Giving Compass' Take:

• Florida's Student Success Act in 2011 ended teacher tenure and caused an improvement in student achievement, according to a Brookings study.  Moreover, the authors found that the lowest-performing students had the biggest academic gains. 

• What is the relationship between ending teacher tenure and improvement in student achievement?

• Read about the Supreme Court ruling in Colorado about ending teacher tenure.

Florida’s controversial move to end teacher tenure and tie educator pay to student performance in 2011 likely caused a modest improvement in student test scores, according to research published by the Brookings Institution this month.

While the overall benefits of the policy were slight, the authors conclude, the lowest-performing students experienced the greatest gains in achievement.

The study is the latest to examine the effects of paring back employment protections for school employees, who have traditionally enjoyed rare job security. Studies of tenure reform in huge school districts like Chicago and New York City have shown that allowing principals more leeway to fire teachers in their probationary period (typically the first three years of employment), or to extend that period rather than grant tenure so quickly, can lead to a decline in teacher absenteeism and prod lower-performing educators to leave the profession.

Some have also argued that offering administrators the right to fire ineffective employees doesn’t mean they’ll exercise it, and that retaining the best teachers is more important than counseling out the worst ones.

The Brookings report, written by Northwestern professor David Figlio, University of Tennessee professor Celeste Carruthers, and Georgia State professor Tim Sass, studied student performance on standardized tests following the 2011 passage of Florida’s Student Success Act.

The new law mandated annual contracts for teachers hired after July 1, 2011, with renewal conditioned on regular evaluations that are weighted heavily toward measures of student test score growth on state exams.

Overall, the study found that in schools where the SSA was felt more forcefully, students performed incrementally better in math and reading on the FCAT test. Scores on the test were declining for all schools in the years before the law’s implementation and recovered ground after 2011 — though the authors note that these trends were small enough that they could simply represent a smoothing-out of data over time.

Read the full article about teacher tenure by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.