Paul Karrer was the 2009 North Monterey LULAC Teacher of the Year. He has taught in Korea , Samoa , England , Connecticut , and is currently a fifth-grade tenured teacher in Castroville Elementary School, Castroville California.
In this article, Karrer explains why tenure is necessary: it protects teachers from the latest fad or misguided mandate.
He writes that teachers are subject to “a revolving door of insipid, untried, never-ending contradictory education philosophies, a steady departure of administrators, over-filled classrooms, diminishing resources, increased poverty, non-related, high-stakes academic testing, and the constant insertion by non-educators of mandated, mantra-driven education policy.
“Veteran teachers have seen: No Child Left Behind, no science, Race to the Top, math this-and-that, reading fluency and whole-word recognition, phonics, bilingualism and language acquisition, and now, Common Core.
“What did teachers get? Substandard pay and tenure. Yet tenure is what allows veteran teachers the freedom to check the insanity of injurious reform.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Yet tenure is what allows teachers the freedom to check the insanity if injurious reform.”
Indeed, which is why, along with the desire to make teaching cheap temp work, it is being attacked so systematically.
The fact of the matter is the teachers who DO speak out, unless they are somehow connected with others in a district, get canned.
“Tenure” doesn’t protect them at all. It actually protects school districts.
A perfect, succinct assessment of the need for tenure.
The attack on teaching is just one front in the the more general attack on knowledge by the forces of ignorance in the world today.
But teachers, unlike doctors or attorneys — whose knowledge and intelligence informs their practice with EXPERIENCE- have little respect from a citizenry that thinks anyone can be ‘trained’ to ‘teach’. The very word ‘practitioner’ is never used, replaced by ‘teacher’, and the idea that a classroom is the PRACTICE is unknown. I read widely and never hear the words “teacher-practioner’ or ‘practice’!
THAY is why it works!
In the medical profession, and with rapid uptake into education, the word is “provider” the great leveler invented by insurance companies to encompass any “service provider” from MD to nurse to the person who scrubs floors. T
he new teacher accredition standards are filled with jargon intended to help “vanish” concepts such as student teacher, higher education, teacher education.
Providers and completers are words of choice. A completer is a person who may, for example, enter teaching with no crediential other than passing muster with a provider of services.
Thank you Laura for that clarification. Exactly, I was a civil servant, a provider of services but there must be a clarification between one provider and another, because an ambulance medic is a provider of service, but the surgeon who operates on the mitral valve of your heart is on a whole different level of provider.
I am a wordsmith, a teacher of language for a life time, and playwright, and I understand how word choice laters meaning, as do the mad men who now write the national narrative about education and health care… two targets of corporate control. For 2 decades they wrote the jargon that became the national conversation, and the word PROFESSIONAL GOT LOST ALONG THE WAY.
It takes more than a provider to show an emergent mind how to think, to reflect, to make choices based on analysis and comparisons, and to make predictions. Knowing how 30 emergent learners will acquire skills is a beginning… motivating children to learn is another thing, and actually facilitating and enabling kids to learn to DO WORK, to do THINGS is what we ‘providers’ who PRACTICE A PROFESSION actually do.
Hope this clarifies the difference between provider of training and a professional practitioner of a discipline.
Laura, as always, love your insights. I also think it’s important to note in the “tenure” debate, that teachers, unlike other professionals, do not really have a lot of horizontal mobility opportunities. Meaning, if I was an “exceptional” teacher in one school district with twenty years in and some of the mastery of this complex job that comes not only, but significantly, from experience, and I wanted or needed to change locations, VERY few districts would consider hiring me. Most teachers have about a five to six year Mobility Timeline. (I believe that’s why so many administrators have very little classroom experience…they realize it’s a Now or Never proposition after a couple of years). What’s in my professional file doesn’t really matter to my employment prospects as a teacher outside of my own school district…but it certainly matters if I happen to need to protect myself WITHIN my school. Just some thoughts.
Susan;
You seem to forget that the “citizenry” can “experience” as well…..and what has been its experience with unionized public school system teachers over the past few decades?
The use of terms such as “practioner”, and “professional” and such for [so-called] “teachers” went by the wayside when such individuals chose to forsake professionalism and the practice of a profession in exchange for becoming yet another group of “organized” blue-collar workers making “gimme, gimme” demands on society.
Seems they’ve made their bed…and now don’t like the idea of having to lie in it.
Yeah..right. I made my bed with a devil’s deal wight he union. What poop!
The union is crucial to workers, but the political traitors who are running the show need to be sent out the door, to be replaced by people like Al Shnaker or Sandra Feldman who represented out interests. I started teaching in 1963, so do not think your kin dog rhetoric holds water with me or anyone who recognizes the observable reality as truth.
The problem with the argument is public K-12 teachers don’t have “tenure,” no matter what certain states call identical civil service protections that other qualified public employees have. It doesn’t matter if teacher unions mistakenly call it that in some lame attempt to build solidarity with college and university professors. It isn’t “tenure,” so his entire argument is meaningless. Teachers do NOT have lifetime jobs, which is what “tenure” actually IS-ONLY the right to an administrative hearing–and the writer is under the illusion teachers have any kind of “freedom” to teach. They do NOT. As a teacher, if you are told you MUST teach a designated curriculum by your administrator and your district, you BETTER do it. “Academic freedom” does NOT exist in public K-12.
If a principal wants to dump a teacher, he or she can do it, and very easily, knowing it is almost impossible to fire administrators thanks to many of them having unions (which should be illegal since they are management) and powerful connections. Districts have all kinds of ways to get of teachers from their “lifetime” jobs.
“Due process” only protects school districts from having to spend more money on expensive litigation. Few teachers nationwide avail to hearings anyway but take severance packages in lieu of them (called “settlements”).
In the old days, principals were less inclined to get rid of teachers because of the damage to school and staff morale. Only those teachers who really deserved to be canned WERE canned. It has never been the case principals couldn’t fire teachers–they always could. Just because they didn’t do it much wasn’t because they couldn’t do it.
When I say “tenure” protects school districts, I am referring to it being a check on a principal’s worst tendencies to get rid of people he or she doesn’t want. It saves on civil litigation costs. Starving teachers into taking piddling severance packages in exchange for a gag order and a promise not to sue also saves them money. However, the hearings aren’t much used except in NYC and a handful of other urban districts where teachers and their unions have some sort of “pull.” Outside of those few areas, teachers have fewer protections than McDonald’s workers and have their careers easily ruined.
Amen, Paul Karrer! However the reformistas and their allies probably cannot conceive of brain dead mediocrities (i.e. teachers) having any intelligent ideas about their practice. Best to give all the power to the CEOs (hopefully Ivy educated) of the new corporatized educational order.
When they are done attacking tenure, what next?
End game: replace teachers with computers. They never collect a salary or a pension.
Yes, it’s scary to see all the education-oriented start ups here in Silicon Valley. As I watch Lyft and Uber swiftly destroying the traditional taxi industry here, I realize the overthrow of human teachers could be surprisingly swift. I recently talked with a Berkeley computer science PhD student who has been learning loads of history from the sophisticated Scandinavian computer games he’s been playing. Some of my seventh graders are fond of these too and they learn a lot. It is conceivable that computers could out-compete human teachers in some ways.
If we are able to replace teachers with computers, or better yet develop a pill that would impart the knowledge of humanity to each student it would be all to the good. Former teachers could than turn to producing other useful things.
Schools do not exist to employ teachers. They exist to educate students. If computers or pills would do a better job, that is what we should use in education.
Would that I shared your faith!
Are you sure there will be paying jobs for all of us displaced by computers? What advice would you give to a 55 year old taxi driver nowadays?
And don’t you think there may be benefits of human teachers that may not be accounted for by the agents of disruption and the consumers of education until it is too late to undo the changes? Do all disruptions lead to net gain? Is there some law of the universe that guarantees this?
Given the rapid rate of economic disruption, do you think the government should offer financial assistance to those who are made obsolete? I hear they do this in Denmark.
Ponderosa,
My state still suffers from the advances in technology that pushed folks off the farm. If only we still required half of our population to grow food my state would be a good deal larger and the dying rural towns would return to being the vibrant places they were a century ago.
I think the 55 year old Taxi driver might be threatened by Uber, but will probably have a job for the next 10 years. After that, I think professional driving will begin to be destroyed by self driving vehicles and society will be much much much better off because of it.
I do think the government should be more involved in retraining workers made obsolete.
Regarding replacing teachers with computers possibly being “to the good,” the bulk of the scientific evidence is that children benefit enormously (cognitively as well as emotionally) from the wealth of interpersonal relationships that well-funded classroom environments generate.
And at the same time, there is a growing body of research suggestive of psychological dangers stemming from people isolating themselves from interpersonal interactions due to their computer use addiction.
At some point, abstract arguments need to come down from the clouds to deal with the evidence on the ground.
By the way, as a newly retired public school teacher, I have posted a video on Youtube (search google for: Common Core: Din-Din Retires). I am working on what I hope will result in a constructive, if humble, contribution to the education dialogue, but this will take several more months, at least.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
teachingeconomist and ponderosa:
Good grief!!! Are you seriously educators???
Here are true stories from many nursing homes in British Columbia, Canada. I watched on documentary channel in 2013. Personal support people, who do not need to have language skills, except cleaning patients, pushed and threw patients to injury or death later on. No, they did not go to jail at all because patients fell off the bed, injured them to death, technically!!!
I hope that your children and many other children would be more or less like robots because they do not learn how to morally interact at school, except with the monitor at home. Could you picture your old age be taken care by robot mind in human being body?
You will have broken bones, or any fractures caused by excessive force from robot care without acknowledging your pain. Good deed returns good deed, and evil follows evil. Stupidity deserves suffering. Back2basic
No, we don’t get to “check the insanity.” This isn’t a comparable situation to the academic freedom enjoyed by tenured university professors!
“Tenure” (in actuality continuing-contract status or due process) doesn’t protect teachers from having to implement whatever fads their administrators take a fancy to. Were teachers to refuse, that would be insubordination: one of the three causes for dismissal in most states. You’d get a hearing, and then you’d most likely be shown the door unless the administrator’s fad was clearly illegal– had everyone giving up his/her firstborn or whatever.