Can We Just Fire Tenure?
Every other year, I get a call from kids at one of the local high schools. We’re trying to save our teacher from being fired, can you help us by writing about it in the paper?
I make no promises that I’ll save a teacher, but I offer up an unbiased look at the case being made by the kids, and the case being made by the school district. Nine time out of ten, the case is simple: they don’t have any money, and the non-tenured teacher is going bye bye.
So I wasn’t surprised when I opened up a link to a Huffington Post piece begging the Los Angeles Unified School District to save a teacher from budget cuts. The way John Koch describes her, this woman could walk on water. But she’s losing out on her job because of seniority.
I can’t vouch for this woman’s savior-like abilities (I confess I was a little surprised this guy was willing to go out on a limb for a woman he met once). What I can say is the American school system has one of the most warped senses of placing value on employees out there. Based entirely on length of time in the system, tenure does nothing to guarantee the people protected have any greater skills or work ethic than those who have joined the team after them. They might have been good once, but there’s no guarantee that they will stay good.
Instead, it provides job security to people in arguably one of the most important professions on earth. It makes screw-ups harder to fire. And these are screw-ups working with our kids. It’s a place we can ill afford to have people who aren’t GOOD at their jobs.
There are millions of talented teachers out there, and millions who deserve to be kept around. But as a product of a school system where tenure was valued heavily, and where the same teacher who taught my father is still reading students the test on Thursdays to practice for the test they’ll take on Fridays (ensuring his high student success rate based on bogus methods), I can attest to the many who should have been scooted out the door years ago. And in any other profession, they would have.
Do you have the security to give up on innovation after five years at your job? To spend six months working on the same report (homework) that should have been handed back to the person (or student) who gave it to you to look over in the first place?
Where else is value placed on quantity (years in) over quality?
The good teachers will tell you it’s the kids who keep their nose to the grindstone, it’s their dedication to education. That they age like a fine wine because they care about their jobs. For many, it’s true, but if you’re doing so well, why do you even need that extra level of protection? Your merit is proven by the quality of your work.
Image: TIME
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I couldn’t agree more!!! Down with Tenure!
As a young teacher, I agree that there are some teachers out there that maybe shouldn’t be protected when budget cuts and NCLB regulations could get me fired from a job I’m good at, even after 3-4 years of solid, quality work. But people forget why tenure was instituted to begin with– to protect the rights of teachers to teach what could be considered controversial topics. It guarantees that teachers, after a period of time when they have proven their abilitiy to employ professionalism and provide quality education, are able to conduct their classes without fear of losing their jobs over issues such as teaching about Charles Darwin or Huck Finn or Karl Marx. And that is a right we need to fight to keep.
In the school district where my mom taught the adminstrators talked about “the dance of the lemons”. It was the process where the bad teachers (who had tenure and could not be fired) were traded from school to school every few years. The admins would trade each other once the parents had gotten wise to how worthless this particular “educator” was. How ridiculous! I don’t think the above poster’s argument provides enough justification for this kind of thing to keep happening. Is it really worth sacrificing the quality of our children’s education? I went to a rural, backwoods, redneck-as-they-come high school 15 years ago and no one batted an eye at Darwin, Huck Finn, or Marx.
Every parent I talk to believes that there should be an incentive IF just the reward of teaching isnt enough. I think most of us all know a teacher or two that dont deserve the security of tenure if you go by how good of a teacher they are.
Melissa – “The reward of teaching” should be enough? It’s a JOB. A very, very hard job. Teachers deserve incentives. However, at my public high school there were many tenured teachers who’d stopped trying long ago, or behaved in ways that were flat-out wrong (like sexually harassing students). Nobody who had tenure was ever fired, just shuffled. So maybe there’s a better way to reward and protect our teachers.
Aren’t we also essentially talking about unions here? I don’t see that word in the post, but I know that that’s how things ran around my school district. Maybe “tenure” and “unions” aren’t interchangeable, but it’s the same idea. My mom wasn’t a teacher; she worked various jobs in the school (lunch program, autistic classroom aide, EI room aide). She was good at these jobs with special needs kids, but they just burned her out, as she worked in them for several years. Finally, after years of waiting, she’s able to work in the media center (what we used to call “library”), but only because no one with more seniority was vying for the job (she’d lost out on winning the job before because a more senior staffer wanted it). There’s no consideration talent, skills or individual situation. I can’t stand how strong the teachers’ unions are. Down with unions!
Something for you to think about; teachers have less of a chance for promotions than other professions. Instead, teachers get paid very well for their experience. Teachers with 19 years experience at my school are paid $66,000 each year. Tenure keeps experienced teachers from being axed first since you can get two new ones for one experienced one. It may not be perfect, but I wouldn’t like to see a cash-strapped school with no teachers over the age of 25 because they are expensive.
Schools are governed by politicians. Schools are political places where popularity with teachers, administration, students, and other teachers is very important. After around 3 years of a teacher doing her job and keeping her mouth shut, tenure allows her to actually express opinions that may or may not actually agree with everyone else.
As a teacher, I agree that unions and tenure are imperfect systems. However, they are somewhat necessary. Unions can provide teachers with sometimes very necessary legal backing when someone sues them over something such as teaching about evolution or an edgy/controversial book. That is not to say that unions can’t be inappropriately pushy either. As far as tenure goes, administrators need to be on the ball to make sure it doesn’t give teachers a free pass to kick back and do nothing. It is possible to get rid of an ineffective tenured teacher. It just requires a lot of documentation on the part of the administrators. Tenure should provide additional job security, not total job security.
Sure, no problem — I’m sure you could get rid of the perk of tenure if you replaced it with some other perk — like more salary. But no one wants to pay for it. Thus teachers’ perks are the ones with invisible costs — summers off and tenure. Simply pay more and you can get good teachers without those. OR, pay more to reduce class sizes and make their jobs more manageable — that would be a real win-win for everybody. But take away teachers’ few perks, and who in their right mind would go into teaching at all? Several family members are or were teachers… it gets a little old hearing all the armchair pontificating on education, without ever addressing the real problem — we Americans try to get away with being total cheapskates!!!
I agree that tenure and teachers’ unions can and do protect incompetence. I also experienced first hand how the union protects teachers from things like cleaning toilets, being denied a lunch or even bathroom break, etc. It’s complicated. Until society values education and teachers enough to pay and treat them well, unions have a real purpose. Unfortunately, there are plenty of bad teachers out there, both new and experienced.
Also, Dustin, I would disagree that teachers are compensated “very well” for experience. $66k after 19 years, continual training, etc. is not that high, and your district might pay more than some. I get your point, though, that experienced teachers make a lot more than new ones, and it makes sense that they would need some job protection because of that.
Education structure is pretty complicated. Tenure is one of the perks of a tough, underpaid, undervalued and thanks to No Child Left Behind, almost impossible to do, job. Ever heard the Chemist’s joke? That they would never do drugs because drugs are being made by failed Chemistry majors. If teaching doesn’t have perks of some kind, then all you can get to teach is the bottom rung of classes – the people who can’t find other work at all due to poor scholastic performance. As for summers off, well, those are unpaid actually. In my area (CA bay area) most teachers cannot afford to buy a house unless they are married and their spouse makes just as much, if not more, than they do. I’m not saying tenure is the answer. I know many teachers personally, but the educational system is pretty difficult to understand from the outside.
This post entry is a lie. It is laughably easy to fire teachers, and the vast majority of teachers who are fired aren’t “incompetents” or dangers to their kids. They simply are too old, too expensive, have too many years in, or younger, less experienced teachers are dumped so they can’t get tenure and qualify for retirement. In other words, the tenure system, blasted by know-nothings, is being abused by school districts and unscrupulous administrators in order to save on costs. People who blather on about tenure, which is only that teachers have a so-called right to due process which is more often than not a joke, don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
As a teacher in a challenging Baltimore school I have to admit that I bristled a bit seeing this. I work 6.3 hours a day according to my paycheck and 14 hours a day according to my clock. I’d also like some of the people whining to have to do my job for a while- because I have a huge stack of ungraded papers myself- and I get up at 3:30 every morning to get to work by 5, and work into the wee hours, and still can’t get everything done. I am also in a school under NCLB alternative governance because I volunteered to go there to try to help out when it wasn’t my mess. Forget the pathetic salary, daily indignities, and unpaid hours, now you want to take away my opinion too?
Comments I am just a parent, and my opinion is: what is good for the kids trumps anything else. Teachers who are good should stay, and those that are burnt out and unmotivated should not be in the classroom. Teaching the upcoming generations is much too important to be left to self important whiners.