopped at a retail store or flown on any major airline, you know that some employees are excellent and some are not, but the difference between the good employees and the bad ones is not in who has job security. Retail and restaurant employees can typically be fired for no reason; airline employees, who are unionized, typically cannot. So why do so many critics of public education assume that eliminating job security for teachers would improve the quality of education?
A California trial judge decided this month that the poor quality of some California schools was the result of job security for teachers and therefore invalidated several provisions of the California Education Code. In a brief 15-page opinion in Vergara v. California, Judge Rolf Treu held unconstitutional a state law that requires schools to evaluate teachers for job security in the second year of employment, a provision that gives more senior teachers preference over junior teachers in layoffs, and the process schools must follow to fire a teacher.
Vergara was a test case initiated and funded by a Silicon Valley millionaire, and was litigated by large firm corporate lawyers with no particular expertise in education law and policy. They sued the state education officials and agencies along with three school districts in Oakland, Los Angeles and San Jose, challenging a wide array of state laws protecting teachers against arbitrary decisions in retention and job assignment.
Treu’s opinion found that between 1 and 3 percent of teachers in California are grossly ineffective. Based on that, he concluded that job security for teachers violates the California Constitution.
The reasoning of the opinion is as flawed as the result is troubling. If job security is the cause of poor quality teachers, what accounts for the overwhelming majority of California public school teachers who are good or excellent? As Treu’s opinion notes, several states have no statutory jobViewpoints: Eliminating teacher tenure will not improve public education - Viewpoints - The Sacramento Bee: