A lot of Americans are understandably dissatisfied with the state of our educational system. Some of the problems stem from unworkable and unenforceable laws that demand much more than they can fund. Others stem from a system that is entrenched in its own habits—both good and bad—that typically take a generation to change.
As friendly debate gradually gives way to heated argument and battle, reformers grasp at straws, looking for the silver bullet that will end all of our problems and usher in a new era of prosperity. One of those straws is the role of seniority/tenure in the hiring and retention of teachers.
Opponents of tenure are quick to point to anecdotal evidence of bad teachers who are difficult or impossible to get rid of. In a nation with over 90,000 schools in more than 13,000 school districts, there are bound to be some bad teachers who are entrenched in the system. It would not be difficult for most people to come up with an example. However, if you think of the three or four best teachers you or your children have had in school, chances are that every one of them had at least five and more likely ten or more years of experience.
If you were to think of teachers you or your children have had who were in their first year of teaching, chances are they weren’t very good. Some have stuck with teaching and have gone on to become good or even great teachers. Others decided after a year or two that teaching wasn’t for them. But in general, almost all teachers do a poor job their first year.
This is not surprising. First-year teachers have little experience in the classroom. They haven’t yet learned what’s in the curriculum, how to teach it, or what aspects students will struggle with. They haven’t yet learned how to reach their students, how to manage them individually and as a whole class, how to grade them, and how to motivate them. They don’t yet have a flash drive (or a file cabinet) filled with assignments, activities and tests to draw from. Or, if an experienced teacher bequeathed them a stack of materials, they aren’t familiar enough with the materials to be able to make good use of them. They have a mentor, but they don’t yet know what questions to ask, or what to do with the answers. In other words, they don’t have experience.
I was a poor teacher in my first year. I didn’t get much help from my mentor, but I read everything I could find about teaching, relating to students, finding their strengths, reaching them, motivating them, and managing them. I didn’t have access to worksheets or a teacher’s edition of the textbook in my first year, so other than lab experiments, I created my own teaching materials. The experience of creating my own materials was valuable, but most of the worksheets themselves got substantially rewritten in year two, and again in year three. By year four, I was finally keeping more than I was rewriting. In my second year, I was at best a mediocre teacher. By my third year I was beginning to see myself start to become the teacher I wanted to be.
The teachers who started teaching at the same time I did followed a similar progression, except that most of them have had better access to teaching materials. They were also poor teachers in their first years, but by year three had begun to hit their stride. Now, almost a decade later, many of those same colleagues have become sought-after experienced chemistry or biology teachers in their respective schools.
I was a career changer. I started teaching at age 38, after spending thirteen years working in industry. In 2003, there were a multitude of initiatives for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professionals to become teachers. At that time, the conventional wisdom was that content was everything—teachers who were weak in their subject areas were being vilified, and a professional who knew the content well was sure to be a better teacher than a teacher who had been sheltered in a classroom. We were encouraged to take the teacher tests and go straight into the classroom, bypassing the practicum (student teaching) and education classes. We replaced experienced teachers, some of whom were given incentives to retire early or were otherwise forced out.
Unfortunately, this experiment failed miserably. Many of the STEM professionals found that they had absolutely no idea how to manage a class or how to communicate anything in a way that high school students could make sense of. Some didn’t even last a month. Some were gone within 90 days. Others stuck it out for a year or two and then left the profession. For those of us who stayed with it, we found that teaching science is a completely different skillset from understanding science or doing science in a pharmaceutical laboratory. Students who were subjected to these career-changing STEM professionals struggled and performed poorly compared with the students who had the experienced teachers they replaced.
Now that I am in my tenth year of teaching, the value of experience is clear. Every good teacher I know is an experienced teacher. And most of the experienced teachers I know are good teachers. Studies have shown that while teacher effectiveness increases most during the first three years, it continues to increase steadily for another twenty years. Reformers who have little or no understanding of how education works want to take experience out of hiring decisions. Unfortunately, the remaining methods of evaluation they have to work with, such as student achievement on standardized tests, are related to so many factors that it is much more difficult to relate the results to a single teacher.
This is not to say that hiring decisions should be based only on longevity. However, I believe it is an equally serious mistake to take longevity out of the equation entirely. If we want the best teachers, we need to start by looking at the teachers who have the most experience and then apply any other criteria that we feel are important.
