Patrick McGuinn - The Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative has begun a long-overdue debate on how to improve state systems of teacher evaluation and tenure.

The Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative has begun a long-overdue debate on how to improve state systems of teacher evaluation and tenure.

Instituted during the early part of the 20th century, tenure systems established a set of guidelines to protect teachers from the arbitrary, unfair, and often discriminatory dismissal practices that were common in local schools. While these due process protections remain necessary today, their expansion over time has made it so difficult and costly for districts to dismiss tenured teachers that they now rarely attempt to do so, even when serious concerns about a teacher’s effectiveness arise.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2007-08 Schools and Staffing SurveyRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader reveal that, on average, districts dismiss or decline to renew only 2.1 percent of teachers (tenured and nontenured) for poor performance each year. The extremely low rates of dismissal for tenured teachers, and the fact that dismissal is generally pursued for egregious conduct violations rather than performance, mean that tenured teachers in most states enjoy the functional equivalence of employment for life.

This problem is further compounded by the fact that the process for granting tenure is itself fundamentally broken, as it has become virtually automatic and almost entirely disconnected from any meaningful assessment of a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom. In 2008, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave 41 statesRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader failing grades for their tenure policies, while nine other states were given a grade of D. Not a single state in the country had even “partly” met the goal of developing a “meaningful” tenure-decisionmaking process by the council’s definition. It concluded: “Tenure should be a significant and consequential milestone in a teacher’s career. Unfortunately, the awarding of tenure occurs virtually automatically in just about all states, with little deliberation or consideration of evidence of teacher performance.”