Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

> But lawyers for the states and teachers’ unions said that overturning such laws would erode necessary protections that stop school administrators from making unfair personnel decisions.

> Administrators seeking to dismiss a teacher they deem incompetent must follow a complicated procedure that typically drags on for months, if not years.

Wait... why should they get more job protection than the vast majority of all other workers? I don't think they need any special treatment beyond what every other person with a job has.

View on HN

The traditional justification is that teachers need to feel free to discuss ideas that social trends or local political whim may disagree with. They may even need to take a Devil's Advocate during a lesson and argue a pretty unpopular position that they don't personally agree and which would sound awfully impolitic out of context.

E.g. To protect them from being fired for reading from a given book. Or teaching evolution. Or teaching sex education. Or covering a topic like communism or socialism in any way other than demonization.

By that same logic, though, teachers are then protected from being fired for reading from the Bible, or teaching creationism, or teaching abstinence-only birth control, or covering a topic like vaccination or astrophysics in any way other than demonization.

Tenure isn't the appropriate approach here. Enforcing Constitutional law - like separation of church and state - is far more useful to actually achieve the desired results. If teachers are being fired for teaching actual fact, then they need to be bringing that to the legal system and turn it into a Supreme Court case. This whole "it protects secular teachers" argument is a silly justification for the negative impact California's tenure-fetish has had on students and younger teachers.

There's no constitutional concern here. Tenure would provide no protection for a teacher who was using their position to preach. Any talk of creationism or reading from a holy text would have to be part of a lesson that didn't run afoul of the establishment clause.

Neither does tenure necessarily provide protection for a teacher who refused to teach the curriculum to such an extent that they failed their students. Tenure is about protecting teachers from being fired for controversial positions, not protecting them from having to teach the material they agreed to teach.

I can't speak to the particulars of California's tenure or contract in general. Maybe their contract really could protect a physics teacher who taught epicycles instead of heliocentricity despite failing class after failing class.

But I would doubt it.

I think you're mixing up my points. The Constitutional concern doesn't lie with tenure itself; enforcement of the Constitution would replace this rather far-fetched excuse for maintaining tenure as some holy trait. The legal system already exists to help teachers in cases where they're punished for teaching science instead of religion in government-funded institutions, since doing so already runs afoul of the establishment clause; a tenure system doesn't really add much, and (in my own observations at least) only seems to benefit veteran teachers at the expense of students and newer teachers.

Teachers union advocates will tell you that it's a way of convincing people to become teachers, as the job has far more stability. Reality shows that it just discourages new teachers, as nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years[1]. Teaching has become an outdated, slow-moving profession that nobody wants to join because of the entrenched interests and bloated bureaucracies.

1: http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-st...

yes, but getting rid of all protection for older, more experienced teachers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

i have often struggled with this issue. i have had some great teachers, i have had some terrible teachers, but if you got rid of all the existing teachers and started anew, who the hell would possibly be a positive influence on the new teachers?

Or no one wants to teach because of low pay compared to equivalent professions, huge classes, and deteriorating working conditions.

What is your definition of a huge classroom?

The number of public school teachers has increased by a larger percentage than the number of public school students over the past 10 years, resulting in declines in the pupil/teacher ratio. In fall 2002, the number of public school pupils per teacher was 15.9, compared with a projected number of 15.2 public school pupils per teacher in fall 2012. [1]

Of course I understand that some districts are different than others, and that this probably includes teachers that teach music, gym, and other classes, but still, there are more teachers per student now than there has been over the past few decades, meaning that even if classrooms are the same size as before, teachers must be getting more free time during the day to catch up on grading/admin work.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28

Just remember that 15.X number is average. I know my wife's school had to call the union in twice last year as certain classes were exceeding 39 students in the classroom. I'd love to see more of statistics broken out demographically (in particular dense urban areas would be interesting).

California teachers earned $67K on avearge in Calif in 2011. Note that this is for 9 months of work. Except in the major cities, teachers often out-earn the income of the parents of all their students. And they benefit from a system in which they can never be fired for their performance and which gives them comparatively good retirement benefits.

Focusing strictly on California, it has the lowest scholastic scores of all states. Despite many efforts to improve schools, fewer than 10 teachers have been fired during the last two years for poor performance. That's out of a population of 275,000 teachers. Schools simply view it as impossible to fire for cause[1].

This ruling has been a long time coming.

[1] http://voiceofsandiego.org/2014/06/10/the-most-blistering-fi...

"nobody wants to join" -> I think you mean few want to continue in. There is plenty of fodder heading into the ranks only to have their dreams crushed by the reality of teaching in today's educational system. The numbers of those going into teaching has been on the rise for years (I believe elementary and secondary teacher population has risen about 7 percent since 2002...don't remember if that was DoE statistics or what...i'll try to find it)

>nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years

My guess is because teaching is seen as a fall back job for liberal arts majors who have no teaching experience, and once they get hired, it turns out they hate teaching.

Or, at least in CA, teachers leave because they grow up and need a real job; one that might pay them enough to afford to live in the communities they work in. If you'd like to live in the valley and teach, you better marry well. You can see some of the salaries here [1]; $71k for Belmont means give up any dream of owning a home.

[1] http://belmont-ca.patch.com/groups/schools/p/comparing-the-s...

If you have 2 salaries of 71k, you've got 142 which should allow you to buy a home priced at around 600k, more if you've saved for a bit. So that dream is still alive.

By that logic, if a teacher is teaching in Manhattan they should be paid enough to afford a house in Manhattan as well?

Since when was Belmont (in the Bay Area) part of the "valley"? Unless you're talking about something other than the Central Valley, that is...

Tenure was designed for higher education and is out of place in K-12. Tenure's purpose is to protect and encourage academic freedom. Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. Since K-12 teachers do not conduct research and follow fairly strict curricula, tenure is merely a union tactic to guarantee employment.

> Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research.

That sounds legit, but the best example I can think of is stem cell research. Can you help me out? I'm not an academic so I don't really know that world.

Why shouldn't they have the right to collectively bargain like every other worker and Union in this country?

And more importantly, in the past, teachers were removed for political reasons or for teaching unpopular topics. http://teachertenure.procon.org/

Collective bargaining isn't the problem. It is the strike that is the problem. When GM workers go on strike, I can still buy a car from 20 other car companies, as well as ride a bus, bike, skateboard, or walk. When public union workers go on strike, they have a much larger position of power because they have monopoly control over a societal good. When teachers go on strike, the children who rely on public education are the ones that suffer...not the teacher's employers.

And when BART workers went on strike it was a (brief) nightmare.

This is (one of the reasons) why it should not be legal for government workers to go on strike.

> Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)

I've had this discussion with friends and family who teach. None of them can make a convincing (to me) argument that a school administrator is any more likely to be capricious or unfair than managers in the private sector.

Then, the friends move onto the whole "how do you evaluate a teacher?" to which I respond "how do you evaluate a programmer?" Sure, there are metrics for both, but none are foolproof. At some point, managers have to go with their guts.

You evaluate a programmer on the coding problems they solve that contribute to the business.

There is nothing so clear for teachers other than their class performance on standardized tests, but standardized tests measure only a very limited part of what a good teacher should be able to offer.

This is how you get lots of low-hanging fruit pickers, rather than programmers who would rather solve hard problems for more significant, but less visible, business needs.

Examples: Refactoring is effective in the long-term but doesn't look as good in the short term. Exploratory work often takes time but doesn't show any specific productivity. Teaching and helping others is incredibly value, but increases their productivity rather than your own.

Evaluating programmers by their business output leads to low-quality code run by a team that doesn't talk to each other and loves self-aggrandizing. Also when something big finally does slip through the cracks, everything will fall apart.

And if you want to find outliers with it, good luck - they'll make mountains out of their molehill of work.

Honestly, it's not very easy to get good metrics for programmers - for the same reason it's not very easy to increase programmer productivity on a project. It's not easily divisible work and involves a lot of teamwork.

I've heard 360 reviews work pretty well though.

What you're saying here seems to be taking about poor evaluators, rather than anything to do with the method of evaluation.

How does self-aggrandizement, for example, result from evaluating how people have solved problems?

Two reasons: 1. Evaluating people by "solved problems" encourages them to solve problems rather than do other kinds of work - which is often more important. 2. You can't evaluate people by their real performance - only their perceived performance. You're splitting them up individually to do so as well. As you are a human being, your perception is biased and your information is incomplete - there are many, many people who would take advantage of that to make their work seem more important/better. Hence, self-aggrandizing.

If you want people to do their best, give them the power to do self-evaluation and ask them to find ways to improve their work/their team's work.

If you want to fire people, your absolute worst employees - the bad ones who somehow survive layoffs, are the ones who are going to abuse your perceptions and metrics the most. The only way to get around this is to gather metrics in ways that can't be self-reported or influenced by the individual being evaluated, even indirectly, except by being competent at their job.

What kind of work doesn't involve solving problems?

For a variety of reasons, really stupid metrics in tech have mostly not had staying power, which reduces how much of a problem people consider them to be. Plenty of companies have attempted to institute some kind of LoC or normalized-LoC or other such system to measure programmer productivity, and they are mostly ridiculed as laughingstocks of the profession. Whereas the dumb, unvalidated metrics seem to be actually making inroads in education.

To some extent tech benefits from there being giant piles of money everywhere, which limits how much leverage stupid employers have over their employees (where legal, they try to use noncompetes to counteract that effect).

An interesting feature of this decision, though, is that it interprets the "right to education" in the state Constitution as creating an enforceable, quite broad right, rather than merely a general principle: any government policy that stands in the way of students receiving an effective education is (according to this holding) unconstitutional. If that stands as precedent, students may have another way to combat poorly designed metrics: such metrics might also be unconstitutional. (One problem, of course, is that there's no clear limiting factor for this principle; it essentially empowers judges to make policy decisions about what stands in the way of good education.)

The problem with your logic is, what happens when you have one of these people elected to the school board or as an admin?

http://www.christianpost.com/news/kansas-school-board-candid...

I think you are putting your head in the sand if you think people like that wouldn't try to get people fired for "teaching evolution".

That's a problem, but is tenure the solution?

Honestly, it is a pretty bad solution. However, it was sufficiently shielded from politics that bypassing that shield was difficult for decades.

Pretty much any alternative is purely governed by populous whims because it is no longer the "norm" but "some unique thing we do".

Now, if you can get a constitutional amendment passed that solves the things tenure is truly needed for [such as abuse of position to engage in de factor or outright bans of topics like evolution]...sure. I can see a better solution there.

However, I don't see a better solution happening :/

try to get people fired for "teaching evolution"

So how do you prevent that while also not making it impossible to fire people who insist on teaching young-earth creationism or abstinence-only sex ed or whatever else wrong/harmful you can think of?

It isn't impossible to fire them. It just takes a mountain of evidence.

Generally the bullshit stuff doesn't stick long enough for that to happen while legitimate issues do.

Tenure shouldn't be the solution.

And I'm not sure how the problem you describe is limited to public schools? If my manager doesn't like me (for whatever reason), he can find a way to have me removed from my job. Nitpick every minor problem, make-work assignments, untenable deadlines, etc.

Why is it incumbent on your friends and family to demonstrate that school administrators would be more likely to be capricious or unfair, and not on you to demonstrate why it's a good idea to subject teachers to any increased level of capricious or unfair management?

Because sometimes incompetence is offered as an excuse for political dismissal, and education is a highly politicized field int he US. Think of controversies over the teaching of evolution or sex education, for example.

Those edge cases are important, but there are very few of them relative to the number of cases where self-interest and rent-seeking by teacher's unions is the main factor. This is an important decision and one that I welcome.

It's been a while since high school for me, but when I was there parents could opt-out their kids from sex ed and they'd get study hall instead. There wasn't a lot of controversy. Is that different now?

I agree with the court in dropping tenure laws, but arguments in favor of have cited protecting freedom of teachers' conscience and preventing politically motivated hiring. I personally think tenure had its day, but its day is long past....

Don't let the word "tenure" fool you too much, in this case it's just union seniority rules under a different name.

Probably based off of some of the origins of tenure. WAY back when they used to fire teachers (for example) when they got pregnant. Nowadays it's protection against (for example) teaching evolution in biology class (which isn't popular in some districts) or "Catcher in the Rye", etc. That all being said there's a reasonable list of pros and cons here: http://teachertenure.procon.org/

EDIT: I should qualify I meant when tenure was coming into K-12. It was originally based off of the professors and the boards of trustees in the universities.

You take away their tenure, you take away their job protection, you are also taking away their need for a union. A union that can cost an hour, two, or more hours of pay per month. That is a lot of money, a lot of money to buy politicians or hysteria.

to start the hysteria train I will trot out... tenure protects the children, protects us from creationist, protects us from bigots, from racists, from all sorts of bad people.

Best thing to ever happen to the teaching profession and it damn well needs to happen at the college level to reign in those costs.

They only have those benefits because they collectively bargained for them. And yes, if the courts start gutting negotiated benefits, that does hurt unions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com