Let's get clear on "tenure."
Under current law, schools choose whether or not to renew the contracts of their current teachers by April 15. If a school district chooses not to renew a teacher who has worked for the district for four years or more, the board must provide a written explanation of their just cause for not renewing that contract. "Just cause" includes poor performance, unprofessional conduct, and various other bad behavior. Any teacher not renewed for cause has a right to a hearing before the school board to appeal the nonrenewal. If the teacher finds the outcome of school board hearing unfavorable, the teacher may appeal to circuit court.
That's the due process Governor Daugaard wants to eliminate under HB 1234. That change would have no effect on the process for firing teachers during the school year. Fired teachers have the same due process rights outlined above, regardless of how long they've worked for the district.
Among the issues raised at the District 31 Legislative crackerbarrel at BHSU in Spearfish yesterday was teacher tenure, or more accurately the "continuing contract" system that Governor Dennis Daugaard wants to end as part of his education reforms.
The exact questions submitted by the crackerbarrel audience and read by the moderator were the following:
- What does a teacher gain from the loss of tenure?
- Will the loss of tenure attract good teachers to South Dakota?
- Why would good educators want to stay in a system where they are at the bottom of the pay salary structure and also lose tenure?
The correct answers to those three questions are...
- Nothing.
- No.
- They wouldn't.
Representatives Fred Romkema and Chuck Turbiville and Senator Tom Nelson did not directly address these three questions. They did offer what sounds like support for maintaining the current system, but not quite the clear rejection of the Governor's plan that this teacher would like to hear.
Rep. Romkema began by acknowledging the difference between tenure and the continuing contract system. However, he and the rest of us continued to use the term "tenure" for the policy. Rep. Romkema said he's not a fan of tenure, but he's not sure anything is broken.
Senator Nelson said the teachers he's talked with don't have strong opinions on tenure one way or the other and are more vocal about merit pay. He feels administrators already have enough tools to deal with bad teachers.
Rep. Turbiville offered a somewhat confusing response. He said longevity shouldn't determine anything on the job. If he were voting now, he would vote to phase tenure out over time, which sounds like Governor Daugaard's plan to allow currently tenured teachers to keep tenure but denying it to any more teachers. Rep. Turbiville says "tenure" doesn't guarantee teachers anything. Asked by one audience member to clarify, Turbiville said tenure doesn't serve the interests of the students or the school.
I then stood to remind the speakers of the distinction Rep. Romkema made between tenure and continuing contracts. When I asked Rep. Turbiville to clarify his position on continuing contracts, the legislator said that he would support protecting the current due process rights teachers have to appeal non-renewal. But then in response to the next questioner, Turbiville said the non-renewal process takes far too long and is unfair to the students. He said he's o.k. with giving folks a reason for their non-renewal, but from his statements here, Rep. Turbiville seems to be saying he would do away with the other due process rights teachers currently enjoy under SDCL 13-43 and SDCL 13-46.
Sen. Nelson and Rep. Romkema seemed to clarify that they support the continuing contract system as it is. Rep. Romkema noted that such protections may not exist in business, but that schools don't work like businesses. If a business fires employees willy-nilly, it gets a bad reputation, loses good workers, and goes out of business. Schools can't go away like that, so we can justify some extra legal protection for employees.
I want to believe that all three District 31 legislators are saying they would vote for the status quo and leave in place what little due process we teachers have to protect our jobs. But the somewhat squishy answers given Saturday suggest we need to keep the issue clear and focus our legislators' attention on the issue of tenure and contract due process to make sure they vote that way.
This issue provides fodder for my contention that the "public" school system needs to be scrapped. Just as we don't want legislators interfering with the doctor-patient relationship, we don't want legislators inserting their public school-educated (or more precisely, non-educated) prejudices into the curriculum or process of transmitting the curriculum to students. I understand that accepting my proposal requires a whole new way of looking at how we can assure that kids at least have a chance of becoming literate while retaining enough curiosity to use their literacy to learn something.
We see the fruits of public education being acted out in the legislature. Of 105 legislators only a handful have the intellectual tools to reason over the proposals made that affect every aspect of our lives. They then hire more examples of educational failure to put on guns and be their thugs to apprehend those of us who don't do as they wish.
Bob, when we have an economic system that allows one parent to stay home again with the kids and educate them, your proposal to do away with the public education system might at least be practical for a significant portion of the population. But it would still destroy democracy. Free universal education is central to giving every child a chance to participate fully in government and the modern economy.
Well Bob, I sure wouldn't recommend using the group of 105 people in the SD legislature as a representative sample of the intellectual capacity of the average, publically educated South Dakotan. First, (objectively) it is statistically too small a sample size, and hoplessly skewed demographically in any number of ways. And second (subjectively) it's... um... well... you know.
One of the reasons both parents (in the ever-decreasing number of two-parent homes) have to work is to pay property taxes to support the ever-decreasing quality of publical (Fleming's term) education.
Bill, you precisely made my point about the legislature. Its members are not representative of most South Dakotans, in a myriad of comparisons. That is why we should not tolerate their meddling in the curriculum of the educational system inflicted on most South Dakotans any more than we should tolerate their meddling with reproductive choice.
It is instructive that both respondents to my first comment reflexively recoiled in horror at my suggestion that we should look at education in a different paradigm from the one that is failing us.
Understand that I am not attacking teachers. I am attacking the system that beats the desire to excel out of teachers in the same way it beats the desire to learn out of students.
"Bob, when we have an economic system that allows one parent to stay home again with the kids and educate them"
Cory, we have that today, it is called the welfare state.
So, are you publicly or privately educated, Bob?
K-12, I mean.
I attended parochial schools for about half of those years.
Maybe that's why I didn't turn out to be as smart and succesful as you did, huh?
Too much public school?
Baloney, Newland. The taxes we pay for public school produce far more benefits than a comparable investment in private school would. Public school (like universal health care) is the most efficient way to provide a service to all citizens and prevent all sorts of externalities (like ever-growing hordes of meatheads who can't hold jobs, thus increasing the cost of private-sector job-training and incarceration). You can't blame two-income families on public education.
As I mentioned earlier; fear of a paradigm shift.
Fleming resorts to condescension. Heidelberger resorts to out-of-hand dismissal. I have come to expect nothing more from Fleming. Frankly, though, I am surprised at the "Baloney" from Heidelberger.
"The taxes we pay for public school produce far more benefits than a comparable investment in private school would."
I doubt you can support that statement.
Condescension? Not at all, Bob. It was a legitimate question that I notice you chose not to answer. Maybe your paradigm shift got caught in your zipper?
https://madvilletimes.com/2012/01/follow-finland-equity-more-important-than-excellence-in-school-reform/
http://www.oecd.org/document/12/0,3746,en_2649_201185_46623628_1_1_1_1,00.html
I had to drop out of full-time college for a time and work full-time on the sports desk of a newspaper. No longer having a deferment, I got drafted. When I was released from active duty, I could not return to the the newspaper because there was a waiting list of reporters who had been drafted before me. So, I took a job with farm equipment manufacturer and to keep my hand in journalism signed on as a stringer for another newspaper. This paper covered 12 school districts and needed reporters. I ended up working almost every evening covering board meetings or keeping contact with administrators and teachers. I also took some night courses in education theory and practice to have the background information for what I was reporting on. That experience is the basis for the following observations.
The function of schools and school boards was totally different from what it is now. Principals were called that because they were the principal teachers, experienced, established classroom educators who functioned as mentors not as administrative executives. Problems that came up with students and parents were fronted with collaborative knowledge and experience. There has always been an element of the public that wanted to interfere with what was taking place in the classroom, but it was the job of the school boards to mediate between the professional staffs and the public. Further, many states had "insult and abuse" laws which prevented members of the public from disruptive and menacing confrontations with teachers.
Collective bargaining changed all that. When teachers got the right to negotiate the terms of employment, the organizations that represented them chose the wrong bargaining model. The AFT was already a part of the AFL-CIO and naturally followed the pattern of industrial union-management negotiations. The NEA, which had been a professional group, followed the same model. A model they did not follow, but which was followed to some degree in higher education, was the kind of contract negotiation that takes place between hospitals and local medical associations. It is much more a consult-and-collaborate process than an adversary process.
What changed most drastically was that school boards were no longer primarily conduits between the public and professional staffs and their management, the administrations. The boards began to think of themselves as management like boards of directors of corporations, not as public bodies that form policy through a process of constant consultation, deliberation, and mediation. Prior to this shift in purpose, the curriculum and policies were instituted and implemented through the professional educators and worked out in consultation with the board. Educators were in charge. When the boards regarded themselves as executive boards is when the notion of running schools like businesses and industrial measures of productivity were introduced. The more that this industrial model of management was imposed on education, the more problems arose. No Child left Behind is based upon the view that teachers are like production line workers and must be held to a measurable standard of output.
Very few administrators or people who train them, with the exception of a few like Diane Ravitch, have what it takes to tell their board of director bosses they are wrong. So, the result is a deplorably ignorant and inappropriate piece of legislation like the one proposed by Gov. Daugaard.
The unions are a problem only in that they allowed themselves to get sucked into a negotiating process and a relinquishment of professional, executive authority so that its viewed as a matter of management vs. laborers.
The people have what they say they want: schools run like businesses. Has anyone noticed how much businesses have benefited the country in the last decade or so?
Mr. Newland, I generally follow my "Baloney!" with some good salami, cheese, mayo, and whole-grain truth. My commenters are helping. Thanks, guys!
Mr. Newland, I cited this butt-kicking study two years ago:
Minnesota, despite its relatively high business tax burden, is a good example of this. Compare Minnesota to its neighbor South Dakota, which has a relatively low business tax burden. As the Property Tax Study Project (2000) has noted, Minnesota has had higher per capita income after taxes, higher average hourly earnings, higher average annual pay growth, higher employment growth, more high school and college graduates per capita, better maintained roads and bridges, less income disparity, and a lower business failure rate than South Dakota. Indeed, Minnesota can be said to have a good business climate in part because of its relatively high tax burden, while South Dakota has a weaker business climate in part because of its relatively low taxes. Taxes are necessary to pay for the high-quality public services that make a state a good place to do business [emphasis mine; Robert G. Lynch, "Rethinking Growth Strategies: How State and Local Taxes and Services Affect Economic Development," Economic Policy Institute, 2004, p. 12].
Investing in early education produces a particularly good return on investment.
Now, Mr. Newland, my friend, what was that unsubstantiated claim you made above? Ah, yes: baloney. Mmm... enjoy your sandwich. :-D