Many articles and books are written about how tenure or a particular union rule or regulation gets in the way of giving youngsters a good education. People find stories on this theme very satisfying, but when you look at the stories closely, they often turn out to be just plain wrong.
For years, we've heard that tenure merely protects incompetence, and getting rid of it would be a major step toward improving U.S. schools. But people who talk about how destructive tenure is don't ask themselves why teachers in all the other industrial democracies-Germany, France, Sweden, Japan- where students do much better than ours, have job protection that is stronger than our tenure system. They also fail to ask whether schools in the states where there is no tenure ( or collective bargaining) -- Texas and Mississippi, for example-are better than schools in New York or Connecticut where teachers are protected by both. And they don't ask why students in private and parochial schools, where there is no tenure, achieve no better than kids in public schools.
Recently, there was a story about how a union rule was about to devastate a class of elementary school children by taking their beloved teacher away from them in the middle of the year (New York Times, January 19, 1993). The headline read, "A Hard Lesson in Living with Seniority Rules." But the writer would have been closer to the truth if he had titled the story, "Children and Teachers Suffer When Principal and Superintendent Break Rules." What happened?
New York City principals set the requirements for certain special jobs in their schools. But if several people meet their qualifications, a job has to go to the applicant with the most seniority.
Before the union negotiated this rule, who got one of these jobs was a matter of the principal's judgment. Sometimes it was good and sometimes bad -- like anybody else's. However, there were plenty of cases where a principal turned down a teacher who was very well qualified but happened to, disagree with him-or when the job got awarded to one of the principal's friends.
What happened in the recent New York City case was that two applicants met the qualifications established by the principal, but the principal and the district superintendent decided to violate the contract and give the job to the less senior applicant. So in September, each of the teachers was assigned to the class that the other one should have gotten. The senior teacher filed a grievance.
When the Times picked up the story, the chancellor had vindicated the senior teacher-as the principal and district superintendent had known he would from the beginning-but the school year was half over. The students and their parents were distraught at the idea of losing teachers with whom the kids had developed very close rapport and the union was being cast as the culprit. The story does not point out that the principal and the superintendent knew what the rule was when they made their decision and that they were willing to use the kids in a struggle to show who was boss. The children could have been hurt, but the chancellor and the union resolved the problem to everybody's satisfaction.
Union contract rules don't always result in the best person's getting the job, but giving the principal absolute power doesn't either, As long as schools are organized like factories, with the principal as boss, teachers will negotiate rules that protect them by limiting the principal's power. The way out of this situation is not to return to giving principals absolute power but to move away from the factory model of schooling.
This is what happened several years ago in Rochester. There was a struggle between the teachers' union and the board of education over an issue similar to the one in New York City. According to the contract, teachers with the greatest seniority had the right to transfer to vacant positions in other schools. The board argued, however, that the senior teacher is not always the one best fitted to do the job in a particular school and that the principal should make the decision. The union countered that principals couldn't be trusted because they often decided on the basis of school politics and favoritism.
The dispute was resolved when both sides abandoned their positions and agreed to the establishment of committee in each school made up of teachers and the principal. A committee's job would be to assess the needs of its school and, in the event of Applications for A transfer, decide which teacher best met these needs. Having a committee make decisions based on a school needs is clearly superior to a mechanical union rule or the absolute rule of the principal.