Last week Chalkbeat published the latest tenure figures supplied by the DOE and it showed that 34% did not earn tenure. However, what the data also showed that most of the teachers denied tenure, eventually received tenure the following year. The discontinuance rate remained steady at 2%. The Chalkbeat article along with the tenure graph can be found Here. It needs to be noted that under Bill de Blasio the probationary period is now four years rather than three years during the Bloomberg years.
Under Bloomberg, the tenure approval rate ranged from a high of 97% in the 2006-07 school year to a low of 53% in his last year as Mayor in 2012-13. Interestingly, the discontinuance rate has remain relatively steady during the last decade, between 2% and 3%. On the other hand 6% of the teachers who were denied tenure the previous year received it the next year.
The data shows that while more teachers earned tenure under Bill de Blasio, the fact that over a third of teachers had to wait an extra year or two shows that the influence of the Bloomberg policies are still in effect as many of the DOE managers are holdovers from the Bloomberg administration and the Chancellor, Carmen Farina, was a Deputy Chancellor under Joel Klein.
Of course, the bigger problem is not the recruitment of teachers its the retention as 50% leave the profession within five years. While tenure is a worthy goal, keeping teachers in the NYC classroom should be the real goal.