It Only Takes One

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situs bandarqAll these attacks on tenure are really getting me angry. I resent the implication that tenure makes us lazy and complacent and if we just eliminated it we’d all magically shape up or be shipped out. There’s relatively little discussion about professional development for teachers, especially those in critical needs districts. No, just make it easier to fire us and hire people from other states with lower standards, or even to hire other professionals with no educational training.

Look, I know as well as anyone that some teachers besmirch our profession by abusing tenure to remain employed even though they’re doing a poor job. We could all name a few of those. But I know they are not the norm. Yet the public and the legislature and the governor and the commissioner and the journalists seem to think they are the norm. They seem to think that we sit around and do nothing for four years, get our tenure, and then do even less—just to paraphrase our governor.

I’ll tell you what tenure is about. In my twelve years as a high school teacher, I was in one district. In that time, I had four superintendents and seven building principals. They were not all created equal.

Early in my career, the year I was up for tenure, I had a ridiculous run-in with a new principal over an issue I actually supported him on. I made the mistake at a faculty meeting of voicing my support, with a caveat. He wanted to extend senior privileges, and I believed this would be manageable if he and the assistant principal were better about disciplining the students we wrote up when they abused these privileges. I had the gall to suggest that we would support his tawaran if he would assure us of administrative support. I was not the most vocal or critical voice at that meeting, but I was the least senior. Colleagues came up to me afterwards and expressed incredible levels of concern because they knew I was not tenured yet. Honestly, I was surprised, till the next day when he accosted me in a hallway in front of students and went up one side of me and down the other, screaming, swearing, dropping f-bombs. I was speechless. Thank goodness we had a strong union president at the time, and she marched into his office and lit into him like a mother upbraiding her misbehaving son. In the end, he offered me a half-hearted and private apology, but I walked on egg shells the rest of the year because I was so scared he would find some excuse to get me. And with good reason.

The following year I was accused by a girl’s parents of sexually harassing her—because I was too explicit in the way I taught Romeo and Juliet. Basically, after reading Act I, scene i, I explained that a maid was not a cleaning lady but a young virgin. Long story short, they wrote a scathing letter and insisted that the principal put it in my file, which he was more than happy to oblige. Thankfully, I did have tenure by this time, and I still had the same union president. She insisted on a little more inquiry in the matter, and threatened a grievance. Turns out, the student had made no complaint, and in fact loved my class. The parents even admitted that their child had no idea they were making any complaints about me and would, in fact, be upset with them if she did. Furthermore, we were told that these parents belonged to a group that had been petitioning the state department of education to remove certain texts they found objectionable, and one of them was, of course, Romeo and Juliet. In light of this information, their attack on me now seemed part of a predetermined strategy. But were it not for tenure and my union president’s insistence on due process, that man would have gladly ruined my reputation and my career because he was still angry a year later about what he perceived as my insubordination on a minor issue.

So, maybe Governor Malloy and Commissioner Pryor’s intentions can be trusted, but not everyone else’s can. I tell my undergraduates all the time that tenure is not about job security. Tenure is about academic freedom. It is about being protected from petty administrators, vindictive parents, and politically ambitious members of boards of education. And it only takes one to ruin a career.

The Case Against Sb 24

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judi bandarq onlineIf you didn’t get to see it, The Hartford Courant ran an op-ed piece by me on Sunday as the lead article on the front of their Sunday Opinion section. You can access it here: http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-courtmanche-ending-teacher-tenure-wrong-fix--20120226,0,5934612.story.

It’s a defense of teachers and tenure. The basic argument is that tenure cannot be cited as the cause of the achievement gap. There’s another piece by a colleague from the Law School that argues that teachers’ unions should not be allowed to participate in education reform talks because the unions only advocate for teachers, and “the interests of children are not part of that discussion.” He got pretty slammed in the blogosphere.

Anyway, the opportunity to publish the piece came about suddenly. I had wanted to attend the hearings at the Capitol on SB 24, Governor Malloy’s education reform bill titled An Act Concerning Educational Competitiveness, but I was unable to do so. I thought to write a letter to the editor on the issue, and, long-story-short, I ended up writing the op-ed piece.

The response has been amazing. Besides all the friends, acquaintances and colleagues who have written me in Facebook or by email to thank me for the piece, the online edition of the Courant has gotten tremendous traffic, with over three-thousand shares, recommends, and tweets, etc, which only account for a fraction of the views. I say this not to toot my own horn but to call attention to the relevance of the issue and to the affirmative response to my defense of teachers. Teachers, of course, but, more importantly, the public in general are not buying into the scapegoating, no matter what the governor, legislators, journalists, and pseudo-reformists like Patrick Riccard claim.

Sunday, February 9, the Courant ran the results of its own poll in its Weekly Buzz section. Question #1 asked, “Should teachers have to re-earn tenure once they’ve earned it?” An overwhelming 84% of respondents replied No. Of those respondents, 56% said that “Tenure protects teachers from arbitrary firings. Without tenure, school systems will save money by getting rid of better-paid tenured teachers and keeping cheaper teachers.” An additional 25% of those who replied No to the first question said that “This [SB 24] is a ploy to get rid of tenure altogether. What’s the point of granting it in the first place if it has to be re-earned?” There were a total of 2,102 responses to this question. By contrast, the third question, on the death penalty, drew the second most, with 679 responses.

Today’s “Issue of the Day” section of the Courant was also dedicated to tenure. The question was, “What’s The Problem With Education? Is It Bad Teachers?” The response, again, was overwhelmingly in defense of teachers. Respondents repeatedly cited poverty, lack of support for education in the home, and lack of funding as the root causes of the achievement gap.

No one’s buying what the Governor is selling except the legislature and the media (and they probably like the sensationalism more than they believe the Governor’s claims).

One colleague wrote to me today and asked what I thought could be done. I told him simple things: write letters to the editor, contact your local representatives, attend the upcoming Town Hall Meetings the Governor plans to hold. The schedule for these can be found here: http://www.cea.org/issues/news/2012/governor-announces-education-reform-tour.cfm.

If you do any of these things, both the NEA and CEA have lots of helpful information on their websites. The NEA can be accessed at http://www.nea.org/. The CEA is at http://www.cea.org/. The CEA has even developed its own “comprehensive education reform plan” that was “developed by teachers” (imagine that!). You can download it here: http://cea.org/viewfromclassroom/. The AFT has good resources, too, of course, and you can access their site here: http://aftct.org/.
And if you want to slog through Senate Bill 24 itself, there are lots of places to access it from. Here’s one: http://www.mygov365.com/legislation/view/id/4f337ea949e51b5a636d0200/tab/versions/.

I hope there’s still time to stop or significantly revise this bill. I’d like to see education reform. I think we all would, but I think that means something very different to teachers than it does to the Governor and the Commissioner, neither of whom have ever taught. As I say in my article, we want and expect support in the form of funding and professional development, not blame, reprisal, watered down standards, and privatization. They seem more concerned with cost savings.

Daniel Ward, editor of Language magazine, a journal for teachers of world languages, states the case succinctly in his February editorial: “it is about time that we all stood up against teacher bashing and insisted that our media affords them the respect that they deserve.”

Check out Kristal Bivona’s article on professional development and self-determination in the same issue: http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=3380.