Understanding Tenure Reform: An Examination of Sense-Making Among School Administrators and Teachers

Background Since 2015, 23 states have issued a variety of reforms to the teacher tenure process. Many of these reforms have made it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure, either by extending the pre-tenure probation period or requiring some form of evidence of teacher performance. How educators and school leaders make sense of changes to tenure-granting policies likely transforms their perceptions of the teaching profession and has ramifications for staffing practices in schools. However, little research has sought to understand how states and districts have implemented tenure reform, how educators make sense of these reforms, and how teacher and school leaders’ understanding of changes to tenure statutes influence school practice and staff relations. Focus of Study The purpose of this study is to explore the sensemaking process of school stakeholders most directly affected by changes to teacher tenure policies—teachers and school leaders. To this end, this study examines the referential cues on which school staff tend to rely to understand tenure reform as well as their collective accounts of how reform translates into changes within the context of their work. Setting and Participants: Participants in this study included 30 pre-tenured teachers and 10 school leaders across 10 school sites within a single large, urban district in Tennessee. Research Design In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants during the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years. Transcripts of interviews were coded for recurring themes to address the research questions of the study. Conclusions/Recommendations Findings illustrate how school leaders relied on outdated state and district supports, while teachers referenced peer interactions to make sense of tenure reform. In addition, school leaders considered the enacted reforms an improvement to the previous tenure process, however, few school leaders indicated that tenure reform influenced teacher staffing and professional development within their schools. Teachers suggested tenure reform provided a sensible form of professional accountability in theory but was nevertheless undermined by a lack of communication, administrative support, and conflicting policy aims in practice. Findings highlight the robustness of peer networks in teacher sensemaking. More generally, this research has implications for the implementation of concurrent policy initiatives within schools and future directions for research on distributed and fragmented sensemaking.

Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

Background/Context The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. Despite mounting attention to the problem of online misinformation and growing agreement that digital literacy efforts are important, prior research offers few concrete ideas about what skilled evaluations look like. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Our purpose in this study was to seek out those who are skilled in online evaluations in order to understand how their strategies and approaches to evaluating digital content might inform educational efforts. We sampled 45 experienced users of the Internet: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. Analysis focused on the strategies participants used to evaluate online information and arrive at judgments of credibility. Research Design In this expert/novice study, participants thought aloud as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues such as bullying, minimum wage, and teacher tenure. We analyze and present findings from three of the tasks participants completed. Findings/Results Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time. Conclusions/Recommendations We draw on insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices to examine current curricular approaches to teaching web credibility as well as to suggest alternatives.

Pennsylvania’s Teachers and the Tenure Law of 1937

While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers’ job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers’ organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia’s AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania’s teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.

Teacher Tenure in Tennessee: An Examination of Principal Perceptions Post–Race to the Top

This quantitative study examined perceptions of K-12 public school principals toward the Tennessee teacher tenure law under Senate Bill 1528 and how principals perceived that the law has affected their ability to evaluate and retain effective teachers. The Tennessee Teacher Tenure Principal Perception Survey was adopted and slightly modified from Davidson’s (1998) study of principal perceptions of teacher tenure in Tennessee. Quantitative results found that principals characterized the teacher tenure law as having a positive impact on their ability to evaluate and retain effective teachers. Results from this study highlight that future research and reform should focus on the use of stakeholder and principal perception data in policy initiatives and education agendas at the school building, community, and state levels.

Causal Stories inVergara v. California

In 2012, families in California filed a lawsuit alleging that five state statutes governing teacher tenure, dismissal, and seniority together violate the state constitution’s requirements for equal protection. Central to the case were competing narratives about the relationship between these statutes, the work of teachers, and the achievement of students. This article analyzes those narratives utilizing the trial court transcripts and judicial opinions in Vergara v. California. We find that despite reaching divergent rulings, the trial and appellate courts provided highly typified accounts of the case—ones that emphasized individual agency and dismissed or deemphasized the importance of the social and political context of schooling. These findings are important for understanding how complex policy debates become transformed within legal proceedings and for understanding the capacity of courts to engage complex evidence and narratives—a major issue given that courts remain an important venue for school reform.

Highlighted & Underlined

Writing in the New York Times, Susan Cain warns against the constant glorification of leadership, arguing that the country needs good followers. Now more than ever, argue Harvard researchers, the public schools must be steadfast in their commitment to providing all children and not just the privileged few with meaningful opportunities to learn deeply. A study reports on the decline of teacher tenure in Louisiana. A new initiative offers guidance to prevent bullying in schools.

Teacher’s Attitudes towards Educational Technology in English Language Institutes

The issue of attitude towards technology is not a new one; it has been around since computers were first placed in the classroom. There appears to be a positive attitude towards technology, so researchers aimed to seek out new information in an effort to find the relationship among teachers’ tenure, age, educational level, experience and teachers’ attitude toward technology. The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitude towards technology among teachers working in several institutes in Mazandaran. A total of 100 teachers including 38 males and 62 females, ranging in age from 22 to 50 and 20 to 42 respectively completed a survey. The non-parametric Spearman Rank-Order Correlation was used to find the relationship between the variables. The result of the research questions showed that: (1) there was a statistically significant relationship between teacher experience and attitude toward technology, (2) there was a statistically significant relationship between teacher tenure and attitude towards technology, and (3) there was a statistically significant relationship between teacher age and attitude toward technology.

Productivity and Selection of Human Capital with Machine Learning

Economists have become increasingly interested in studying the nature of production functions in social policy applications, with the goal of improving productivity. Traditionally models have assumed workers are homogenous inputs. However, in practice, substantial variability in productivity means the marginal productivity of labor depends substantially on which new workers are hired--which requires not an estimate of a causal effect, but rather a prediction. We demonstrate that there can be large social welfare gains from using machine learning tools to predict worker productivity, using data from two important applications - police hiring and teacher tenure decisions.