Tenure laws need serious reforms

Have you heard about Charlene Schmitz?

Former teacher Charlene Schmitz is behind bars in a federal detention center in Tallahassee, Florida, serving 10 years for using texts and instant messages to seduce a 14-year-old student.

She has been fired from her job as a reading teacher at the high school in Leroy, Alabama.

Good for them.  Fire her.  That’ll teach her a lesson.  But wait!

But she is still collecting a paycheck.

Schmitz is appealing her federal conviction — and her firing. State charges filed in connection with the case are pending. Under the law in Alabama, she is still entitled to her $51,000-a-year salary while she appeals her firing.

She was convicted back in February of 2008 and yet she is still being paid.  So much for that lesson.

Get this:

Three weeks after her conviction, the school board sent the tenured reading teacher a notice of its intent to terminate her. The school board officially fired Schmitz at a meeting in late March.

Three weeks to send her a notice! I’d have had the letter handed to her on her way out of the courtroom.

Who do we have to thank for this abomination?  The AEA and its stooges in the Alabama legislature.

The Alabama Teacher Tenure Law, meant to protect tenured teachers from unfair firings, gives them a chance to appeal their firings with the board. A change made to the law in 2004 requires the board to continue paying Schmitz until her employment appeal is heard and decided by an arbitrator.

According to the Mobile Press-Register, if Schmitz can extend her appeals out another two and a half years “she’ll be able to retire and enjoy pension benefits for life.”

Former two-year chancellor and current gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne called it “the ultimate example of a bad tenure law.”  I went back and looked through the awful Alabama legislative database and identified the changes to law in question from 2004: HB42 sponsored by Terry Spicer (D).  The bill passed easily.  It cleared the House 96 to 1 and passed the Senate by a vote of 27 to 8.  Then Senator Byrne was one of the eight to vote against the changes.  He had sponsored his own bill (SB272) to reform the state’s tenure law and fought (unsuccessfully) to have Spicer’s bill changed.

I don’t understand tenure laws.  I understand why they exist – because the powerful teachers unions demand and get absurd levels of job protection for their employees.  But I just don’t understand how the public abides by them.  They do nothing to promote quality education.  Tenure laws allow teachers to simply retire in place without recourse.  Or get convicted and keep getting paychecks.

They also force school boards to make fiscally asinine personnel decisions when times get tough.  I’ve addressed this before.  If the schools were a business and their business model was to keep only the most expensive labor without regard to merit when slashing payroll then they would go out of business.  Somehow the public has allowed this farce to be repeated throughout the country, though.

Right now in LA, which of course has screwed up tenure laws, they may lose up to 40% of the staff at some inner city schools.  Why?  Here’s how the AP article answered that question:

District officials acknowledge staff turnover is a problem at certain schools and that layoffs will cut into the hires — including those who request to work in urban areas — that the district has worked hard to recruit in recent years.

Translation: it sucks to work in dangerous inner city schools.  By the time teachers acquire tenure they probably have families and want to work and live in safe environments so they migrate to safer schools.  Young teachers without families who want to work hard and make a difference take jobs in the inner city schools.  Then when the budgets are lean the schools fire these motivated teachers because they don’t have tenure.  Stupid.  Just plain stupid.  And the big losers are the kids in rough areas, punished by laws sought out by the teachers unions that don’t give two rips about actually teaching kids.  Job preservation is the primary goal.  The second goal is getting as great a percentage of education dollars as possible allocated to teacher pay and benefits.  Educating children is not on the agenda.

Tenure laws make it prohibitively expensive and time consuming – effectively impossible – to fire teachers from coast to coast.  John Stossel has reported on the labyrinthine process required to fire bad teachers in New York while a similarly tortuous path can also be found in Los Angeles.

Why should teachers enjoy such special job protections not afforded to employees in other professions?  I just want someone to answer that very simple question.  I believe we’ll get a better education system when the employees understand that they have to perform their duties well to stay employed.  Seems pretty simple to me.