The need for teacher tenure reform

My remarks, as sub­mit­ted, May 2, 2011 to the Michi­gan State Sen­ate Edu­ca­tion Com­mit­tee in sup­port of pro­posed tenure reform leg­is­la­tion. An abridged ver­sion of these remarks were pre­sented to the com­mit­tee on May4, 2011 in Lans­ing, MI.

Hello, I am Matthew Patul­ski, a proud par­ent of a first grader and 4th grader at North Park Montes­sori Acad­emy in the Grand Rapids Pub­lic Schools. I am here today to speak to the chal­lenges of retain­ing and train­ing teach­ers in spe­cial­ized pro­grams such as Montessori.

The Montes­sori Method is a robust 100+ year old ped­a­gogy that pro­vides infant chil­dren to young adults with an edu­ca­tion that meets local, state and national stan­dards for cur­ricu­lum while devel­op­ing those qual­i­ties that are key to suc­cess in the 21st cen­tury work­place: per­sonal effec­tive­ness, inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, con­flict res­o­lu­tion and nego­ti­a­tion, cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing, strate­gic think­ing and team build­ing. cre­at­ing adults who live life as engaged cit­i­zens at the local and global levels.

GRPS has a very suc­cess­ful Montes­sori PK-6 ele­men­tary pro­gram. Year over year, we match or exceed scores of the local sub­ur­ban schools in all of the stan­dard tests. For the last two years, a group of GRPS par­ents, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors have been work­ing to reboot our sec­ondary Montes­sori pro­gram. The pri­mary chal­lenge to the suc­cess of our pro­gram is the reten­tion of a prop­erly trained, pro­fes­sion­ally cre­den­tialed staff.

The US Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion rec­og­nizes sev­eral cre­den­tial­ing orga­ni­za­tions for Montes­sori teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors and schools. The Grand Rapids Pub­lic Schools lead­er­ship rec­og­nizes this as a require­ment for a suc­cess­ful pro­gram. Our par­ents expect it. Of course, our teach­ers are on board. The GREA lead­er­ship has pub­licly sup­ported the need for pro­grams such as ours to have a prop­erly trained and cre­den­tialed teacher in our classrooms.

If every­one agrees, why can’t we staff a school? Every­one has a dif­fer­ent answer. But, it all comes down to this sce­nario: When two teach­ers are com­pet­ing for an open posi­tion, and teacher A has a cre­den­tials but teacher B has no cre­den­tials and 1 more day on the job, teacher B gets the posi­tion. OK fine, those may be the rules, but at this point you have also lost the par­ents and the chil­dren to fill the classroom.

I grew up in a union fam­ily. I believe in the right of a group of pro­fes­sional indi­vid­u­als to col­lec­tively bar­gain. It estab­lishes a floor in the work­place for wages and work con­di­tions. How­ever, in today’s edu­ca­tion staffing envi­ron­ment, com­po­nents of this process are act­ing as a ceil­ing or a wall to block the opti­mal per­son from enter­ing the class­room. There is a need for greater lat­i­tude for pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, cre­den­tial­ing, and staff selec­tion in build­ing schools based on spe­cial­ized mod­els like Montes­sori, Inter­na­tional Bac­calau­re­ate and Uni­ver­sity Prep.

Teach­ers are remark­able peo­ple. We all have 1 or 2 we will remem­ber all of our lives. Every­day, they must engage our chil­dren on a per­sonal level in a way that pre­pares them to be adult cit­i­zens while con­duct­ing them­selves as pro­fes­sion­als in the work­place. Cur­rent edu­ca­tion pol­icy sells these fine peo­ple short in that regard. As you con­sider the leg­is­la­tion before you, please take our con­cerns into account while also respect­ing the pro­fes­sion­als who nur­ture all of our children.

Thank you.