October 18, 2010 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Amelia Island, Fla.
For many donors who want to improve the education system, the question isn’t whether teacher tenure needs to be abolished but how to do so.
In a session at the Philanthropy Roundtable’s annual conference entitled “How to End Teacher Tenure,” nonprofit leaders discussed how philanthropic dollars could be spent to help get rid of teacher tenure, which protects teachers from arbitrary dismissal.
Critics of tenure for public schoolteachers argue that it has made removing bad teachers far too difficult, if not impossible.
Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit in Brooklyn, N.Y., that recruits and trains teachers to work in needy schools, said that making teachers more accountable won’t happen until there are good data to evaluate teacher performance. Collecting such data have been a focus of his organization and others.
“If we want to change the culture and make it more performance-oriented, the key point is that we have to generate information about performance that means something,” he said. “Until we have real information on teacher performance that we can employ in this conversation, we’re just arguing with one another and chasing our tail.”
Mr. Daly’s message to philanthropists was to support forward-thinking, risky projects. He noted that philanthropist Donald Fisher, a co-founder of The Gap, took a risk in helping Michelle Rhee start the New Teacher Project. Ms. Rhee, who served most recently as the chancellor of Washington public schools, was then in her 20s and had never run an organization.
“Fund things that are anticipatory,” Mr. Daly said. “Don’t look at the landscape today, look where it’s going.”
He also urged philanthropists to focus more on designing policies and programs that school districts could adopt, such as evaluation systems for teachers and teacher-training efforts.
“We should have lots of shops out there that are feeding ideas to districts,” Mr. Daly said.
“We’ve funded organizations really well,” he continued. “There’s been a real focus on brands and names. We really need to move past that and focus on funding design work.”
Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, in New York, said that attacking the teachers’ unions isn’t the best approach for ending tenure.
“I don’t think that just pummeling the unions into the ground and hoping they are going to go away on this is the most surefire way,” he said.
He talked about a law that passed this spring in Colorado; both his group and Mr. Daly’s were involved in helping to shape it. The law doesn’t get rid of tenure outright, but it links teachers’ right to keep tenure with the academic progress of their students. That kind of legislation, which allows the teachers’ unions to hold onto tenure as a bargaining chip but still makes teachers accountable for their performance, may be a more practical approach, Mr. Williams said.
But Richard Berman, who heads the public-relations firm Berman and Company, in Washington, argued that people who care about the issue need to be much more aggressive. (Mr. Berman also runs the Center for Union Facts, a nonprofit that gathers information about teachers’ unions and runs campaigns attacking them.)
The movie Waiting for Superman, a new documentary that portrays teacher tenure in a negative light, is generating sympathy for the issue, he said, but that sympathy isn’t enough to influence public opinion.
Instead, he called on people trying to change the system to employ “fear and anger,” which, he said, “stays with people longer.”
Mr. Berman said that donors and nonprofits need to make education reform an economic issue. He said they ought to help make the case that the poor education system, and tenure, are leading to the “hollowing out of the intellectual capital of this country,” which will cripple business and America’s standing in the world.
Patricia Levesque, executive director of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, in Tallahassee, talked about what her organization learned in its efforts this year to pass legislation that would have gotten rid of tenure for newly hired teachers and linked pay to students’ test scores.
The legislation cleared both the state’s house of representatives and senate but was then vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
Ms. Levesque said advocates of the bill made several mistakes, including taking on too much. In addition to dealing with tenure and pay, the bill would have given the state authority to shut down colleges of education if they didn’t perform well, among other changes.
Her advice to donors: support bold messaging campaigns, policy work, and advocacy. “That’s where you’ll help spread the impact of the programs you’re funding,” Ms. Levesque said.
