Lily Eskelsen Garcia talks to Al Jazeera
Eskelsen Garcia is the president-elect of the National Education Association, a union of 3 million educators
Ray Suarez: Recently in Vergara v. California the teachers' unions defending the notion of tenure were handed a big defeat in a California court. What's more interesting is who was lined up on the side of Vergara, a young California schoolgirl who was the petitioner: Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. If you believe what you read, the Democrats are in lockstep with the NEA, but here's the secretary of education saying, "No, no, taking down teacher tenure in California, the largest single state-administered system in the country — that's a good thing."
Lily Eskelsen Garcia: Tenure is making sure that a good teacher cannot be fired. Tenure is due process. Most states like mine, in Utah, we don't even use the word "tenure." After a probationary period, after you've met your performance expectations and you've had good evaluations, when you get to that level that says now you have tenure, it simply means if you are going to be fired, you get two things. You get to know why you're being fired, and if you believe you're being fired unfairly, you get a chance to defend yourself in front of a hearing officer.
Every state has different timelines of exactly how those two things play out. Every state should always be looking at are those timelines fair? Are you protecting someone who's incompetent while you're trying to protect the people who are doing their job well and being treated unfairly? So you always have to weigh that.
It's interesting that you say that the system that they had in California was there to protect good teachers from losing their jobs because the way the public often sees it is that these systems protect bad teachers by making it really hard to fire.
In Utah it doesn't take years. It takes months. If you have someone who truly is not doing their job or can't do their job, there are steps that you take. There are very clear steps. And they lead to a conclusion very quickly. That should always be the case. But there should always be due process. There's always going to be someone who's unhappy with a kid's grade, you didn't make the team, the way a child might've been disciplined. Most teachers are not going get in trouble. They just want what they need to do their jobs.
One of the hottest ideas in American education right now is that if a teacher is effective, I should be able to test his or her children, and their effectiveness as a teacher will show because the kids know math, science, English. Does the NEA support performance-based compensation that's judged by testing children?
No, absolutely not. I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever, not just on a practical level but on any study it shows wild fluctuations of things like test scores. That's what it usually comes down to when someone says performance or merit pay, when you go, "And how would you judge Ray against Lily, these two teachers? Oh, well, we would just look at their kids' standardized tests because …"
‘If you’ve ever been in a room with actual human-type children, whether you’re the parent or the teacher or the grandmother or grandfather, you understand that kids learn in very different ways.’
Lily Eskelsen Garcia
If you don't know how to do division after three months of learning division, wouldn't I know that teacher A is better than teacher B if the kids know division?
Let's take that. Because that's exactly what it's based on. If this child needs to know their times tables and she needs to know her times tables and you practiced your times tables and here's a class of again 39 kids and if this many kids