What a ridiculous claim!
In a court case in California, a bevy or flock or pride of teacher-bashing organizations argue that teacher tenure violates the civil rights of students. The bevy says that bad teachers hurt students and tenure protects bad teachers.
Maybe next they will sue to eliminate tenure in higher education so everyone is an adjunct.
In higher education, tenure is a guarantee of a lifetime job.
In K-12 education, tenure is a promise of a hearing before they fire you. If a student falsely claims you touched him or her, you are fired without a hearing. If the principal doesn’t like your race, your religion, your face, he or she can fire you without having to say why.
Here is Ted Olsen explaining to the Jeb Bush foundation of rightwing extremists how this case will be a civil rights landmark.
No, it will be one more nail in the coffin of the teaching profession, one more chance to reduce the status of teachers and to increase churn.
Here is what the teachers of the Bay Area say.
“Just when you think that some of the big moneyed, right wing reformers might back off from their unsound, unproven and unrealistic schemes, along comes another one!
“Did you know that because of five sections of the California Education Code YOU have just become the enemy and you are accused of depriving our neediest students of their education?
“Forget about the damage done by unnecessary high stakes testing and fly by night charter schools. Disregard poverty, racism, homelessness, neglect and malnutrition. So what if the schools in California are ranked at the bottom in per pupil funding, class sizes, number of librarians, counselors and nurses in our schools. Not to mention that we have lowered the number of educators by over 30,000, in the California in the last few years.
“Don’t even think about the hard work that you and your colleagues do every day to teach the children of San Francisco under difficult and challenging conditions.
“David F. Welch, CEO of INFINERA, a fiber optics communication company, is the founder of NewSchools Venture Fund. Previously, the fund has invested in charter schools in Boston and worked in “school reform” in New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Oakland. Now he has created “Students Matter,” and hired the law firm of Theodore B. Olsen, Theodore J. Boutrous and Marcellus Antonio Mc Rae, partners in the powerful law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, to sue the state of California.
“In their own words, “The lawsuit seeks to strike down five provisions of the education code that, separately and together, push some of out best teachers out of the classroom and entrench grossly ineffective teachers in our schools….”
“They allege that “California’s schools hire and retain grossly ineffective teachers at alarming rates.”
“In the lawsuit they attack the due process rights that are referred to when you achieve “tenure.” They attack procedures called for when you are accused of misbehavior by a student, a parent or an administrator. They attack seniority when there is a need for lay-offs. And they want “objective evidence of student growth” to be part of evaluations.
“No one in the profession wants educators who are not competent and not doing the job they have been hired to do. No one in the profession wants to see students harmed in any way.
“But, all that tenure really means is that a person must be made aware of the reason they may be in jeopardy of losing their job. Educators should not be “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of the administration. We do not want the careers of people ruined because they have been falsely accused of misbehavior. The unions seek to protect the rights of employees to know the charges made against them, and the right to defend oneself. That is what is meant by due process.
“The reformers have filed this lawsuit because they have failed to achieve their ends using the democratic political process. The Education Code of California was created by our elected representatives. If the public wants to make changes, there is a democratic process to do that. The people behind this effort have been unsuccessful in doing that and so they have resorted to going to court to push their anti-teacher, anti-union perspective.”
Tenure doesn’t violate the rights is children.
But poor leadership from elected and appointed offices does.
How about a “great leader in every elected office.” If they don’t win their second election, they need to pay back every dime the state or public entity paid them because obviously if they weren’t reelected, they were not great.
Rights of, not is
With the exception of where there are term limits. And then there should be a rating scale based on consumer opinion to determine if they get paid.
“Tenure” doesn’t exist in K-12. It’s time that teachers QUIT using the term, the meaning of which has been distorted by the reformers. In fact, all K-12 PUBLIC school teachers have (private K-12 teachers do NOT have this) is the identical protections of other civil service employees such as police and fire personnel. The right to a hearing is identical; the rigged hearings are identical. ALL public employees are covered by administrative law, which is a sham and not a real branch of the law.
I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this. There is NO such thing as “tenure” for K-12 teachers. There never has been, and there never will be.
Many states don’t even use that term anyway–teachers are “post-probationary” employees if they have continuing contracts. That is the TRUTH of what they have.
ALL public employees have civil service protections, and their rights to a hearing are identical. That’s because they are all covered by administrative law. They have rights to hearings because of many years of case law which states that having a government job is a property right, and because it is a governmental job, that right cannot be taken away without due process of law.
Teachers, like other government employees, have a right to a hearing before they are terminated, but few take advantage of those free hearings, erroneously believing that if they resign (even though they are basically fired anyway as they don’t have a job anymore), this won’t hurt them in future jobs. However, it is an admission of guilt to take a severance package in lieu of a hearing. It isn’t going to stop school districts from labeling a teacher a “no rehire,” which in turn will kill a teacher’s career more than anything else.
“susannunes
January 29, 2014 at 12:11 pm
“Tenure” doesn’t exist in K-12. It’s time that teachers QUIT using the term, the meaning of which has been distorted by the reformers.”
“Ed reform” is a sophisticated, well-funded political campaign.
Distortions are deliberate.
I’m wondering how many variations they can create on combining words like “Students Matter”. How many paid ed reform lobbying groups and individuals are there now? It has to be tens of groups and hundreds or thousands of people actually employed in this.
I agree. We need to avoid the term “tenure.” People assume that tenure means it is a right to a job regardless of competency. It simply means the right to a hearing from an impartial decision-maker.
We need to quit letting reformers control the narrative by choosing emtionally charged words that do not reflect the facts.
ohhhhh, that’s weird. In any other job, the HR department lays out rules for firings or discipline — which are applied to each and every employee. Very weird.
They love this political frame, public school teachers versus students, because then they can ride in as the savior.
It’s ridiculous, and it’s also an incredibly contradictory message to send to children, that the people who work in public schools are their adversaries. I’m an adult and I find it jarring. There’s the sappy, sentimental public statements on teachers they produce for PR and political purposes and then these absolutely vicious periodic attacks.
I was amazed at how nasty they were when they went after Ohio public employees. I don’t know a single person in this town who has as much contempt for public employees as hurled during that campaign. It was surreal. I was as shocked as the local public employees were.
Anyone who still believes these folks aren’t anti-worker just watching this transpire over the last 5 years has to be willfully blind. I’m not a public employee and I got it clear as a bell. It’s not subtle!
Is Eli Broad even credible outside billionaire, millionaire and politician circles?
Didn’t I read that he lied about his involvement in a California anti-worker initiative, and it was only revealed when the AG released documents? Are we all just pretending that didn’t happen?
The “best interest of the child” is a misnomer. It would seem that kids in present day schools have no civil rights so, even if tenure did exist, why would that be the cause of so called failure in our schools? No one in big government seems to really care about the harm done to kids on a daily basis as a result of NCLB, CCSS, RTT! What a name calling farce!
…and let’s not even begin to discuss the harm done to countless VALUABLE teachers. Let’s not go there!
“No one in big government seems to really care about the harm done to kids on a daily basis as a result of NCLB, CCSS, RTT! ”
Nor in the ranks of teachers and administrators are there many who care about that harm. Oh, I guess they may care but they don’t do a damn thing about it. GAGAers all of them!
I had a personal experience with unfair firings. A teacher I was mentoring was accused of kicking a student. The video showed him lifting his leg backwards and making contact with the girl in the hall way. She said he kicked her intentionally however he stated he had something sticky on his shoe. He lifted his leg backwards to see it as he has a withered hand and does things differently.
An independent person saw the video and told me there was nothing in it that contradicted his explanation. Yet he was asked to leave the school or be fired. He left the school. t the hearing he had no representation. This Milwaukee charter school called Guadelupe school damaged the future of the teacher, one of the most decent human beings I have ever met.
I would never work in a school that didn’t have a union. As in this case, a weak administrator succumbed to an irrational parent based on no real eveidence other than contact was made. A video doesn’t show intent. Are we going back to the 30’s and 40’s that Pete Seeger sung about? Boss rule?
As an LAUSD parent who has had personal experience with grossly ineffective teachers AND who opposes what passes for education reform (high stakes testing, charters, privatization of public education, etc), I confess to having mixed feelings about this issue. I know this lawsuit is, largely, about weakening the union. At the same time, I do think there are times when the students’ rights really do conflict with the rights of administrators and unions. I have often thought there needs to be an advocate – almost a ‘guardian ad litem’ – for students during teacher/admin negotiations. While legally tenure simply means access to civil service protections, in reality it means that it’s extremely difficult to get rid of teachers who should not be teaching. Neither teachers nor administrators operate in a vacuum – yet it is often the students who, while claimed as the raisons d’etre – are left out of the equation altogether.
“While legally tenure simply means . . .”
Again, there is ABSOLUTELY NO K-12 TENURE. That’s a falsehood and edudeformer meme!
Aren’t the parents the advocates for their children? Tenure means due process, that’s all, innocent until proven guilty. The administrators hire the teachers in the first place, don’t they do vetting and investigate the hire’s records????? Then there is the trial period before tenure sets in, the teacher can be fired for no reason or any reason. In NJ, the trial period has been extended to 4 years before a teacher gets tenure, which does not mean a guaranteed job for life. If you eliminate tenure, then the administrators will have a field day dumping all the older more expensive teachers, no matter how great they are.
awesome movie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trotsky is, partially, about a student who wants to make the student union a union for students. LOL, he leads a student strike.
We slowly see the profession of teaching being reduced to a “Entry Position” for Stepping Up in Another Profession. Keeps it cost effective, only paying for temporary 4 to 5 year in length employment as a teacher while grooming yourself for a career in another profession. This lowers the states output to retirement funds, keeps cost lower for medical insurance, puts the profession as just another Fast Food Style Employment Position, it just happens that it requires a college degree. Look at North Carolina, they are well on their way to making it happen.
I became a teacher in the era of Joseph McCarthy in a state with no teacher unions. If there was due process, it was abandoned in favor of his witch hunt, and those conducted by his cronies who believed that many teachers (and other “cockroaches”) were communists, communist sympathizers, unAmerican, and so on.
In order to teach in my state, you had to sign a loyal oath and swear that you had never been a member of any of the so-called “subversive” organizations on a long list–published on two pages of legal-size paper, single space, two columns each page.
I have not only come to appreciate the role of unions in protecting the rights of workers but also the virtue of reasonable job security provided by due-process requirements, whether embedded in the idea of tenure or not.
It is sad to see that Ted Olsen et.al. take on this case under the cover of civil rights.
Some of the history in Los Angeles, and how the school district has had so much trouble getting rid of even the most incompetent teachers: http://www.laweekly.com/2010-02-11/news/lausd-s-dance-of-the-lemons/?showFullText=true
Tenure worked reasonably well in higher education, but is becoming more problematic with the abolition of mandatory retirement. There are increasing numbers of faculty in their seventies and eighties teaching at my institution.
Realizing that tenure can now be a fifty year commitment instead of the thirty year commitment makes institutions more reluctant to hire people on a tenure track.
So they are all incompetent? Can they not afford to retire?
Certainly not all are incompetent, but some are.
Beyond incompetency, there is the problem that any faculty member’s ideas about the discipline are largely formed when they are in the crucible of graduate study. Some have kept pace with the change in the discipline, some have not. All can wield power over a department, and thus the curriculum taught, because of the power that seniority brings. Transfer of department leadership between generations is becoming increasingly difficult. I have seen several academic departments self destruct going through the process.
TE,
How about abolishing tenure in higher education and paying professors by how much their students earn after they graduate?
Wouldn’t that get rid of dead wood professors who teach useless stuff like philosophy and art history?
Faculty are generally paid what is required to keep them in the classroom, so there IS a rough correlation between faculty pay and student earnings. That is why faculty in professional schools like engineering, business, and medical schools are paid much more than faculty in philosophy and art history. Abolishing tenure would not change that.
Have you ever watched a department become chaotic because a group of faculty stick to the views of a discipline that are a half a century old? I have, and it is not pretty.
One highly biased article from four years ago? That’s what you’ve got?
What a vile vicious anti-teacher, anti union anti tenure screed. Total garbage.
If you thought you had a lot of grossly incompetent teachers before, you will only see more when tenure is abolished. It creates an undesirable profession and you will have profound difficulty getting teachers to teach in the hardest to work areas. Destroying tenure under the phony civil rights banner will do nothing to improve education in California. When the economy gets going you won’t be able to find teachers in these high poverty/low performing schools.
No doubt tenure is a valuable benefit to teachers in the public school system, and a valuable protection for the public against the misuse of power by politicians who control the largest employer in the town, city, or county. There are other valuable benefits to potential teachers that might be used to attract folks into the profession, and the sort of decentralizing of decision making that is possible with choice schools would reduce the ability of politicians to manipulate education employment policy to their private advantage.
Notably, no one can refute the facts laid out in this article. To quote:
“Los Angeles Unified School District, with its 885 schools and 617,000 students, educates one in every 10 children in California. It also mirrors a troubled national system of teacher evaluations and job security that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says must change. Recent articles in the Los Angeles Times have described teachers who draw full pay for years while they sit at home fighting allegations of sexual or physical misconduct.
But the far larger problem in L.A. is one of “performance cases” — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. Their ranks are believed to be sizable — perhaps 1,000 teachers, responsible for 30,000 children. But in reality, nobody knows how many of LAUSD’s vast system of teachers fail to perform. Superintendent Ramon Cortines tells the Weekly he has a “solid” figure, but he won’t release it. In fact, almost all information about these teachers is kept secret.
But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
***
It cost the district roughly $3.5 million to try to fire seven teachers because of the cost of hiring outside lawyers with special expertise, administrative overhead, paying ongoing salaries for each teacher during the lengthy legal battles, and other expenses. Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.
Just a few blocks from LAUSD’s skyscraper headquarters, Los Angeles City Hall’s approach to firing public employees provides a stark contrast to protections enjoyed by teachers, also public employees. Despite civil-service protections, City Hall fires from its 48,000-plus workforce of garbage, parks, street-services, engineering, utilities and other employees more than 80 tenured workers annually. During the past decade, in which LAUSD fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service–protected workers were fired at City Hall. City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan says nobody is paid to leave. She was dumbfounded that LAUSD is paying to dislodge teachers, saying, “That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe that. Golly, it makes no sense. Some are not even mediocre, they’re horrible.”
***
Schonberger benefited from the fact that the small legal unit at LAUSD was already busy juggling a firing case the district badly wanted to win — that of Pinewood Elementary School teacher Colleen Kolter. According to district documents, between May 2003 and October 2005, while teaching at the Pinewood grade school, in Tujunga, Kolter racked up four notices of unsatisfactory service and three below-standard Stull evaluations from a newly reassigned but veteran principal, Ada Munoz-Yslas.
Munoz-Yslas says that Kolter, a thin woman in her mid-50s, went for days without teaching anything and resisted advice from the pricey math and literary coaches sent in to retrain her. “When I started there, almost immediately, people came up to me to complain about the things that had been happening: parents, students, teachers,” says Munoz-Yslas, now the principal at Van Nuys Elementary School. “Lack of classroom management, safety issues, not meeting the education needs of students. … There was a lack of following and implementing the curriculum. A lack of planning.”
Teaching assistants and others tried to salvage the children’s wasted year. Yet the mystery is that during the eight years prior to Munoz-Yslas’ arrival, LAUSD never put Kolter on the dismissal track — even when furious and fed-up parents took their children out of Pinewood altogether.
The state Commission on Professional Competence found that Kolter sometimes had “an unsteady gait and was using slurred speech,” once requiring a small child to support her. Records show that Kolter argued that LAUSD failed to force her to take sick leave to deal with her “bipolar disorder and depression.” But the competence panel said she was fired because “at bottom, it appears she cannot teach.” Kolter could not be reached for comment, and her attorney, Lawrence Trygstad, whose firm is used by UTLA to represent teachers facing dismissal, declined to comment.
Kolter’s firing is one of LAUSD’s exceedingly rare and clear-cut dismissal victories in the past 10 years. Yet by the end of that struggle, LAUSD had spent a staggering $305,576 on private attorneys who helped the district’s legal staff in the fight to get rid of her.
What Bush & Olsen cannot stop:
Isn’t it those of far right ilk, like Olsen, the ones who complained the most about activist judges and abusing the usage of the courts to make laws????
“They allege that “California’s schools hire and retain grossly ineffective teachers at alarming rates.”
Even if this were true (which I don’t believe), shouldn’t the focus be on the inept administrators who are hiring all these “ineffective” teachers? There has been more than a decade of focused attacks on the teaching profession,so, implicit in their own argument, is the question: What on earth is the matter with school policy and leadership that makes it so difficult for them to vet, hire, professionally develop, and retain good teachers?
Exactly, especially since due process rights aren’t granted on one’s hire date. It usually takes 3-4 years to gain such rights. These administrators can’t tell in 3-4 years who is and who isn’t a good teacher?
Quiet, now! You’re being too logical!
If the article linked to by WT is accurate, we might forgive the administrator for being unable to predict how well a teacher is teaching forty five or so years after gaining due process rights.
The article is interesting and describes a problem that exists. However it isn’t an impartial investigation or study of the systemic dis-functions that create the conditions allowing people who should not be teaching to teach. The article gives the impression that teacher tenure is the sole problem dragging down the LA school system, and that as a result the system is infested with bad teachers.
In fact, if the numbers stated in the article are correct, the size of the group (of teachers) forced into retraining — “466 teachers during the past three years”, represents about 1% of the entire staff of 45,473 teachers. This article was written 2010 but the error of its argument still remains. Teacher tenure is not what is wrong with education. Even if twice the number of teachers stated in the article were assigned, or, as the journalist characterizes it, “forced” into retraining, that would leave about 98% of the teaching staff teaching at some level of competency.
The challenges facing all urban districts with significant populations living in poverty, are so much more complex than what is presented by those who argue that teacher tenure is the problem.
After nearly two decades of teaching the urban poor, I mostly see hard working, conscientious, and dedicated teachers, overwhelmed by the challenges that poverty present.
Obama and Duncan wave the common core, as if this was some how the solution. I am left wondering if they actually understand the problem.
Jonathan,
Re: “After nearly two decades of teaching the urban poor, I mostly see hard working, conscientious, and dedicated teachers, overwhelmed by the challenges that poverty present.”
Me too.
Same thing .
Poverty is a big umbrella with some students overcoming and most not. Please be specific. All I have to say to discredit you is “I have all poverty kids and they’re doing fine” They don’t say which poverty kids they have. Be specific, generalizations leave many doors open for those who survive on political double talk
I have no doubt that Jonathan and Ang have mostly seen hard working and conscientious teachers, but apparently they have Aldo seen teachers who were neather. The community needs to use the professionalism an d knowledge of the teachers in the building in the teavpcher evaluation process by having peer evaluation.
I always ask myself: would I want my daughter to have that teacher? and in most cases the answer is yes. In my school of 35 teachers, their are two who are struggling, the rest are at or approaching excellent. The two who struggle are not lazy, they are relatively new, and struggle with classroom management. They represent less than 1% of the teaching staff and while they may be “loose links” they are not what is wrong with education today.
The larger point is that the so called “lemons” that march around LA, or any other school district, are, according to the numbers provided in that 2010 article, (and assuming my math is correct) a small percentage, 1%-2%, and can’t possibly account for the issues facing low income urban school districts. Most people, who make a career of teaching in low income urban school districts, know this.
Those who present teacher tenure (at least in the k-12 world) as an issue so significant that it needs to be abolished, don’t understand the real dis-functions teachers in urban school district are contending with. They dismiss the effects of poverty as an excuse, not, (to quote Diane from Reign of Error), “a harsh reality”.
I am curious about your perception of the professional responsibility a teacher has for ensuring that all students are getting a quality education. This came up a while ago on this blog, when I posted about a middle school science teacher who was eventually dismissed from teaching in a small town public school because of the intertwining of science and his religious beliefs in the classroom (you can read about it here in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20teacher.html?_r=0).
The article reports that downstream science teachers testified that
“….she consistently had to reteach evolution to Mr. Freshwater’s students because they did not master the basics. Another testified that Mr. Freshwater told his students they should not always take science as fact, citing as an example a study that posited the possibility of a gene for homosexuality.
“Science is wrong,” Mr. Freshwater was reported as saying, “because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin, and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner.”
A third teacher testified that Mr. Freshwater advised students to refer to the Bible for additional science research.”
I argued that the downstream teachers had a professional obligation to take action, while others on this blog argued that downstream teachers had an obligation not to take action, and are only obliged to speak up if there is a danger of immediate physical harm to the student.
What do you think?
One od the first supreme court cases involving religion was the Gideon Bible case. Every Christian wanted their own Bible, not the Gideons. If you want continous war like in Ireland for 500 years, simply ignore separation of church and state. Yes kids must be protected from religious beliefs of the state. And the teacher and school are arms of the state. When we teach, we teach as representatives of the state of course in public schools.
Throw them out
Who paid the students and their families? I’m sorry but I just don’t believe any of these groups are anything other than a sham.
teachingecomo… whats stopping you. develop your own and challenge CC some ideas http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
I am not sure what you are referring to. Develop my own what?
Develop, with your school, your own system of assessment and implement it. And take the information and challenge CC
You might check, but at one point the ACLU was making a similar argument in California!!!!!!
For more information see website: http://www.deborahmeier.com
Here is what would be nice, for folks who are upset that I posted a link to an article about LAUSD’s difficulties in firing even the absolute worst teachers:
1. Prove that no incompetent teachers exist, not even one.
OR
2. Prove that if incompetent teachers exist, it is much easier and cheaper to give them due process than this article claims — i.e., that it costs $500,000 per teacher to go through years of legal battles, making the process so difficult that it happens less than once a year in the entire district.
OR
3. Prove that even if such incompetent teachers exist and even if they are practically impossible to fire, they are not concentrated in poor minority schools but are equally present in rich white suburban schools.
I doubt that any commenter will be able to prove any of the above, which will leave me thinking that it is a shame that poor minority kids are stuck with the worst teachers who can almost never be fired.
By the way, even if poor minority kids are getting shafted, one could still make the argument that getting rid of tenure isn’t the answer — that getting rid of tenure altogether will harm more good teachers in the long run (somehow) than the bad teachers that it will get rid of.
But it would at least be nice if folks showed some awareness that there might be a difficult tradeoff here, and that if you support the current system, you’re in part asking poor minority kids to bear the cost of helping teachers in rich suburban schools have job protection against a vengeful principal there
I posted this comment just above, but seems better placed here:
The article is interesting and describes a problem that exists. However it isn’t an impartial investigation or study of the systemic dis-functions that create the conditions allowing people who should not be teaching to teach. The article gives the impression that teacher tenure is the sole problem dragging down the LA school system, and that as a result the system is infested with bad teachers.
In fact, if the numbers stated in the article are correct, the size of the group (of teachers) forced into retraining — “466 teachers during the past three years”, represents about 1% of the entire staff of 45,473 teachers. This article was written 2010 but the error of its argument still remains. Teacher tenure is not what is wrong with education. Even if twice the number of teachers stated in the article were assigned, or, as the journalist characterizes it, “forced” into retraining, that would leave about 98% of the teaching staff teaching at some level of competency.
The challenges facing all urban districts with significant populations living in poverty, are so much more complex than what is presented by those who argue that teacher tenure is the problem.
After nearly two decades of teaching the urban poor, I mostly see hard working, conscientious, and dedicated teachers, overwhelmed by the challenges that poverty present.
Obama and Duncan wave the common core, as if this was some how the solution. I am left wondering if they actually understand the problem.
As an attorney and educator myself, it sounds like the problem is hiring outside counsel. The attorney’s for the district should have been able to handle a termination. They could have hired additional additional inhouse attorneys for a fraction of the cost. Perhaps it is their attorneys that are ineffective. It seems to me that outside counsel were milking these cases for fees.
Is this a reprint from The Onion?
“But, all that tenure really means is that a person must be made aware of the reason they may be in jeopardy of losing their job.”
Re- posting this from a pervious thread, similar topic.
Originally posted by Labor Layer, I believe.
Excellent summary and explanation of the issues of ” tenure”, IMHO.
“Due process protection for govt employees is excellent public policy. In the private sector, a union contract’s “just cause” protection — essentially the same as the govt employees’ due-process protecdtion — is also excellent public policy.
Due-process/just-cause do not prevent an employer from discharging an employee; they just require that the employer have a good reason to
in many employment situations one cannot count on a manager’s self-interest to prevent bad discharge decisions.
In govt employment, the manager never has a profit motive and often does not even have an easily-measured good-divisional-performance motive guiding his/her actions. In other words, in govt employment, if a manager discharges an excellent employee for bad reasons, the manager will rarely suffer any adverse personal consequences as a result of the institution losing the services of an excellent employee. The same is mostly true for very large private employers — all private employers have a profit motive, but for very large private employers the adverse impact on profits of a manager’s bad decision to discharge an excellent employee will rarely be significant enough to subject the manager to criticism. Non-profit employers are often similar to govt employers — no profit motive guiding management + top “management” is often a board of directors of major donors/important local citizens who usually have very limited knowledge of day-to-day operations.
These are real-world facts that contradict what they teach in organizational behavior and economics courses.
Due-process/just-cause protection effectively deters managers from making bad discharge decisions. These protections will not deter a good/competent manager from discharging a poorly-performing employee. I represented management for employers of unionized white-collar employees and management successfully discharged poorly-performing employees; usually, the union walked away from the well-document discharge w/o invoking arbitration and, if the union went to arbitration, management usually won. Conversely, knowing that a discharge might be challenged at arbitration in many cases prevented (or allowed me to discourage) a bad discharge decision in the first place. Managers are all human; even good managers can be frustrated by excellent employees who sometimes make the managers lose face or who are holding jobs that the manager would love to give to his/her buddy.
School administrators who complain that due-process prevents them from discharging poorly-performing teachers either lack the managerial skills/resources to document the poor performance or lack the intestinal fortitude to pull the trigger on the poorly-performing teacher.”
A school principal in Los Angeles Unified does not have the power to fire a teacher because they don’t like the teacher’s face or for any other made-up or legitimate reason. Eliminating due process will not solve the problem of ineffective teachers. The process for supporting ineffective teachers needs to be overhauled as well as the process for helping that person leave the profession and end the damage they do to children.
Without tenure, no one has to give a reason for firing a teacher. They can just fire them, even if it is because they don’t like their face or their race.
“In higher education, tenure is a guarantee of a lifetime job.”
That simply isn’t true. Teachers in higher ed can–and should–be fired for cause and after due process. That some of them aren’t (like one abusive teacher where I teach), it’s because no one wants the aggravation of going through the process.
Great post! Been reading about different civil rights violation situations. Thanks for the info!