Teachers protest against new performance-assessment system

On 8 March 2008 in Lisbon, around 100,000 teachers held the largest demonstration ever organised by Portuguese teachers’ trade unions. They were protesting against the implementation of a performance-assessment system launched by the ministry of education. The so called March of Indignation was organised and supported by a common platform of all the teachers’ unions. The issue dominated political debate in the weeks following the demonstration, and the minister of education decided finally, a month after the protest, to meet the unions and listen to their concerns.

Background

The teachers’ demonstration held in March 2008 was the culmination of a joint process of action launched in July 2006 (PT0608029I) by all the teachers’ trade unions against the government’s initial May 2006 proposal to revise the Teachers’ Career Statute (Estatuto da Carreira Docente – ECD) a specific professional statute which regulates the employment and careers of pre-school instructors and teachers at primary and secondary level. According to the most recent data, from 2005, a total of 138,548 teachers with civil service status are affected by the new ECD, not to mention those with non-civil service contracts or temporary recruits.

The joint process of action started with the creation of a Teachers’ Unions Platform (Plataforma Sindical dos Professores e Educadores), which includes: the National Federation of Teachers (Federação Nacional de Professores, FENPROF), affiliated to the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses, CGTP); the National Federation of Education Trade Unions (Federação Nacional dos Sindicatos da Educação, FNE), the National Federation of Education and Research (Federação Nacional do Ensino e Investigação, FNEI) and the Portuguese Federation of Education, Teaching and Research Professionals (Federação Portuguesa dos Profissionais da Educação, Ensino, Cultura e Investigação, FEPECI), all affiliated to the General Workers’ Union (União Geral de Trabalhadores, UGT); as well as nine independent trade unions.

The negotiation process over the ECD lasted from May to January 2007 and was marked by various strikes and protests against the ministry of education’s proposals and what unions saw as its “inflexible” position. The negotiations ended without an agreement with the unions. In January 2007 the new ECD was published (Decree no. 15/2007 of 19 January).

Teachers’ career statute

The new statute set out major changes for teachers in terms of career entry and development, the duration and organisation of working time, absence, seniority and adjustments to the retirement age (PT0608029I).

In particular, the ECD introduced a major change in teachers’ careers, replacing the previous single and continuous career through the creation of two hierarchical categories, teacher and ‘titular teacher’, each with a distinct functional content. To reach the category of titular teacher, teachers must have 18 years of experience and pass a selection process for vacancies, where their professional experience and qualifications are evaluated by the ministry of education. According to the trade unions, these conditions might prevent around 80% of teachers from reaching the status of titular teacher.

Furthermore, the new ECD introduces a system of merit pay, together with performance-related bonuses. The new ECD eliminates the previous system of automatic promotion based upon seniority and sets up a system of progression through pay-scale grades for each rank of the two categories of teachers (teacher and titular teacher), which is based on individual performance assessment. Those teachers whose performance is insufficient are obliged to following training programmes and can be dismissed in specific conditions. The new ECD considers various issues in assessing performance: attendance, participation in projects and activities, coordination and pedagogical supervision activities, teaching relations with students, academic results, and parents’ evaluations.

On 24 July 2007, the ministry of education presented a proposal with respect to the system of performance assessment for teachers. According to the trade unions the proposal was more penalizing than rewarding, extremely bureaucratic and focused on quantitative performance results to the detriment of qualitative ones. Furthermore, the introduction of quotas for the award to teachers of the grades of “very good” and “excellent” was considered by the unions to distort the evaluation process. The negotiations between the ministry of education and the trade unions ended in October 2007 without an agreement. Later, in January 2008, a decree regulating the performance assessment of school teachers (Decree no 2/2008 of 10 January) was published, coming into force immediately after. Subsequently, the ministry of education decided to give schools a maximum of six months to launch the performance-assessment process.

Reasons for the protest

The teachers’ unions organised the ‘March of Indignation’ (Marcha da Indignação) in March 2008 to express discontent with the ECD’s implementation and in particular with the performance-assessment system and its implementation. Other issues that might contribute to explaining the high level of participation in the demonstration included the fact that about 40,000 of 47,977 candidates for teaching posts were not placed in jobs for the school year 2007–2008. Among the candidates, 20,500 were teachers who had held a teaching contract during the previous school year 2006–2007 (PT0709029I).

The various problems related to the new ECD’s implementation include teachers’ discontent with perceived injustices in access to the category of titular teacher, which is dependent upon the existence of vacancies in each school. This condition is seen by the trade unions as unjust and as not taking into account equity and proportionality, because teachers with more experience and superior academic qualifications could be excluded in schools with fewer vacancies, while those with less experience and inferior academic records could become titular teachers in schools with more vacancies.

The implementation of the system through the first selection process for titular teacher revived the controversy and the ministry of education accepted at the end of August 2007 the existence of injustices in this first selection process. The ministry decided to deal with such cases through the nomination of candidates to the category of titular teacher, a solution that the trade unions did not welcome, demanding a repeat of the selection process.

In relation to the ministry’s implementation of the performance-assessment system for the period until the end of July 2008, the trade unions demanded the suspension of the assessment during the 2007/2008 school year. The reason, the unions explained, was that the ministry of education failed to provide the appropriate tools for the assessment in due time.

Although recognising lapses, the ministry of education decided to go on with the process. In February 2008, various school administrations reported serious difficulties in meeting the deadlines for the definition of individual objectives for assessment, and in March various schools decided to boycott the process. Therefore, the ministry of education decided to delay the first phase of the evaluation until June 2008, as well as to postpone the intermediate deadlines. The trade unions did not accept this solution and demanded once again the suspension of the assessment for the 2007/2008 school year.

After a week of local demonstrations, on 8 March 2008, up to 100,000 teachers demonstrated in the ‘March of Indignation’ in Lisbon. This was the largest demonstration ever organised by teachers’ trade unions and the largest demonstration involving a single sector since the introduction of democracy in 1974.

Aftermath of the demonstration

Following the demonstration, the Teachers’ Unions Platform asked for the reopening of negotiations on performance assessment and, after various requests, the ministry of education promised to meet the unions. For a month, the teachers’ conflict had a high profile in the media and was the subject of many editorials in the main newspapers. Finally, on 8 April 2008 the minister of education held a meeting with the teachers’ trade unions, four months after their last meeting in December 2007.

Despite the fact that the issues at stake in the teachers’ demonstration related to the practical implementation of the ECD, along with the performance assessment system and its implementation in the school year 2007-2008, the whole conception of the ECD and of the assessment system are still disputed, constituting a radical change against which the teachers and their unions have been struggling for a year and a half. Therefore, the ministry of education’s main goal in the coming talks may be to ensure that any changes towards more flexibility will not undermine and compromise the basis of the ECD and the assessment system.

Maria da Paz Campos Lima, Dinâmia