Tenure may be the new panacea for solving teacher quality problems. Researchers like Tom Kane, Robert Gordon and Eric Hanushek are all making a steady and convincing case that a system predicated on predicting a future teacher’s effectiveness is akin to chasing fool’s gold. They argue that the real hope for raising the quality of the teaching force is to put up few barriers at the point when teachers enter the profession but then to take tenure decisions (usually taking place after two to three years) much more seriously.
Economists Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen (who happens to be a finalist in NCTQ’s upcoming collective bargaining research competition) contributed an exceptionally useful paper on the topic at
While these results may be fodder for both sides of the debate over using test scores to judge teacher performance, we argue that the results are pretty good for having used a single measure to judge performance. Coupled with the additional knowledge gained by multiple evaluations over the same period, there is every reason for districts to make harder and more meaningful decisions about which teachers should earn tenure.