Lisa Zhu | Taking on tenure

As 2008 slowly winds to a close, few Americans are optimistic about their year-end bonuses. But if you're a teacher in a Washington, D.C. public school, there may be good news. In the policy recently proposed by school district Chancellor Michelle Rhee, teachers could earn raises of up to $40,000 - in exchange for giving up tenure for a year. Although this policy could succeed in reducing the number of incompetent instructors, firing bad teachers may not be enough to fully address the challenges facing inner-city educational systems.

Essentially, teachers who opt for the raise would be evaluated throughout the year, after which principals would either recommend that they stay or dismiss them outright. Even those who decide to retain their tenure will receive higher salaries (though not as generous as under the first option) but lose their seniority rights when transferring to other schools.

This debate over tenure wouldn't go very far in Philadelphia.

"In the state of Pennsylvania, tenure is a part of state law," said Philadelphia Federation of Teachers spokeswoman Barbara Goodman. "It has nothing to do with the union contracts, so tenure itself is not up for negotiation." But regardless of its applicability to Philadelphia, the proposal certainly raises interesting questions about how to address education reform in urban neighborhoods.

Originally, tenure was established in order to protect teachers from biased firings. "The problem was that teachers felt very vulnerable," said Urban Studies professor Elaine Simon. "They didn't have security in their jobs not so much because of the quality of their work, but because there might be retaliation in their workplace."

For younger teachers like Penn alumnus Thaddeus Duprey, tenure isn't a big deal. However, "being at a school where I see lots of people that are career educators, I can probably recognize the importance of tenure to them. This is their life blood.

But in a small minority of cases, tenure has deviated from its original purpose by preventing unmotivated or incompetent ones from being fired. "There are 55,000 teachers in the New York City school district, and last year, 10 were fired," Duprey said. "When they are fired, it's at a cost on average of $219,000 [per teacher]."

Yet, eliminating ineffective teachers is only one variable in the complicated equation of urban education reform. For one thing, what happens after these bad eggs have been weeded out? Indeed, Philly's school district had 166 vacancies at the beginning of the school year with 100 vacancies still left three months later - and that's without any change in tenure policy. Conventional wisdom would say that you can't replace something with nothing. Given this preexisting shortage of teachers in inner-city school districts, it's unlikely that every bad teacher fired will automatically be replaced with a Michelle Pfeiffer from Dangerous Minds.

In other words, talking so extensively about firing teachers doesn't make much sense unless you're talking just as much about hiring and retaining teachers. It's the latter portion that's the tricky part. To keep good teachers, administrators can establish professional learning communities within a school that prevent teacher burn-out and generate mutual trust. Additionally, Philadelphia recently implemented several pay incentives in hard-to-teach schools and in subject areas with a severe teacher shortage.

Even so, these changes won't add up if teaching continues to offer the same low level of prestige and pay. As innovative as Rhee's plan may be, her pay increase for teachers isn't a sustainable option. "She doesn't have guaranteed funding, and there certainly isn't the money in the regular budget to keep that going," Simon said. To fix inner-city schools, it's going to take a complete overhaul of our national educational structure, as well as the way society perceives the profession. This of course, begs the question - how on Earth are we going to pay for this?

Consider this response: A report cited by a November New York Times article stated, "If American students did as well as those in several Asian countries in math and science, our economy would grow 20 percent faster." Talk about an economic stimulus.

Lisa Zhu is a Wharton and College senior from Cherry Hill, N.J., and United Minorities Council chairwoman. Her e-mail is zhu@dailypennsylvanian.com. Zhu-ology appears every Thursday.

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