Garden State Teachers Who Won’t Leave
How hard is it to get rid of tenured teachers, even when they don’t deserve their tenure? In New Jersey, Chris Christie actually tried.
He actually had some success with his program—TEACHNJ—but the operative word is some. “In considering whether TEACHNJ affected the number of New Jersey teachers removed from the classroom, The Press Atlantic City found that of the 37 tenure cases heard in the first two years after TEACHNJ was implemented, the teacher was let go in 23 of them (62 percent),” Michael Jones writes in a policy analysis published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this month. “In 13 of the cases (35 percent), the arbitrator reduced the teacher’s penalty or dismissed the charge and returned the teacher to the classroom.”
“In the first two years of reform, TEACHNJ increased the number of ineffective tenured teacher dismissals from two per year to just over 10 per year.”
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Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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