The Board of Education has recently sent a memo to teachers asking for their comments on tenure and provided teachers the website location to review the Public School Systems\u2019 position on tenure and for balanced reporting. I think it is important that teachers review the articles and papers that have been presented by PSS for teachers. But I would also like for teachers to hear the opposing arguments to these papers before they send their comments to the board or to me at Kagman High School. I already have the comments from the overwhelming majority of teachers at Kagman High School and San Vicente Elementary School. I hope that all teachers will submit their comments because this is their first and maybe the only chance they will get to address the board on their job security and matters facing the teacher workforce.<\/p>\n
The \u201cDiversifying Teacher Compensation\u201d article is indeed a great new and novel approach to \u201csalary compensation.\u201d However salary compensation is only one component of a tenure plan or system. It should also be noted that this was only \u201cone\u201d article or paper written by only two people and it does not reflect any research that de-legitimizes tenure. There is also the fact that diversifying teacher compensation is still being debated and the research on this form of teacher compensation is still in its infancy. Furthermore, we are presently not financially able to fund a diversity compensation plan when its obvious we can\u2019t give teachers a nominal salary increase. The proposal for Diversifying Teacher Compensation does have potential but without funds it is nothing more than \u201cpie in the sky\u201d that will only serve to distract teachers from wanting tenure.<\/p>\n
The paper on \u201cResearch Illuminates the Nature and Cause of School Staffing Problems\u201d covers two basis areas: The supply and demand for teachers and the hiring practices of various school districts. The focus of this paper is \u201chow to retain or replace teachers. The article stated, \u201cthe problem of hiring enough teachers for our nation\u2019s classrooms is like pouring water into a leaky bucket\u201d\u2014the recruiting challenge facing the CNMI is almost doubled compared to mainland schools when our location and pay scale is entered into the equation. The article calls for states, districts and unions to work together with school boards to create an accelerated hiring process.<\/p>\n
The article does identify sources of staffing problems but like the first article the word \u201ctenure\u201d is not mentioned nor does the article de-legitimize tenure. The article explains why teachers with more options often leave schools systems for better positions, which causes school districts to loose their best recruits. A phenomenon we have been experiencing in the CNMI with our teacher academy recruits because more and more students are deferring to mainland upon graduation. In fact, I have a letter from 17 NMC students who plan to be and they don\u2019t want to work for PSS simply because they can\u2019t get a permanent contract and decent pay\u2014these future teachers of the CNMI are headed to the mainland ASAP to teach. PSS would do well to incorporate some of the solutions offered in this paper to a tenure plan for PSS teachers.<\/p>\n
The article \u201cTeachers warn to idea of performance pay\u201d is an article about one school district in La Crecent Minn. which does not represent an adequate sample of teachers or school districts of America for us to make a definitive decision. While there is a push for teachers to be paid on the level of achievement of their students, there are many factors that contribute to the classroom educational experience that are beyond the teachers capabilities and accountability.<\/p>\n
These factors vary from child to child, parent to parent, classroom to classroom and school district to school district and to only assess teachers for quality and pay is clearly not a fair and appropriate approach when teachers aren\u2019t being given all the necessary support in equal amounts. I\u2019m confident that only a few teachers in school districts throughout America are not very excited about performance pay, especially when the teeth of this type of policy will only bite teachers.<\/p>\n
The next article is from the Contra Costa Times Newspaper, which states, \u201cHigher Pay no longer enough to make new teachers stay.\u201d The article only relates to the conditions of new teachers and it refers to \u201cmentoring and monitoring\u201d as a means to help retain new teachers. PSS only recently implemented the mentoring program, which was taken from the tenure proposal I submitted for teachers. New teachers do need an additional support system but the support should be from within the school itself to be really affective. Presently, we have a \u201cscatter brain approach\u201d to address teacher relations, growth and concerns. The mentoring and monitoring should be apart of a teacher retention and growth \u201csystem\u201d and the only system used by all the teachers and school districts in America is a tenure system.<\/p>\n
The newspaper editorial form a small newspaper group in Illinois (with no name) speaks about \u201cHidden Cost of Tenure\u201d is nothing more than complaints about the cost of law suites Illinois has encountered with firing teachers and complaints about the power of the unions that represent teachers. It should also be noted the article was \u201cpolitically\u201d motivated by representatives in the Illinois Legislature who have historically been against unions. PSS teachers don\u2019t have a union and they only want a simple grievance process for firing, which makes PSS\u2019 argument moot in regards to the cost of tenure.<\/p>\n
The same newspaper group also published an article about \u201cSchool Board lose[s] power to fire poor teachers.\u201d This article blames the power of unions to persuade legislation that made it difficult to fire teachers in Illinois. PSS does not have to worry about the Legislature or the board making a law or policy that will make it extremely difficult to fire a teacher and the fact that teachers don\u2019t have a union makes this phenomenon even less of a threat to the Board or the system.<\/p>\n
PSS used a third article from this \u201csingle source\u201d newspaper group against tenure with the article \u201cTenure frustrates drive for teacher accountability.\u201d This article is clearly focused on unions and the formal grievance procedure that supports teachers, which merely gives teachers a stronger voice.<\/p>\n
It was really insulting to read newspaper articles and editorials to compare against the real research that supports tenure. PSS administration is trying to destroy the idea of a tenure when we should be focusing on how to create a better or the best tenure system. I hope that teachers can see that PSS administration has offered them a whole lot of nothing based on magazine articles and newspaper reports from the Web. I gave the board proof that tenure is our best option based on research that has gain the support of numerous educational organizations including the National Association of State Boards (NASB). But the articles presented by PSS did prove that there is \u201cNo Genuine Research\u201d that de-legitimizes tenure. Teachers should send their comments on this issue to me at KHS so I can present all the comments collectively, as they should be presented. Teachers will only get permanent contracts, a grievance procedure and a structured plan for individual growth under a tenure system and only if teachers ask for one. Teachers only need to say yes or not about tenure because there is no system in place to even comment on. All teachers, one direction for tenure.<\/p>\n
Ambrose Bennett
\nKagman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Board of Education has recently sent a memo to teachers asking for their comments on tenure and provided teachers the website location to review the Public School Systems\u2019 position on tenure and for balanced reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}