A School Chief Takes On （对抗） Tenure (终身职位), Stirring a Fight
Readers:
Do you think that Chinese universities should or should not employ teacher tenure system?
tenure : the status of holding one's position on a permanent basis without periodic contract renewals:
终身职位：不用续签有期限的合同的而永久地保有其职位的状态：
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By SAM DILLON
Published: November 12, 2008
WASHINGTON — Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire.
So Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure.
Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Ms. Rhee’s bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers’ Union has divided over whether to embrace (乐意做，乐意接受) it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary (专制的，专断的) firing.
“If Michelle Rhee were to get what she is demanding,” said Allan R. Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation (补偿，赔偿), “it would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan (huge) change.”
Last month, Ms. Rhee said she could no longer wait for a union response to her proposal, first outlined last summer, and announced an effort to identify and fire ineffective teachers, including those with tenure. The union is mobilizing to protect members, and the nation’s capital is bracing (支持) what could be a wrenching )(distressing, changing fast) labor struggle.
Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright (彻底地，完全地). Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal.
Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay increases but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more-junior teachers if their school closes or undergoes an overhaul (全面革新). If they were not hired by another school, their only options would be early retirement, a buyout (买断) or eventual dismissal.
In an interview, Ms. Rhee said she considered tenure outmoded (过时的).
“Tenure is the holy grai l(长期努力的目标) of teacher unions,” she said, “but has no educational value for kids; it only benefits adults. If we can put veteran teachers who have tenure in a position where they don’t have it, that would help us to radically increase our teacher quality. And maybe other districts would try it, too.”
Ms. Rhee has significant public backing for her efforts to improve this district of 46,000 students, one of the nation’s worst-performing. Both presidential candidates lined up behind her in their final debate last month, with Senator Barack Obama calling her Washington’s “wonderful new superintendent (主管，负责人).”
Ms. Rhee, 38, has convinced Washington that she means business since Mayor Adrian M. Fenty plucked her out of a nonprofit organization based in New York City, the New Teacher Project, and installed her in the chancellorship 17 months ago. She has fired or forced out hundreds of central office employees, principals and paraprofessionals (专业人员的助手), as well as 216 teachers who lacked licenses, her aides said.
“Fire all incompetent teachers — that makes a good sound bite,” said George Parker, the president of the Washington Teachers’ Union. “But remember that not only teachers are to blame for the problems in this district.” Mr. Parker cited a chaotic administration that has had seven superintendents in a decade and has paid little attention to problems like truancy (逃学，旷课，旷职) and student discipline. “You can’t fire your way into a successful school system,” he said.
Mr. Parker said he had kept an open mind about Ms. Rhee’s proposals, which would raise star teachers’ salaries to $130,000, with bonuses, by 2010, and the two went together before several mass gatherings of teachers in July to explain them. But an August poll (民意测验) commissioned (委托) by the union found that teachers opposed Ms. Rhee’s proposal by three to one.
In the interview, Ms. Rhee said the raises would be financed largely by foundations that had given her commitments of $75 million a year for five years, of which a “significant portion” would go for teacher compensation.
“The foundations want to fund things that are innovative and will have national ramifications＊,” she said. Ms. Rhee has declined to name the foundations, however, raising worries among some teachers about the foundations’ motives and about whether their commitments would remain solid if the nation’s financial crisis were to be prolonged (延长).
The talks have made little progress in recent weeks.
“Students cannot wait for accountable (有责任的) teachers while adults argue,” Ms. Rhee said on Oct. 2, announcing that the district would seek to dismiss even tenured teachers deemed ineffective (不称职的终身教师), partly by training principals to manage a little-used procedure that allows them to identify teachers for a 90-day mandatory (强制的) improvement plan. Those who fail to demonstrate progress could face dismissal.
Mr. Parker responded by promising that the union would help teachers use all procedures available to protect their jobs.
“I’m willing to be flexible and to try out-of-the-box things to raise achievement,” he said, “but I’m not willing to move along this track that’s just geared (调整) to busting (使终结，粉碎) the union.”
Of Mr. Parker, Ms. Rhee said, “We have a very good relationship — he drives me nuts (难解的问题).”
The two leaders appeared together on Oct. 23 at an awards ceremony, and Ms. Rhee said they spoke briefly about the negotiations.
“You’re killing me,” Ms. Rhee said she told Mr. Parker in a joking exchange during the ceremony.
“No, you’re killing me,” Mr. Parker responded, she said.
Ms. Rhee’s relationship is less cordial (热忱的) with Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York and, also, since July, the American Federation of Teachers, which is helping Mr. Parker’s local.
During Ms. Rhee’s decade-long tenure at the New Teacher Project, her group operated programs for the New York schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, and she helped him during negotiations with Ms. Weingarten in which Mr. Klein, too, initially attacked tenure and seniority (资历) rights.
Mr. Klein’s 2003 assault on tenure did not prosper (make steady progress), but those negotiations eventually changed the seniority system so that principals are no longer required to accept teachers in schools that are not a good fit for them and teachers are not required to go to those schools. Both sides say the change has improved school staffing, and Ms. Rhee has proposed it for Washington.
In May, hundreds of people at a convention of educational entrepreneurs here watched spellbound (好象被符咒镇住的) as Ms. Weingarten, a commanding presence onstage, and Ms. Rhee, challenging her from the floor, clashed over what should happen to tenured teachers whom no schools hire.
Ms. Rhee’s attitudes about teaching were forged in the 1990s in Baltimore, where she taught in an elementary school as a member of Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits (招募) college graduates to teach for two years in hard-to-staff schools, after which many leave for jobs in other professions.
“Michelle does not view teaching as a career,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “She sees it as temporary, something a lot of newbies (菜鸟，新手) will work very hard at for a couple of years, and then if they leave, they leave, as opposed to professionals who get more seasoned (适应).”
Teachers first won tenure rights across much of the United States early in the 20th century as a safeguard against patronage firings in big cities and interference by narrow-minded school boards in small towns, said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.
“And the historical rationale (根本原因) remains good,” Dr. Mirel said, pointing to the case of a renowned high school biology teacher in Kansas who was forced to retire nine years ago because he refused to teach creationism (创世论)*.
“Without tenure,” Dr. Mirel said, “teachers can still face arbitrary firing because of religious views, or simply because of the highly politicized nature of American society.”
Ms. Rhee and Mr. Klein are hardly the first public officials to inveigh (猛烈抨击) against tenure, but few have succeeded in weakening it. Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, persuaded Georgia lawmakers to repeal (废除) the state’s teacher tenure law in 2000. But two years later, angry teachers helped elect Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, who promptly restored job protections for teachers.
Officials may have been most successful in abolishing tenure in Louisiana, where they had the help of a hurricane. Teachers in the Recovery School District, which was given control over many of New Orleans’s schools after Hurricane Katrina, serve at the will of the state superintendent, a spokeswoman for the district, Siona LaFrance, said in an e-mail message.
Maggie Slye, 31, a former teacher in Teach for America who is a literacy coach in a Washington elementary school, said she liked Ms. Rhee’s proposal because her salary would rise to $90,000 from $61,000 under the green plan.
“Isn’t it funny? I don’t even know if I have tenure,” said Ms. Slye, who taught in Boston last year. “To me, tenure is not a motivator; I motivate myself. It just doesn’t mean a lot to me.”
By contrast, Kerry Sylvia, 38, said she opposed Ms. Rhee’s proposal.
Although she is an award-winning world history teacher and works long hours to help students at her high school improve, Ms. Sylvia said that without tenure she would nevertheless feel vulnerable to arbitrary firing because she has publicly opposed some Rhee initiatives and speaks out about things like her school’s decrepit (老朽的；用旧的) heating system.
“Don’t ask me to give up tenure, not even for a moment,” Ms. Sylvia said.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 13, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Notes:
1. The foundations want to fund things that are innovative and will have national ramifications＊
ramification： a development or consequence growing out of and sometimes complicating a problem, plan, or statement:
e.g. the ramifications of a court decision.
2. “And the historical rationale (根本原因) remains good,” Dr. Mirel said, pointing to the case of a renowned high school biology teacher in Kansas who was forced to retire nine years ago because he refused to teach creationism (创世论)*.
creationism: the position that the account of the creation of the universe given at the beginning of the Bible is literally true.
特创论，创世论：认为《圣经》篇首给出的创造宇宙的叙述是真实无误的学说