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Sunday, March 11, 2007
A hand goes down the badger hole, and…..
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Several years ago, a Democratic governor named Roy Barnes wanted to improve education by making it easier to fire public school teachers in Georgia who didn’t measure up.
Politically, it turned out to be poor policy. In 2002, educators - a large Democratic constituency - rose up and smote him at the polls. Sonny Perdue, the Republican governor who replaced Barnes, quickly restored the rules of “fair dismissal.”
Teacher tenure, as many called it, quickly gained a reputation as the angry set of teeth at the dark end of a badger’s den. No one’s dared stick his hand down that hole since.
Not until now.
But Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle is doing so with a thick pair of gloves, and in such a smooth fashion that he’s likely to get away with it. Cagle’s bill to permit entire school systems to abandon state mandates breezed through the state Senate, which the lieutenant governor controls. Its fortunes look good in the House.
Under S.B. 39, charter school systems would be allowed to make up their own rules regarding class size, days of operation, teacher hiring and teacher firing - as long as performance objectives were met. Cagle frames his measure as a chance to hack at educational bureaucracy, and revive the independence of local districts.
“This bill was never about teacher tenure, and it isn’t today,” Cagle said Friday. Well, at least it’s not solely about teacher tenure - which is perhaps the better point. When the entire applecart is turned upside down, it’s hard to focus on a single apple.
Then there’s the fact that, at least for the time being, the concept of a charter school system is an experiment. The bill would permit only five school systems to move in that direction in 2008. Small ones - no monster systems with names like Cobb or Gwinnett.
“I need school systems that can be nimble, that can adjust at a fairly rapid pace,” Cagle said.
Georgia’s two largest teacher organizations are against the bill, but abandonment of fair dismissal rules is not their chief concern. Right now, individual public schools that convert to a charter status require an approving vote of the faculty. Not so when a whole county or city school system switches.
Under Cagle’s bill, the local school board would be the only voting body. “I’m not interested in giving a veto to any organization. Trust me, no one’s being shut out of the process,” The lieutenant governor said.
But why no badger-like reaction from teachers on the tenure issue?
Times change. Teachers feel the market offers more protection, said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Educators. Teachers are in such short supply in Georgia that any district that junks the rules of dismissal in wholesale fashion would quickly find itself with unfillable vacancies, he said.
Then there is the matter of style. It’s not just what Barnes did that angered teachers, but how he did it, said Jocelyn Whitfield, a top lobbyist for the Georgia Association of Educators. Educators felt locked out of the discussion.
While Cagle hasn’t responded to all of GAE’s objections, Whitfield said, he has responded to some. When the teacher’s group saw that the power to hire and fire would be almost solely vested in each school principal, conversations with Cagle staffers resulted in a change, she said.
Cagle was a Gainesville state senator when Barnes attacked teacher tenure. He acknowledges he drew a lesson from it. “It was the way [Barnes] went about it. You have to show leadership, and leadership is not ‘my way or the highway.’ It’s about bring people together, and persuading others to follow,” he said.
