Transcribo a continuación la nota circualada en estos días por el colega Jeff Puryear, Co-director del PREAL, sobre un tema de indudable interés, e intenso debate, entre nosotros: la facultad de los directivos escolares de despedir un porcentaje de profesores de bajo desempeño. ¿Có se discute el tema en los EE.UU? Que posiciones están adoptando demócratas y republicanos?
Varios políticos en los EEUU están tomando pasos para reformar u eliminar la permanencia de los docentes en la educación pública. Dichos esfuerzos llaman la atención debido a que el tema de la permanencia, un tema sagrado para los sindicatos de docentes, nunca ha sido confrontado seriamente. Los esfuerzos recientes han sido estimulados en parte por el Presidente Obama y su mensaje sobre la medición y premiación del rendimiento eficaz de los docentes. Los gobernadores Republicanos de al menos cinco estados, tanto como el alcalde de Nueva York, han propuesto reformar o eliminar la permanencia, en parte como una respuesta a las crisis presupuestarias estatales. Las quejas sobre la permanencia se centran en lo difícil que es despedir a docentes malos o incompetentes. Los sindicatos han respondido que “si el problema más grave, como algunos dicen, es que tenemos demasiados docentes incompetentes y que no pueden ser despedidos, sugeriría que su sistema de reclutamiento, contratación y evaluación no funciona.”
Nadie sugiere que la mayoría de los docentes son incompetentes, pero un porcentaje pequeño de docentes malos puede perjudicar a muchos estudiantes – particularmente los de familias pobres. El economista de Stanford University, Eric Hanushek, sugiere que si el 6-10% de los docentes de más bajo rendimiento fueran reemplazados por docentes de rendimiento promedio, “los niveles de aprendizaje estudiantil en Estados Unidos irían de ‘debajo del promedio’ en comparación con otros países a entre los mejores.”
Cabe destacar que el debate sobre este tema es cada vez más substantivo y apolítico. Muchos estados quieren basar tanto el despido de docentes – así como incrementos salariales y bonos – en evaluaciones rigurosas sobre rendimiento, en vez de basarse sólo en antigüedad. ”Existe una apertura a la confrontación de estos temas que nunca hemos visto antes,” dijo Michelle Rhee en el siguiente artículo de Time Magazine, mencionando a varios Demócratas conocidos que también se han sumado a la causa de reformar la permanencia docente.
Abajo compartimos algunos artículos que cubren esta tendencia en los EEUU:
· Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade – Andrew J. Rotherham, Time Magazine
· G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure – Trip Gabriel and Sam Dillon, New York Times
· Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary? – Alan Greenblatt, NPR
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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2044529,00.html
Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade
By Andrew J. Rotherham
TIME MAGAZINE
Education eyes were on Washington this week to see what President Obama would say about schools in his State of the Union address. But just as in 2010, if you really want to follow the action on education reform, it’s better to look toward the states. All the new governors (29), education chiefs (18 new ones elected or appointed since November) and legislators (nearly 1,600) mean things are more fluid in the states, where teacher tenure is becoming a major flash point. Florida and New Jersey are considering pretty much ending tenure altogether. And while those states may be ground zero for tenure battles, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania are also considering significant changes.
Quick primer: When people refer to tenure for public-school teachers, what they’re really talking about is a set of rules and regulations outlining due process for teachers accused of misconduct or poor performance. The elaborate rules often make it nearly impossible to fire a teacher. Joel Klein, who recently stepped down as New York City schools chancellor, has pointed out that death-penalty cases can be resolved faster than teacher-misconduct cases. In some places, the due-process rules are part of collective-bargaining agreements, and in others they’re state law. In either case, there is a consensus among education reformers and some teachers’-union leaders that the rules need to be changed and the process streamlined. The contentious debate tends to be about how to modify what constitutes due process — as negotiators did in a landmark teachers’ contract in the District of Columbia in 2009 — rather than get rid of it altogether. (See “States’ Rights and States’ Wrongs on School Reform.”)
But before every teacher reading this column starts shaking his or her head, it’s worth noting that most teachers are not incompetent or dangerous and that, as a group, they have been unfairly maligned in recent coverage of the tenure issue. But with more than 3.2 million teachers in the U.S., even a small percentage of lousy ones adds up to a lot of students’ being shortchanged — or worse. Today there are simply too few teaching licenses being revoked, unless you somehow believe that there are far fewer incompetent teachers than there are incompetent lawyers or doctors who are being removed from their professions. The reality is that because it is far easier to encourage teachers to move to another school or district instead of trying to formally remove them from yours, sometimes people who are not only not good at teaching but actually dangerous to children bounce from one school to the next.
That phenomenon highlights a second problem with current practices. Whatever process is in place will be meaningless absent a culture that values excellence and differentiates among teaching performances. A 2009 report by the New Teacher Project looked at teacher evaluation across the country and found that less than 1% of teachers were rated unsatisfactory. Given the dismal performance of many schools, such ratings defy common sense. I mention this study because too often the blame is placed on teachers’ unions for protecting bad teachers. But ineffective administrators are a big part of the problem too.
Tenure rules are hard to change for a few reasons. For starters, teachers are understandably concerned that absent today’s rules, they won’t be treated fairly by administrators. On one level, their fears are overblown because a variety of federal and state laws protect workers from unfair and discriminatory practices. But neither are teachers’ concerns groundless, since public education is not exactly a hotbed of great management. Moreover, union leaders are elected, so it’s in their interest to resist changes that risk their members’ job security. And truth be told, these fights are a great way to fire up membership. (See TIME’s special on what makes a school great.)
All of the above helps explain why recent efforts to reform tenure have been so disappointing. Klein of New York City tried to address that district’s cumbersome due-process rules by giving principals more lawyers to help them navigate the system. That’s a solution only the American Bar Association might view as a good one.
Another less-than-satisfying attempt at tenure reform: on Jan. 21, at the request of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Kenneth Feinberg — the highly regarded attorney who handled the settlements after the Sept. 11 attacks and the massacre at Virginia Tech — released a plan to expedite dismissals in cases of misconduct. Unfortunately, while his proposal adds some specificity to the vague standards for what constitutes misconduct, it does little to streamline the process, which can often take years to resolve cases.
So does this mean we’re basically stuck with the status quo?
No. The horror stories of multiyear dismissal processes — even when teachers’ conduct is clearly inappropriate — as well as the growing awareness that today’s measures are weak are fueling an appetite for change. There are two options being debated. One is to make achieving tenure a high bar so that it signifies not just the amount of time served but a performance standard that comes with monetary and other recognition. (When a Public Agenda survey in 2003 asked teachers if tenure was a sign of hard work and performance, 58% said it was not.) Several states that won federal Race to the Top grants last year include elements of this idea. (Comment on this story.)
A more politically popular option is the model that Florida and a few other states are considering: doing away with tenure altogether and giving teachers contracts similar to those of most other workers, i.e., employment agreements that don’t come with what essentially serves as a lifetime job guarantee.
But both of these approaches reinforce an underlying problem in that they basically treat all teachers alike. Why not look to empower teachers and administrators by giving them the ability to negotiate more flexible contracts? Let districts act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold on to. Contracts could offer more than monetary incentives. Excellent teachers could be protected from layoffs, for example, or given enhanced professional development experiences. Most of us are not professional athletes, but you see the same approach in a variety of workplaces all the time.
Despite the AFT’s dalliance with Feinberg, the teachers’ unions are still pretty much digging in their heels on the tenure issue. That’s too bad. A backlash has been building for some time now, and things are going to change one way or another. With creative leadership, ending tenure as we know it could lead to something much better for teachers — and for their students.
Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.
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G.O.P. Governors Take Aim at Teacher Tenure
By Trip Gabriel and Sam Dillon
NEW YORK TIMES
Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.
The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama’s call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week’s State of the Union address.
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers’ unions on the defensive.
“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.
Eliminating tenure, Mr. Sandoval said, would allow school districts to dismiss teachers based on competence, not seniority, in the event of layoffs.
Politics also play a role.
“These new Republican governors are all trying to outreform one another,” said Michael Petrilli, an education official under President George W. Bush. In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has campaigned aggressively for the state to end “last in, first out” protections for teachers. Warning that thousands of young educators face layoffs, Mr. Bloomberg is demanding that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo scrap the seniority law if the budget he will unveil Tuesday includes state cuts to education. Teachers’ unions have responded to the assault on the status quo by arguing that all the ire directed at bad teachers distorts the issue. “Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”
Tenure laws were originally passed — New Jersey was first in 1909 — to protect teachers from being fired because of race, sex, political views or cronyism. Public-school teachers typically earn tenure after two or three years on probation. Once they receive it, they have a right to due-process hearings before dismissal, which in many districts makes it expensive and time-consuming to fire teachers considered ineffective. Tenure also brings seniority protections in many districts. In recent years, research on the importance of teacher quality has sparked a movement to evaluate teachers on how well students are learning — with implications that undermine tenure. The movement gained momentum with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant contest last year. Eleven states enacted laws to link student achievement to teacher evaluations and, in some cases, to pay and job security, according to the American Enterprise Institute.
Now some politicians and policy makers have concluded that if teachers owe their jobs to professional performance, then tenure protections are obsolete. The former school chancellor of Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee, who campaigned against tenure as early as 2007, has made abolishing it a cornerstone of a new advocacy group,Students First, which has advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey.
All are Republicans, but Ms. Rhee, a Democrat, insisted that the movement was bipartisan. “There’s a willingness to confront these issues that has never before been in play,” she said, noting that some influential Democratic mayors, including Cory A. Booker in Newark and Antonio R. Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, have also called for making it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers.
In a speech in December, Mr. Villaraigosa — who once worked as a teachers union organizer — said, “Tenure and seniority must be reformed or we will be left with only one option: eliminating it entirely.” The two national teachers’ unions insist that they, too, favor some degree of reform. The American Federation of Teachers endorsed a sweeping law in Colorado last year that lets administrators remove even tenured teachers who are consistently rated as ineffective.
Many teachers who accept linking job security to their effectiveness still want to require administrators to present any evidence against them in a hearing, which critics of tenure like Ms. Rhee say is unnecessary.
Ada Beth Cutler, dean of the education college at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said, “One of the fears I hear from teachers is that in these tough budget times, what’s going to stop someone from firing someone at the top of the pay scale?”
Mr. Van Roekel of the National Education Association labels tenure laws “fair dismissal laws” that protect from arbitrary firing. “In all my years in education I don’t remember a time when there was this much concerted effort to eliminate fair dismissal laws,” he said. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, whose combativeness with the teachers’ union has buoyed his national reputation, appears to have a good chance of getting a bill from the Democratic-controlled Legislature that reshapes tenure.
Under a pair of bills moving through the Indiana General Assembly, teachers would have to earn “professional” status based on evaluations tied to student learning, and their collective bargaining would be limited to salary, not seniority rules. “Most of these reforms would have been dead on arrival” last year, said Tony Bennett, the Indiana superintendent of public instruction. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana has said that “teachers should have tenure,” but the bills introduced by his fellow Republicans call for teachers’ traditional protections to be sharply reduced.
It is similar in Florida, where lawmakers plan to reprise an anti-tenure bill from last year that provoked such an outpouring from teachers that the moderate Republican governor, Charlie Crist, vetoed it.
That is unlikely under the new Republican governor, Rick Scott, who told the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce last month: “Good teachers know they don’t need tenure. There is no reason to have it except to protect those that don’t perform as they should.”
And in Idaho, Gov. C. L. Otter, a Republican, presented an education plan last month that said bluntly, “The state will phase out tenure.” Idaho’s schools superintendent, Tom Luna, argued that the plan would not subject teachers to arbitrary dismissal. Mr. Van Roekel of the teachers’ union disagreed. Recounting a story that had the burnish of something told many times, he recalled that around 1980, when he was a union leader in Arizona, he had arranged to have a speech pathologist assess a teacher whom a principal was trying to fire because of a speech impediment. The pathologist determined that the teacher had a New York accent. “She would say ‘ideer,’ instead of ‘idea,’ ” Mr. Van Roekel said. “The principal thought that was a speech impediment. Without a fair dismissal law, that principal could have fired her arbitrarily, without citing any reason.”