Teacher Tenure

This past week over at Capitol Fax, Rich provided us with Scott Reeder’s comprehensive report on teacher tenure. Scott’s reporting was very insightful, and the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board took notice.

If anyone doubts that it's hard to fire an incompetent school teacher in Illinois, now there are statistics to prove it.

Only two teachers a year, on average, get fired for incompetence, according to an investigative series published this week by a Downstate newspaper chain. Five more teachers get fired for misconduct.

That's out of 95,500 tenured educators.

It would be nice to believe all teachers are hard-working, competent and dedicated to children. Most educators fit that description, but not all. As in every profession, teaching has wormy apples too.

The Illinois tenure system was created 64 years ago, ostensibly to protect veteran educators against political reprisal by their bosses. Today, though, tenure seems to protect only mediocrity. Despite changes in law over the years to raise accountability standards, "it remains almost impossible to fire a tenured teacher," reporter Scott Reeder wrote in the investigation for the Small Newspaper Group.

Reeder, who writes for papers in Moline, Rock Island, Kankakee and Ottawa, obtained tenure data by filing about 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Illinois State Board of Education and 876 school districts.

Most districts don't even bother trying to dismiss underperforming teachers, according to the investigation. Only 7 percent of school districts made an attempt to fire a teacher in the last 18 years, and only two-thirds of those districts were successful. It costs on average $100,000 to go through the bureaucratic maze of firing a teacher. If a hearing officer finds a single mistake on any of the dozens of forms required, he's likely to toss the case.

Cash-strapped districts would rather wait for a bad teacher to retire. Some districts secretly arrange to pay a teacher handsomely to leave, Reeder found.

Reeder calculated that changes in state tenure law prompted more than 2.5 million hours of administrative work for principals in the last two decades. They have little to show for that work.

Reforms passed in 1985 required principals to evaluate tenured teachers at least every two years. The intent was to make it easier to fire the profession's worst by documenting poor performance and inability to improve with help. Principals nevertheless have shown great reluctance to use the authority. Only 6 percent of districts have issued unsatisfactory ratings to tenured teachers.

In one case, an East St. Louis assistant principal impregnated a 14-year-old at his school. Even though a DNA test determined with more than 99 percent certainty that he was responsible, a local tenure hearing officer ruled that to be insufficient evidence for dismissal.

Yes, the state could find ways to make it easier to remove bad teachers. But beyond that, there is no compelling reason to keep the tenure system in public schools. It doesn't protect good teachers. It protects incompetent ones.