Parents Favor New Teacher Tenure Plan While Superintendent, Union President See Flaws

Several parents of children in the Westwood Regional School District favor the . They say it's a good idea that teachers who fail to meet performance standards for two consecutive years would lose tenure.

"It sounds like a great idea," said Katie Fisher who has girls in third and fourth grade at . "We have wonderful teachers here but a few, if they had to meet a certain standard and be evaluated fairly, would retire."

Heather Constantinidis, who has two boys in Washington School, said having a system like the one proposed would make teachers more aware of their performance and want to better themselves."The kids deserve the best education they can get," she said. "We're paying for it with our taxes."

Jaimie Baker, who has two children at and one at , said she would like a "less costly and cumbersome" mechanism to terminate teachers who aren't meeting standards. She said she would also like to see a system of merit pay based on a combination of test scores, classroom observations, department goals and feedback from peers, supervisors and administration.

"The idea of merit pay instead of tenure, years of service and post-graduate education must be embraced by the education community. As a taxpayer, we cannot afford to continue paying our educators with the current model," Baker said. "As is done in corporate America, teachers should have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely goals and objectives."

Frank Alefanti, whose son attends kindergarten at Washington School, said teachers should be evaluated periodically to make sure tenure is appropriate instead of it being granted after the first three years of work. "I don't think three years is all that long," he said.

But Westwood Education Association President Barry Albert said the current process of receiving tenure can be difficult, with teachers having to show excellence in their jobs. "Tenure is something, when handled propery, it's not easily attained," he said. "Here we have the first three years when teachers have to prove themselves."

He explained in the Westwood Regional District, the standards have been raised, which he attributes to the administration and Board of Education. Albert said they are the ones that determine which teachers should receive tenure.

Albert said the claim that the problem with public school education is that districts can't get rid of tenured teachers is "just utterly ridiculous."

Westwood Regional Superintendent Geoffrey Zoeller said he has no problem with having high standards for teachers, but believes the acting commissioner's plan is flawed.

"The issue I see with the proposed plan is that it appears that the single criteria for determining 'teacher effectiveness' is performance on state standardized testing. This cannot possibly work," Zoeller said. "Probably one-third of my tenured certificated staff members do not have a direct hand in preparing students for state testing in mathematics, language arts and more narrowly in science."