Politico.com reports this morning that Laurence H. Tribe, a legal scholar Harvard, has joined the campaign to eliminate teacher tenure. “Students Matter, which led the Vergara lawsuit to overturn teacher tenure and other job protections in California, will announce this morning that constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe is joining the group as senior adviser. Tribe, a Harvard law professor, will advise on legal strategy as Students Matter seeks to bring similar suits in states across the country.”
The burning question of the day: Will Laurence H. Tribe relinquish his tenure at Harvard Law School? More important, will he join with other activists to abolish tenure in higher education? Or do these eminent lawyers just like to beat up on the female-dominated teaching profession in pre-K-12?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not too surprising. According to wikipedia (and other sources), President Obama was a research assistant for Professor Tribe during his last two years of law school. It goes on to say:
Tribe actively supported the Barack Obama presidential campaign, and described Obama as “the best student I ever had,”[1] a sentiment previously reserved for Kathleen Sullivan.[15]
Obama is no Kathleen Sullivan.
Does anyone have contact info for Tribe where we can ask him the questions Diane mentioned?
Lisa, google him. He must be in the Harvard online directory.
http://bit.ly/VnBbzJ
He doesn’t have to come to NJ. Tenure has already been eliminated. It is called in Newspeak – “Tenure Reform” !
http://teachersdontsuck.blogspot.com/
http://wsautter.com/
Tenure in higher education has to change with the end of mandatory retirement. What might have been a thirty year commitment is now turning into a fifty year commitment. This may be part of the reason that institutions are becoming more reluctant to hire on tenure track.
Where are the robust stats on that? Based on a state? The nation? Your college? On you? Public schools? Private schools? Please provide salient, full blown evidence with the statistics.
Robert,
I will post links in separate posts so not to delay the responses. Here is an editorial that is concerned with the impact of the aging professoriate on not only faculty positions, but the ability of younger researchers to obtain grants (essential to research and tenure in the natural sciences): http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/v3/n2/full/nchembio0207-69.html
Robert,
A more recent PBS Newshour story: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_03-18/
One of the more interesting statements: 75% of tenured faculty plan to teach beyond the age of 65.
Here is a discussion about the issue from the NYT a few years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/08/15/aging-professors-who-wont-retire?hp
Are you saying older professors should not be receiving grants or teaching? Would a good solution be to expand to pool of grant money? With 76% of faculty at post secondary institutions now adjunct/non-tenure positions – has the affordability of college improved? Has the quality of instruction, however you define it, improved?
MathVale,
I am saying that 1) post tenure review must now have real teeth, and 2) that institutions will be more hesitant to commit to hire an individual for the next fifty years than they would be to commit to hire an individual for the next thirty years.
You imply one thing, say another. I smell ageism. Whatever “real teeth” are, tenue should have real meaning. It is all about money.
We need to stop calling it tenure. In K-12, it is due process.
MathVale,
I do not know what you are smelling.
By “teeth” i have in mind a review that is somewhat to the scale of a tenure and promotion review and consequences that include losing tenure.
Mathvale,
Give up on TE. He is too busy pretending to relate to people. He is able to sometimes give out a faint approximation of homo-sapien, but he’s more wired with circuit boards and programming language than red blood cells and DNA.
He does not like tenure, or old people, and he thinks reform is good, as is school choice.
He does, to his emotionally trapped credit, think that a single payer healthcare system is the only way to go, but it would be interesting to see what Mr. slab of cold steel’s design of such a system would be like and how it how the tax system should pa for it.
Of course, don’t expect any real micro-detailing from TE. He’s more comfortable in front of a screen, with generalities, theoretical constructs, and open ended questions thaty rarely address anyone else’s specified curiosity. . .
You know, I would not be hard with TE if he were to disclose to us if he is on a spectrum for Aspberger’s or Autism, two things I take seriously and don’t at all mock. I am a strong proponent that research on those conditions is gravely underfunded and that advocacy, while growing, is still not enough. Perhaps, he is, and I have been all wrong in confronting him.
But without such information, how does one know how to assess him? Merely by his straightjacketed but amusing thinking? His trolling? His profound disability in connecting with a sense of others?
Robert,
Any thoughts on my links?
Do you think we should follow the French and have mandatory retirement?
TE,
Do you think I should conitnue to follow you and have mandatory deompression from stress?
Robert,
If you did not want the links, perhaps you should not have asked me to provide the.
TE,
Have I questioned whether I should follow you or follow your links?
Which one is it?
My alma mater now hires retired tenured profs in an adjunctivitis type role. Your assertion may be part, but a small part. The other 99.99999% part is money – Walmart-ize education for the masses to maintain bloated administration and building budgets.
MathVale,
Retired faculty members make up a good sized chunk of the non-tenure stream faculty, especially the part time non-tenure stream faculty.
The order of tenure destruction is backwards here. The anti-K-12 tenure campaign is following on the success of a 40+ year attempt to eradicate tenure at the college level and casualize the entire professoriate. Where do you think the education deformers got the idea?
It is widely acknowledged on our side of the Common Core argument that both the propopents and opposition to Common Core are a bipartisan, ideologically diverse bunch.
Now establishment liberal Lawrence Tribe joins fellow liberals like Campbell Brown in opposing teacher tenure. So this seems like a good time to drop all the “far-right opponents of tenure” stuff and acknowledge that, like just about every other aspect of the reformist garbage, this argument does not neatly break down along familiar ideological and political lines.
Campbell Brown is no liberal. Her husband is a Republican power broker who advised Mitt Romney. Neither is the right of center “New Democrat” Obama and his lackeys.
LINOs? If Tribe and Brown are true, salt of the earth liberals, then Nixon was just straightening up at the Watergate officies. Try again.
Tribe is a well-known liberal. You’re grasping at straws if you deny it.
I don’t think Tribe is beating up only or mainly on females in this profession. He is beating up upon ALL teachers, the middle class, unions, and the civil rights that protect children and adults, rights that exist in different ways and for different, legitimate, critical reasons.
One can view this through a feminist lens and make some very cogent arguments, but I believe it is more complex than that . . . .
Everyone stands to lose. Are there any brilliant legal minds joining in on the teachers’ side? Alan Dershowitz, now is the time to show some more of your chutzpah . . .
I’m sure Barack and Tribe are on the phone like Commissioner Gordon and Batman. Obama saw the Pearson logo projecting from a spotlight high into the Gotham sky and called Tribe right away on the red teahcer-hatred telephone.
Holy tenure, Batman!
I’m a clueless male who forgets anniversaries, but even I can see the misogynistic tone prevalent throughout much of the Reform movement. The dog whistle is “I like unions, just not public employee unions” or “we need to exempt public safety unions”. Translations – “predominantly female professions like teaching should be seen and not heard” and “mostly boy unions (police, fire) good; girl unions (teaching, nursing) bad”. It is the retro-conservative belief of women having less rights being leveraged by reformy, business interests.
It’s an excellent point. Yet there are manyh reformy women who bash the public teacher left and right. I think the bashing works on several levels because humans are complex. . . . .
Love the analogy. Got a well needed laugh as a result.
TE–higher ed began marginalizing tenure 40 years ago; the turn away from job security and due process guarantees is not recent; began at college level and in vario;us leading industries, like the notorious Reagan firing of the entire air-traffic controller workforce when its union PATCO went on strike in Summer ’81. For higher ed prof’s presumably retiring later than before, blame it on the Wall St money men who played casino and crashed economy at least 3 times in last 30 years; many fax simply cannot afford to retire, their pension plans always “recovering,” and their salaries frozen for years at a time until 0-2% contracts finally offered. Hiring adjuncts/grad students at less than half pay of f/t tac has been the dream management policy for decades; contingent employment across the economy, low-wage/temporary employees without benefits, job security, health plans, or pensions. Higher ed faculty tenure was marginalized decade by decade, and now k-12 is the last to be cut apart. The time has come for Wall St to finish off the American workforce and mop up the last pockets of job security, k-12.
For advocates of public sector and for job security for all workers, what are the rationales offered by legal starts Boies and Tribe to justify throwing their weight into the teacher tenure fight?
Horrific, another high profile liberal joins the anti-tenure brigade. If tenure were such a major problem, why is it that the highest performing states, NJ, Mass, CT, are states that still have strong tenure laws? Getting rid of tenure will not improve education but it will make it easier to fire the older more expensive teachers whether they are good, great or average.
Yes. Just a way to get around age discrimination lawsuits. Who are the kidding?
NJ, Mass, CT are among the wealthiest states and have relatively low proportions of at-risk students. Folks can’t use the argument that our low-poverty schools do great only when it’s convenient.
A summary of the research shows that unionization and tenure have an indistinguishable impact on student outcomes: http://shankerblog.org/?p=1941
Wait, another Ivy league union buster? But I thought they were “liberals!”
nyceducator.com/2010/09/ivy-league-union-busters-then-and-now-html
Hmm, do we see a pattern here?
From Wikipedia:
“Tribe is noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Tribe
Chris Hedges once said that “Obama is the poster child for the death of the liberal class,” and Tribe is said to have called Obama his best student…
Formerly Left/liberal realms in the media, academia, the Democratic Party and Labor have all been suborned by money-as-free-speech married to sovereign corporate personhood, and is nowhere more evident than in their abandonment of unions, workers and public education.
Couldn’t bring up the page. It says it doesn’t exist. Perhaps you’ve got a copy.
Google the title and blog site, Florence, and it should turn up.
Are there any pro tenure billionaires out there? Are there any pro tenure or at least not anti-tenure big star liberals out there in the universe or any nearby galaxy?
I know you’re being tongue in cheek, but Matt Damon (whose mom was a teacher) has been outspoken in his support against the testing/accountability movement.
K-12 teachers do not have life-time (or even one-year) job protection “no matter what.” Let’s understand that the “reformers” have thrown up that straw man to add to their obfuscation and destruction. Many teachers (pre-“tenure,” non-union) have NO job protection and are t the mercy of the whims and prejudices of administrators and “evaluators.” The rest of us (unionized, past the “tenure” period) have a modicum of due process. What Tribe and his ilk are calling for is eliminating due process for all of us. This is similar to and related to the campaign to end seniority. Why don’t they just come out and say, “no more teachers’ unions” . . . .
Why on earth don’t the lawyers who are defending P-12 teachers ask these tenured professors on the stand to provide examples of when and how their own tenure prevented them from being effective teachers?
If Chetty could use the Michael Jordan anecdote, he should have been asked in cross examination to describe how that kind of thing plays out in his own tenured teaching experiences.
Good question!
Laurence Tribe, tenured professor at Harvard?
With each passing day another intelligent person fades away. Respect for Larry is now lost.
Someone needs to edit this line in Wikipedia:
“Tribe is noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Tribe
Finally, someone said it. It’s not the union, it’s the female-dominated union that must be brought down. My brother is in a pilot’s union. My sister works for a nearly all-male trade union, and I don’t see ANYONE suggesting that those particular unions are damaging the economy or not accountable enough. Seems to me it might be embarrassing to say those things when the pilots or the ironworkers or the carpenters fight back. But, you can denigrate teachers and the politicians and billionaires will pile on.
Campbell Brown: Warrior against women.
Yeah, I’m thinking you’re going to have a hard time selling that conspiracy theory to anyone not already in crazypants territory.
Rhetorically- the explanation for the men of color on DFER’s board, which was once filled with white male hedge fund owners?
The issue is not and never has been *tenure* for public school teachers, it is due process. Business doesn’t like due process, business likes “fire at will”. Your are all accepting and using an incorrect term. Tenure on the college campus has long outlived the original intent, instead serving to imbed people such as Tribe. This particular political stunt is not “liberal”, btw, it is “neo-liberal”. There’s a difference.
I would really like for Tribe to tell us what definition of tenure he is opposing. He might need a bit of an education as to what is actually included in the K-12 definition. I keep hearing that bad teachers are so hard to dismiss, but where is the data and how should it be interpreted? One technique of big systems seems to be to warehouse suspect teachers for long enough that any defense that could be mounted is handicapped by the passage of time. These cases, with a fairly long time table by design, would skew data, so it is becomes necessary to scrutinize any claims carefully.
The burning question of the day: Will Laurence H. Tribe relinquish his tenure at Harvard Law School? More important, will he join with other activists to abolish tenure in higher education? Or do these eminent lawyers just like to beat up on the female-dominated teaching profession in pre-K-12?
First question gives meaning to the last one.
Maybe, as an attorney herself, Randi Weingarten can get to the defense lawyers in NY and make sure that they ask these professors to detail the differences between tenure in P-12 and higher ed, where they truly do have tenure for life, and get them to describe how tenure has prevented them from being effective teachers.
Since the state is being sued, and so many representing the state, like John King, are in cahoots with corporate “reformers,” what assurances are there that the lawyers will actually mount a decent defense?
If Tribe is the Harvard professor who taught Obama how to circumvent the Constitution, such as by using coercion and money to get states to adopt national standards and their related tests (which do, in fact, dictate curriculum and instruction), as well as how to by-pass Congress, in order to revise FERPA and permit 3rd party access to student data without parental permission, then he is not an example of liberal thinkers.
Nor is he an example of someone who upholds the Constitution . . . .
“. . . who taught Obama how to circumvent the Constitution, such as. . .” ordering the hit on and killing of a 16 year old American boy without any judicial proceedings whatsoever. . .
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/10/laurence-tribe-unfiltered-on-s.html
So now a celebrated liberal and Harvard professor of constitutional law comes out against due process rights for teachers. I wonder what Derek Bok or John Dunlop would think. I’m not sure if this is more a sign of the continuing decline of American “liberalism” or of the further alienation of Harvard from the realities of American public life and American workplaces.
Harvard is really showing its partisan beliefs lately, Mike Johnston delivered a tiresome graduation speech & now Tribe delivers an inaccurate campaign against tenure.
If it’s any consolation, Tribe noted that many K-12 teachers are pretty.
Not exactly a liberal. Tribe on Sotomayor: http://www.eppc.org/docLib/20101028_tribeletter.pdf
How is that evidence that Tribe is not a liberal?
Wait, was this just bait to get me to type “a liberal”? If so, well-played.
The problem here is that, like much of the educational dialogue, the fundamental issue has been lost.
Education is about children, not about liberal/conservative/tenure/politics/religion/choice/common core/sex/etc./etc. Education is about our children. By using standardized tests as the holy grail of evaluation of the success of education, we are measuring the wrong things and education of our children, in public, charter, and most private (all but the most expensive and elite where the children, not the budget, come first) schools has lost it’s focus and run off the rails. Kids are bored in schools and loose interest. Tests rule supreme and are, in the long run, meaningless. What a nutty world. And all you folks are completely absorbed, no, buried up and blinded by, your own ideologies. Time to refocus on the kids and give the teachers room to teach, give them resources, small classes, and support, or at least, get the hell out of the way.
It would be nice if teacher unions would really focus on the things needed to support the education of our children and not just support teachers because supporting the children IS supporting the teachers but, having said that, Unions are not the problem. The real problems are: 1) we care more about the money than about our schoolchildren. Budgets drive education and we are always focused on getting the best minimum education that we can get parents to tolerate. This is a very unsavory truth even though–if there is a more important issue for the future of our country, indeed our civilization, I can’t imagine what it is. Can you??? 2) Standardized Testing does NOT measure educational success, it drives education into the ground and provides great opportunity for greedy entrepreneurs to steal education dollars and destroys the opportunity for teachers to actually teach and inspire students to learn. 3) Idealogues have decided that, despite the complete lack of empirical evidence to support their views, the way to fix education is to provide choice through charter schools and private school vouchers. They are completely determined to dismantle public educstion in America to fix it their way. They are so focused on the free enterprise model of competition that, evidence to the contrary be damned, they are willing to destroy public education as it exists and replace it with an even more inferior model. They are very wealthy and powerful members of society whose opinion and dollars carry great weight, so their opinion really matters. In the process they are willing to use public funds to vastly increase the wealth of some very greedy and unscrupulous capitalists who could care less about the education of our children.
We have amassed a great deal of knowledge about what works in education, for adults and for children. I have noticed that the US Department of Defense makes good use of this knowledge to effectively train soldiers. Why can’t utilize the principles developed by John Dewey and others about 100 years ago (now being used effectively in Norway to educatate their children) to get our children excited about learning. Lets educate and support our teachers, let them teach our children. Lets forget all this crazy standardized testing and flawed teacher evaluation systems tied to it and use the money for our kids education, not for giant corporations who don’t care about our children.
It’s such a sad misdirection . . . sad.
The stench of the Liberal corpse.
Al Tate: Well said.