Howard Wainer, a statistician who’s worked in education research for decades, writing at the Statistics Forum:
In recent weeks the budget crises that affect the Federal, state and local governments have led to a number of proposals that are remarkable in one way or another. It seems apropos at this time to examine New Jersey’s governor Christie’s campaign to get rid of tenure for teachers. . . .
The fiscal goal of removing tenure is to make it easier, during periods of limited funds, for school administrators to lay-off more expensive (i.e. more senior/tenured) teachers in favor of keeping less experienced/cheaper ones.
What’s tenure all about?
The reason that most teachers would want tenure is because it provides them with increased job security in general, and, in particular, as protection against capricious personnel decisions.
A more interesting question is why did states agree to grant tenure in the first place?
Howard guesses at an answer to his own question:
Why is tenure almost uniformly agreed to in all public education? . . . Education officials recognize that for teachers, tenure is a job benefit, much like health insurance, pensions and sick time. As such it has a cash value. But it is a different kind of benefit, for unlike the others, it has no direct cost. Sure there are expenses associated with tenure when a teacher with it is to be terminated. But if reasonable care is exercised in hiring and promotion, such expenses occur very rarely. So, I conclude, tenure was instituted to save money, exactly the opposite of what is being claimed by those who seek to abolish it. [emphasis added]
The next step is to bring in the numbers:
Who is right, Governor Christie or me [Howard Wainer]? Happily this is a question that, once phrased carefully, is susceptible to empirical investigation. The answer has two parts. The first part is the title of this essay: How much is Tenure Worth? The second part is: Do we save enough by shifting the salary distribution of staff to compensate for the cost of its removal? I have no data on the latter and so will focus on the former.
Unfortunately there are no clean experimental or observational data available, so Howard pulls in some data from New Jersey, where tenure for school superintendents was eliminated in 1991, and a couple years after their salaries started shooting up:
In 1975 the average superintendent in NJ earned about 2.25 times as much as the average teacher, but this disparity was diminishing, so that in the early 1990s the average superintendent was earning just twice what the average teacher earned. Then the disparity began to increase sharply, so that by 2010 superintendents’ pay was two-and-a-half that of teachers.
This is just one state, but it suggests that removing tenure for teachers while maintaining quality may not be such a budget-saver in the medium or long-term.
Details (including graphs) are at Howard’s article, which appears in the Statistics Forum, the new blog sponsored by Chance magazine and the American Statistical Association.