Teacher survey: Change tenure, layoff laws
January 13, 2015 | By John Fensterwald | 1 Comment
Gov. Jerry Brown said last week he’s open to changing tenure and other teacher employment laws at issue in the Vergara v. State of California lawsuit, and most teachers in a new survey say they want to change them, too.
Most of the 506 public school district teachers who answered the online questionnaire, which was released Monday, said they favor lengthening how long it takes for teachers to receive tenure and making job effectiveness, not just seniority, a factor in layoff decisions. They also support a less drawn-out process for dismissing poor-performing teachers – as long as teachers have an opportunity to improve and their peers are involved in evaluating them.
Teach Plus, a national organization of teachers, funded the survey, which was conducted by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, an independent opinion research firm with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The survey responses are more nuanced than the positions of the unions that represent them – the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. Both unions are defendants in the Vergara lawsuit, which claims laws regarding teacher tenure, firing and layoffs disproportionately hurt poor and minority children, saddling them with the state’s worst-performing teachers. Last year, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu agreed with the plaintiffs and ruled the laws unconstitutional. The two unions have filed an appeal.
“The evidence at trial overwhelmingly showed that these statutes promote and support important public interests like attracting and retaining qualified teachers for California public schools while providing objective, fair, and transparent procedures in the event of economic layoffs,” the unions stated in announcing their appeal.
The views of teachers in the survey offer a path to compromise, “a ‘third way’ between reformer calls to throw out all teacher job protections and old-guard calls to preserve virtually all elements of the current system,” Teach Plus, which has called for changing the laws challenged in the Vergara lawsuit, said in its summary of the teacher survey.
The survey included a cross-section of new and veteran teachers from various grade levels. Its four main findings, according to a Teach Plus summary, are:
Teachers highly value tenure but support making it more performance-based, granted after a longer period than two years on the job under current law. Five years, on average, would be the appropriate length of time, the respondents said.
- 81 percent said tenure is important to them personally;
- 55 percent worked at a school where tenure protected an effective teacher from dismissal;
- 69 percent said tenure protected an ineffective colleague who should have been dismissed but wasn’t;
- 15 percent said tenure in two years or less was appropriate;
- 75 percent said qualified teachers should play some role in tenure decisions.
Teachers believe that classroom performance should be an important element in any layoff decision.
- 71 percent said layoff decisions should be based partly or entirely on classroom performance; 24 percent supported basing layoff decisions almost entirely on seniority;
- 74 percent worked at a school where an effective teacher was laid off because of a lack of seniority.
The current system needs to better support struggling teachers while setting a time frame for firing persistently inTeacher survey: Change tenure, layoff laws | EdSource: