Gilroy teachers: performance or seniority?

If two state initiatives make it on the state ballot and are voted into law, it might mean first-year teachers such as Zane Boehlke—a new English teacher at Christopher High School—would be less likely to lose their jobs if the state economy takes a downturn and school districts are forced to cut staff to make it through the school year.
Called the High Quality Teachers Act of 2014, the two initiatives would use a teacher’s classroom performance ratings rather than seniority to determine layoffs. Teachers convicted of certain violent, serious or sexual felonies would also be automatically dismissed and permanently barred from teaching in California.
For Boehlke and other new Christopher High School teachers, the road to tenure starts with two probationary years in which the district tells the instructors if they’ll have a job offer for the following school year on March 15. If the district offers a teacher a contract their second year of teaching and the instructor accepts, they become tenured the first day they walk into their classroom during their third year of teaching.
“It’s not very hard to do. There’s a lot less pressure when you’re tenured to make changes,” Boehlke said. “You’re protected at that point. It’s pretty hard to get fired at that point. I appreciate that, as someone who would like to get tenured.”
With all the changes sweeping across the country including Common Core State Standards, which changes the ways students are taught and evaluated in the 44 of the nation’s 50 states, teachers are being asked to change the way they teach, Boehlke said.
It’s not just state standards that are changing. Teachers who taught word processing and online research skills 10 years ago must teach different skills now, giving students “intuitive skills with technology” so that they know how to work with people over the web, Boehlke said.
“There are a lot of people who are unsure of how to implement that new stuff, so I feel that a lot of people are just sitting back on their heels,” Boehlke said. “It’s definitely a small portion that are sitting back on their heels waiting to see what going to happen. But in my mind, teaching is just like every other job. It should be performance-based.”
California is one of 11 states that bases teacher layoff and reappointment decisions primarily on how long someone has been teaching, according to the proponents’ summary of one of the two initiatives listed on the State of California Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General website.
States such as Massachusetts, Florida and Tennessee already have systems that retain teachers based on a review of their teaching success, according to same document.
The process
In late February, California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced the proponent for the measures, Matt David, could begin collecting the 504,760 (five percent of the total votes cast for governor in the 2010 gubernatorial election) signatures he needs to put the two initiatives on the state ballot. David has 150 days—or until July 14—to get the signatures.
To get the measure on the ballot for this year, California’s state constitution requires that initiatives have the required signatures verified a full 131 days before an election, which would be June 26 this year, said Kurt Oneto, an attorney at Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni LLP, who deals with initiative and referendum campaigns and submitted the initiative to the state.
If the initiatives collect the required number of signatures in the allotted 150 days but don’t make the deadline for this state election, they will be listed on the November 2016 election, according to Oneto.