How Much Do Reformers Think Job Security Is Worth To Teachers?
A couple of weeks back at This Week in Education I tried to explain why the Vergara decision in California doesn’t have easily-predictable major consequences, even if you hand-wave away all of the inevitable legal wrangling and assume tenure and seniority rules for teachers do end up changing significantly. Partisans really don’t like thinking – or at least talking – about trade-offs1 but they almost always matter in the long-term.The upshot is that, even if you operate with an extremely naive model in which only student achievement outcomes matter, it’s not obvious that tenure reform2will have large net benefits:
There will probably be some good effects and some bad effects of tenure reform, and much depends exactly on how the tenure rules are changed and how the state, districts, and schools respond. For example, will districts raise salaries in response to limitations on tenure? Will administrators find work-arounds to reduce energy spent on evaluations?As a result, it’s hard to know which effects, if any, will dominate in the long-term. They may largely cancel each other out.
One of the central tensions for reformers when it comes to improving teacher quality is that on the one hand they believe teachers are fighting desperately for excessive job security but also, on the other hand, that you can substantially reduce that job security without making teaching significantly less attractive.
In theory this is not impossible. Making it work, however, requires admitting that job security is a benefit for teachers and that taking it away will - all else equal - make being a teacher less appealing.
How much less appealing? I think it’s very hard to say, but via Tyler Cowen, Lee How Much Do Reformers Think Job Security Is Worth To Teachers? | Paul Bruno:
