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Rochelle Riley: Educator Michelle Rhee tells legislators: Teacher tenure hurts children
LANSING -- Michelle Rhee brought her campaign to improve teaching to Michigan Wednesday, and she didn't mince words.
"Most teachers are granted tenure within just a few years," she told a joint meeting of Senate and House education and appropriations committee members. "Once a teacher has tenure, in most states, that teacher essentially has a job for life, regardless of performance.
"It should be virtually impossible for an ineffective teacher to remain in the classroom," she said.
Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, founded StudentsFirst, an advocacy organization to protect children's needs the way labor groups protect educators. She is touring states to discuss ways to improve teacher performance, and to recruit 1 million members and raise $1 billion for her cause.
Rhee urged Michigan legislators to end the "outdated and bureaucratic practice known as 'last in, first out' ... a policy that hurts children."
"Even after just one year, an ineffective educator can set a child behind for years to come," she said. "This also puts a greater burden on subsequent teachers who are working so hard to catch that student up. ... I understand that proposing to eliminate tenure outright is incredibly difficult politically."
But she suggested ways, such as requiring principals to consent before minimally effective teachers are moved into their buildings, and instituting rigorous evaluation systems based partly on third-party observation in the classroom.
Michigan legislators already are considering numerous bills to end teacher tenure.
Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said that Michigan must change how it measures teacher and student achievement.
"To suggest that a 30% proficiency rate should be a passing grade for our students today is off-base," said Pavlov, who also lavished praise on the Detroit School of the Arts, which he toured last week. But he said he is concerned about how the dismal state of Detroit's schools will affect the good teachers and students in the district.
Even Rhee's critics -- and she had some on the committees -- can't dispute some facts: When she became chancellor of the Washington public schools, only 8% of students were performing at grade level. Yet 95% of the system's teachers were rated as doing a good job.
"When the sole function of a school system is to educate children," Rhee said, "how can you have a system in which the vast majority of adults are running around thinking they are doing great work while simultaneously producing such dismal results for students?"
In an interview before the legislative hearing, Rhee said that in the next 20 years, America will need employees for an estimated 123 million high-paying, highly skilled jobs, but American students will be prepared to fill only 50 million of them.
"Close to 75 million jobs will have to be outsourced to India and China," Rhee said.
The sad thing, she said, is that business leaders nationwide know there is a problem.
"They know you can't fire people by seniority. You've got to do it by value," she said. "They know this ... and they have refused in many cases ... to be out in front of these issues because they say, 'Oh, we don't want the teachers unions to boycott our company.' "
Rochelle Riley: The fix for American schools is change
OK. I've spent two days writing about student advocate Michelle Rhee's efforts to rid American schools of bad teachers and to focus America on protecting children's educational needs.
But now let's look at what Paul Harvey used to call "the rest of the story."
I called Keith Johnson, one of the fairest presidents ever of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, and asked him: What do unions do for children?
And he hasn't stopped answering since:
"What we try to do is create the best learning and teaching environment for children and teachers, making sure that where children go to school and the conditions under which they go to school are conducive to learning," he said.
"Protecting bad teachers is the least of what we do. And we don't protect them. We just protect their right to due process."
The voices shouting solutions to the problem of America's public schools get louder and louder. Everyone knows what went wrong.
An idea: Birth system anew"The real challenge is reinvention of an educational system dismantled by the innovative forces of technological change and the unruly winds of globalization," wrote former Detroit teacher Lorraine Rudolph in a treatise she sent to the Free Press.
"Designed to prepare the majority of students for an industrial economy, schools, especially Michigan high schools, taught an overt curriculum of basic skills and a covert curriculum of rote memorization, physical quietude, punctuality, and obedience," she said. "A factory-based model of education prepared the masses for a pot of gold at the end of the high school rainbow: a life made prosperous by taking orders from management in a plant, or through repetitive tasks in an office."
Preach, Ms. Rudolph!
She contends that the only way to save America's public schools is to "give birth, much like during the era of Reconstruction, to a new educational and economic civilization."
Or, we could heed what billionaire Warren Buffett told Michelle Rhee: The only way to fix public education, he said, is to outlaw private education.
The law requires that children attend school. So require them to attend public schools. Imagine public schools having the attention of every CEO, millionaire, politician and principal. I told you the only problem America has ever had is segregation.
Remember how Vietnam was a gnat that most of America ignored until the Defense Department needed more troops and started drafting more than poor black and white boys from the South?
Then the antiwar effort really kicked in.
Teachers' voices getting lostIn the battle to improve America's schools, the voices getting heard the least are those of the best teachers on the planet.
For me, it was science teacher Ronnie Daughtry and advanced English teacher Viola Babcock and social studies teacher Archie Moseley, who taught not just social studies, but taught us to love and understand how the world worked. And there was Harry Amana, my news-writing instructor who became my lifelong friend.
None of them taught because they couldn't be scientists or writers or journalists. They taught because they loved it -- and they were good at it.
Thinking of them made it easy to see Johnson's point that teachers who fight for small classes and clean, safe buildings are fighting for children, too.
"If a child goes into a school that is filthy and infested with vermin, you're telling that child that they are less-than," Johnson said.
And that is why every teacher I've ever known has bought more paper towels and cleanser than I have in my lifetime.
All that said, Johnson is clear: Tenure does not grant every teacher a lifetime job.
"It is as not as clear as Michelle Rhee wants to paint the picture," Johnson said. "We are a union of professionals, and we don't want people in our profession who aren't good at it. We want teachers to be evaluated fairly. We want administrators to do their due diligence."
Johnson does agree with Rhee and most education advocates -- and with me -- on two things: The children must come first and, besides Papa, education needs a brand new bag.
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