>Calls mount for a N.J. tenure system based on teacher skills
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Last updated: Sunday August 22, 2010, 12:03 PM
BY LESLIE BRODY
The Record
STAFF WRITER
https://www.northjersey.com/news/101245949_Only_two_teachers_removed_for_inability_to_teach.html
The New Jersey education commissioner dismissed only two teachers for poor performance in the last two years.
That’s out of roughly 116,000 public school teachers.
Revoking tenure is such an arduous undertaking that school officials are usually reluctant to pursue it unless a teacher is clearly insubordinate or dangerous. The process can drag on for years and cost a district hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Leaders in New Jersey and across the nation, all the way up to President Obama, say they want to make it easier to weed out teachers who don’t help students learn, while rewarding superb educators and helping teachers with potential to improve.
The National Council on Teacher Quality says the skill levels of the teacher workforce follow a bell curve: About 15 percent are ineffective, 15 percent are highly effective, and most are somewhere in the middle. Still, few teachers are pushed out. Nationally, districts dismiss only about 2.1 percent of teachers each year for poor performance, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
“Our children have a right to have a great teacher in the classroom,” said New Jersey Education Commissioner Bret Schundler. “No one has a right to a job where their performance doesn’t matter.”
Yet even when a teacher is accused of beating students, it can be expensive and time-consuming to dismiss him.
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