Like most union-dominated workplaces, the New York City Department of Education maintains strict seniority rules. No matter how great or bad you are, if you are a first year teacher your job is in jeopardy.  During my first couple of years, I was definitely low man on the totem pole, which meant that at least three times I was in real danger of losing my job.  Once, only a last minute sabbatical by a senior teacher saved me: I found out I would be returning for the school year about a week before the school year began.

This always struck me as unjust. No doubt, there were some incredible older teachers.  But there were just as many who were bad or simply mediocre.  Not only were these lifers immune from firing, they also were paid (at the time) something like triple my salary.

The truly talentless and the obtuse among the senior teachers insisted on giving low grades, arbitrarily favoring certain students and living on the edge as administrators tried (and generally failed) to remove them.  But they were always a minority. 

More interesting were the bulk of the old timers; many of whom had developed tricks that allowed them to thrive—tactics that kept criticism at bay.  One teacher concocted a system in which he divided all of his students into groups and had them writing their own constitutions and designing their own cities for government class.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  Creative education at its best.  But this system was created so that he could read the Village Voice at his desk while his students ostensibly did their assigned tasks.  What really happened was discussion of the dismal prospects of the Knicks and gossip on who was dating whom.  He even solved the problem of grading: he gave each team a certain number of points and then they were responsible for grading themselves.  Everyone got a 91. The only work that was ever submitted were papers written by each group.  After this particular teacher retired, I taught a class in his old room. After the day was done, in his abandoned closet, I discovered boxes and boxes of dusty and totally ungraded papers.

The longer I spend inside the system, the more convinced I become that everyone’s a running a racket.  Whether it’s the teacher who gives all of his students a base grade of 93, or the one who has student monitors grade all her papers, it seems like very few people are actually working. Do they know something I don’t?  Why are there so few old and good teachers? They are out there, but they are a small band. 

The fact is that many “seasoned” educators know that so long as they give high enough grades, they can float by.  This is the reason why the proposed legislation to end teacher tenure is so threatening.

In “Last Teacher in, First Out,” New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina—who is really working the Ed Reform Beat—goes into some of the reactions to this idea.  Teachers everywhere are angry and upset about the prospect that the sacrosanct rules of tenure might be threatened. 

But really, the odds of passage are grim:

“[The legislation] wasn’t just dead on arrival, it was dead before it was put in the mail,” [State Senator Eric] Schneiderman said of the legislation. “It does open the conversation about how to ensure there are quality teachers, but the idea of giving the administration total discretion to pick and choose who is fired with no standards is not going to fly.”

The truth is that I really don’t know what to think.  I hate tenure and I hate seniority as a concept.  I do believe that principals should be able to fire whomever they want and pay teachers for merit, not years in the system.  But how can I ensure that the principals are good?  Many of them are walking examples of the Peter Principle. 

I like to think of myself as a good teacher.  I spent the whole day grading papers in a Starbucks next to a bearded man who reeked of Nag Champa and Clamato instead of playing with my kids.  

What do those old schemers know that I don’t know?

I’m in a PHD program, and a lot of my peers are worried about their prospects.  There are so few academic jobs out there, they’ll need to take whatever is offered to them.  And then there is the struggle for tenure—they’ll be expected to publish articles, write books and kiss senior faculty ass simultaneously.  How funny!  As a New York City public school teacher, I received tenure automatically after three years.  I am basically unfireable.

And this is not a good thing. A study by the New Teacher Project called “The Widget Effect,” notes that  ”less than 1% of teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools where students fail to meet basic academic standards, year after year.” It goes on to note that in Los Angeles (to give just one example), less that 2% of tenure applications are denied—even though the percentage of students dropping out is 35%

In her New York Times piece, “Progress Slow in City Goal to Fire Bad Teachers,” Jennifer Medina shows that despite strong efforts from schools chancellor Joel Klein—including the creation of a special Teacher Performance Unit, the city has only managed to fire only three teachers for incompetence.

Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, said that the team, whose annual budget is $1 million, had been “successful at a far too modest level” but that it was “an attempt to work around a broken system.”

Anyone who has ever spent anytime kicking a can down the halls of a New York City public school knows that a significant percentage of all teachers are incompetent—just as a significant percentage of all workers in all areas of the economy are incompetent.  But unlike most other areas of the economy, New York City has agreed (under duress from the union) to a cumbersome firing and arbitration process that makes it almost impossible to get poor educators out of the classroom.

Medina’s piece shows how hard it is to remove teachers for plain old incompetence, as opposed to misconduct.  It’s not exciting for arbitrators to have to sit through observation report after observation report listing typos and misinformation spread by bad teachers.  Indeed, it is so hard to find qualified and interested arbitrators that the panel meets only five days a month.

This is not to say that it is any easier way to remove teachers who are engaged in misconduct.  They are out there as well, causing even more problems.

The real tragedy is that the biggest victims of teacher incompetence and misconduct are students who are from disadvantaged backgrounds.  They are less likely to push administrators for transfers into better classrooms and are less likely expect good teaching as a right.  And yet these are the groups that need good teachers more than anyone.

Easy tenure was great for me, but it’s not great for the schools, the city or the nation.  At some point, some courageous reformer is going to have to end this ridiculous process. Everyone should have to worry about keeping their job—especially teachers.