Competing Teacher Tenure Bills Move Forward

Tenure reform in New Jersey saw a lot of action Thursday, on a couple of fronts. The question now is whether any of them will get over the finish line.

State Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), chairman of the Senate education committee, Thursday released her long-awaited revisions to her tenure bill, taking bold and surprising strides to bring a consensus between disparate factions, Republican and Democrat alike.

The biggest was a decision to give up - at least for now - her bid to phase out seniority rights for teachers, or what is termed the “last in, first out” (LIFO) rule in layoffs.

“The whole process was I would propose a concept, and conversations would create compromise, and that is precisely what has occurred,” Ruiz said Thursday in releasing the language in the late afternoon.

“It still is a big issue, but it’s a question of whether we can we get a bill that has significant policy change, one that gets posted, one that gets support, and one that gets considered for passage into law,” she said. “Or do I sit and do nothing at all?”

Meanwhile, a separate, more moderate bill sponsored by Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr. (D-Middlesex), the Assembly’s education chairman, also progressed through his committee Thursday, albeit with only Democratic support.

This one never would have ended seniority rights in the first place, but it does include some of Ruiz’s provisions for directly linking tenure to annual evaluations of teacher performance. And notably, it had the public backing of the New Jersey Education Association, the powerful teachers union, in a step almost unthinkable a couple of years ago.

“All of us realize that every teacher who performs before a classroom does not necessarily do the best job they can, and this bill puts in place a system where those individuals would no longer be in front of the classroom,” Diegnan said.

Both are up against the clock, with each sponsor saying they hope to reach agreement - including with each other - before the end of the month and the Legislature’s summer break. Gov. Chris Christie has already said tenure reform is one of his top priorities for the rest of the month, along with a tax cut and a state budget.

“I don’t think we differ that much,” said Diegnan after his hearing of his and Ruiz’s bill.

But even for all the talk of progress and consensus, significant gaps remains between the bills. The huge question looms to whether Christie will sign a bill that is a far cry from what he first proposed more than a year ago, one that not only ended LIFO but had explicit connections between tenure and student achievement, including state test scores.

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