Ah, political science. Ahem. Well, perhaps I’m just adding more science to politics than I usually see. I’ve wanted to sit down with state education rankings and compare the minimum teacher tenure requirement with the state ranking. Tonight I sat down the Google, OpenOffice, and the ballot initiative documents. I wrote down all the states, their teacher tenure requirement (in years) from page 12 of the Official Voter Information Guide for this special California election, and their education ranking (according to “http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank.htm”:http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank.htm).
Below is the chart of the data. On the y axis are the states, in descending order of education ranking (Vermont is ranked #1). The x axis values are the number of years required for a teacher to work before getting tenure. California currently requires two years.
There are a few observations from this data. First of all, all states that require only one year are ranked in the top 60%. States that require two years are scattered through all rankings, as are states that require three years. States that require 4 or 5 years concentrate in the middle of the rankings.
What this suggests is that while very good states can sometimes have very short tenure requirements, generally the data suggest that there is little correlation between tenure minima and ranking. That conclusion must be slightly modified, since the data also suggest that states with long tenure requirements tend to lie around the median in their ranking.
It therefore appears that other factors must be correlated with ranking, more strongly than teacher tenure minima.
A further conclusion would appear to be that changing teacher tenure time minima in this state is a useless measure, one which distracts the people of California from the actual problem, whatever it is.
