Teacher tenure is depicted by critics as the villain in attempts to improve education. Yes, there have been abuses, but there’s another side of the story that deserves telling (“Dear Mr. Chancellor, please stop the grade-fixing in NYC schools,” New York Post, Apr. 14). It has to do with wholesale grade-fixing fraud orchestrated by the principal at John Dewey High School in the New York City system.
When Kathleen Elvin became principal in 2012, she launched “Project Graduation” in an attempt to boost the graduation rate. Aside from shortchanging students through credit recovery courses, she retaliated against unwilling teachers by giving them the lowest rating of “ineffective.” Two teachers blew the whistle, which eventually led to an audit by the state Education Department confirming the fraud. But the Board of Regents has never held any guilty party accountable.
Here’s my point: If the teachers who exposed this scandal did not possess tenure, they would have been fired under some trumped-up charge. Even with the existence of tenure, teachers are still harassed by abusive principals. But at least they still have their jobs. Exemplary reputations do not protect teachers from such abuse. What puzzles me in this case is that the two whistleblowers say the United Federation of Teachers failed to support their cause. Bully principals are nothing new. I’ve written before about the situation several years ago at Brooklyn Tech, an elite high school in the New York City system.
If tenure were abolished, how many teachers would be willing to expose similar scandals? Tenure merely guarantees that teachers receive due-process protection. It’s important to keep that in mind as pressure mounts to eliminate it or gut it. As Sir William Blackstone wrote in 1765: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
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