A new teacher tenure reform bill recently signed into law by Governor Christie has elicited some guarded responses from stakeholders on both sides of the issue.

In order to earn tenure under the new law, which is known as Teacher Effectiveness and Accountability for the Children of New Jersey Act, teachers will be required to work for at least four years, instead of three. Other new requirements include a year of being mentored and achieving ratings of “effective” or “highly effective” in at least two of the four years they work.

A failure to earn high ratings for two consecutive years will result in revocation of tenure, unless there is some evidence of improvement. Under the previous, century-old law, school districts were allowed to dismiss teachers for “inefficiency.” Critics said that the process was inefficient and costly, topping out, sometimes, at more than $100,000. Now teachers will have 105 days to fight a tenure revocation order after a school district files it, and arbitration caps will have a $7,500 limit, to be paid by the state.

“Maintaining due process rights for teachers facing dismissal is essential,” said Princeton Regional Education Association President Joanne Ryan in -response to the new law. “I would have preferred to see an evaluation system proven to be fair and effective in place before changes were made to the tenure law.”

The new law was proposed by a bipartisan coalition in the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, and was passed unanimously in June. While state teachers’ unions have not been happy with Mr. Christie’s forced changes to their pensions and benefits, he credited their leadership in helping to create the new legislation. State Education Commissioner Christopher D. Cerf was quoted as saying that the new law “proves that education reform need not be a partisan issue.”

“We’re happy to have been a part of the process that created this law,” said New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) President Barbara Keshishian. “It should go a long way to help us reach the goal of providing every child with the best teacher.”

“While these changes are fine, they apply to a very small percentage of our state’s teachers,” commented Superintendent Judy Wilson, suggesting that the state “pay more attention to the hard working, talented, and devoted teachers in our systems,” with better recruitment practices and more opportunities for professional development.

For educator James Deneen, the upsides of the new law are also still tempered by the work that remains to be done. “The new law has several good elements: an additional year before tenure, mentoring and support for teachers, a clearer set of evaluation criteria,” observed the former program director of Educational Testing Service’s advanced placement program who has written several books on K through 12 curriculum and assessment. “I continue to be concerned at the focus on teachers in New Jersey’s debates over school reform,” he added, however. “Inadequate teachers are not the fundamental problem in these schools. Rather, the curriculum is not geared to students’ needs, and the school day and years do not provide sufficient instructional time. Changing the tenure law can only slightly affect the achievement of students trapped in our failing urban schools. Until these schools imitate successful inner-city schools around the state and the nation, their students will fail to learn and will drop out.”

Ms. Wilson said that she appreciated the changes “that attempt to expedite what to date has been a far too expensive and lengthy process to dismiss a tenured teacher who is ineffective in his/her work, and the change to move the non-tenured timeframe from three to four years.” She expressed disappointment, however, that the law stopped short of the initial proposals to change the ‘last in, first out’ or LIFO statute.” Ms. Wilson was referring to the law requiring that the most recently-hired teachers be let go first in the event of layoffs.

Despite Ms. Keshishian’s positive spin on the new law, an NJEA fact sheet about its provisions noted that NJEA “remains concerned about the evaluations that will be used to rate teachers.”

“Increasing teacher effectiveness should always be a priority for educators,” Ms. Ryan observed, adding, however, that “tying student performance to teacher effectiveness isn’t going to be a simple task since there are many factors that impact our students’ performance.”

Mr. Christie, who was just tapped to be the keynote speaker at the Republican convention this summer, has been characteristically blunt in his comments about public school teacher performance and his desire for greater accountability. At a recent Town Hall meeting held in Freehold, he declared that “if you’re ineffective in the front of the classroom we need to get you away from the front of that classroom and on to something else.” He said that he would veto any “watered-down” bills, which he described as “BS reform.”