Opinion: Taking an Incremental Approach to Tenure Reform

By Laura Waters

[Laura Waters has been president of the Lawrence Township School Board in Mercer County for six years. She also blogs about New Jersey education policy and politics at NJLeftBehind.com. A former instructor at SUNY Binghamton in a program that served educationally disadvantaged students from New York's inner cities, she holds a Ph.D. in early American literature from Binghamton.]

Over the past eighteen months, as Sen. Teresa Ruiz’s tenure reform bill has run the gauntlet of legislative hearings, lobbying by interest groups, and input from stakeholders, New Jersey has been harshly schooled in how much can be accomplished in the arena of education reform. Just call us “incrementalist.” 

In fact, a long-running debate in education circles across the country is whether substantive change is best achieved incrementally or boldly. One lesson for bystanders during these intense months of consensus-building and compromise is that New Jersey is far more amenable to small steps rather than long strides.

Consider that exemplar of long strides: LIFO, the child-unfriendly practice of laying off teachers by years served rather than classroom effectiveness. Treasured by union officials and disparaged by reform types, LIFO was slated for complete elimination in the original version of Senate Bill S1455. Then this past March, at a meeting of the Senate Education Committee, word slipped out that current teachers would be grandfathered in and only new hires would be unprotected by seniority during layoffs. Last week another iteration of the legislation made no reference to LIFO at all. Score one for incrementalism.

However, Bill S1455 ties teacher evaluations to “multiple measures” of student outcomes and significantly expedites the process of firing ineffective tenured teachers. Not quite a stride, but surely a large step in the direction of education reform for a set of protections once shielded by NJEA’s force field.

If the evolution of Ruiz’s bill is any indication, New Jersey is all about incrementalism. We’re not Colorado, where a Democratically controlled legislature passed a tenure law (SB 191) last year that bases 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluations on student test scores, eliminates LIFO, and implements mutual consent (in the case of a transfer, both principal and teacher must agree on the placement).

Nor are we Illinois which, under Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, passed a bipartisan bill backed by the teachers union which eliminates LIFO and requires that districts consider student growth as a “significant factor” in teaching evaluations. Or Indiana, Michigan, Utah, Tennessee, Florida -- all long-stride states.

(To be fair, we’re also not Connecticut, where the Governor swung wide on a tenure reform bill and then pulled back. Months of politicking yielded no change in, for example, Hartford’s policy of using social security numbers as a tie-breaker during layoffs when two teachers have accumulated equal seniority.)

This past January Gov. Chris Christie thundered in his State of the State speech, "It is time to end the system of last-in/first-out, which protects some of the worst and penalizes some of the best.”

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