Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation writes a cogent article in The American Educator in defense of tenure. Most people mistakenly think that tenure means a job for life. That may be true in high education (where only a minority of professors have tenure or tenure-track positions), but it is not true in K-12 education. Tenure for teachers means due process, the right to a fair hearing before an impartial judge or arbitrator. Kahlenberg provides a valuable history of tenure in American schools and why it matters. He notes that conservatives have always opposed tenure because it constrains management’s ability to fire at will, without cause. But what is most troubling in the present moment is that people with liberal credentials have jumped on the anti-tenure cause, beguiled by the false idea that students of color will get better teachers if their current teachers could be easily fired.

 

He writes:

 

 

 

Teacher tenure rights, first established more than a century ago, are under unprecedented attack. Tenure—which was enacted to protect students’ education and those who provide it—is under assault from coast to coast, in state legislatures, in state courtrooms, and in the media.In June 2014, in the case of Vergara v. California, a state court judge struck down teacher tenure and seniority laws as a violation of the state’s constitution.* Former CNN and NBC journalist Campbell Brown has championed a copycat case, Wright v. New York, challenging the Empire State’s tenure law (which was consolidated with another New York case challenging tenure, Davids v. New York). Similar cases are reportedly in the works in several other states.

 

Meanwhile, with incentives from the federal Race to the Top program, 18 states have recently weakened tenure laws, and Florida and North Carolina sought to eliminate tenure entirely. According to the Education Commission of the States, in order to give greater weight to so-called performance metrics, 10 states prohibited using tenure or seniority as a primary factor in layoff decisions in 2014, up from five in 2012.

 

Leading media outlets have joined in the drumbeat against tenure. A 2010 Newsweek cover story suggested that “the key to saving American education” is: “We must fire bad teachers.” In 2014, the cover of Time magazine showed a judge’s mallet crushing an apple. The headline, referencing the Vergara case, read, “Rotten Apples: It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher; Some Tech Millionaires May Have Found a Way to Change That….”

 

Tenure was designed to prevent patronage hiring and nepotism, as well as to protect teachers for politically motivated firings and defend academic freedom.

 

Kahlenberg offers many examples and adds:

 

The argument for tenure—and the requirement of “just cause” firing—is especially compelling in the case of educators. Teachers feel enormous pressure from parents, principals, and school board members to take actions that may not be in the best interests of students. Teacher and blogger Peter Greene notes that because teachers “answer to a hundred different bosses,” they “need their own special set of protections.” Because all adults, from parents to school board members, have themselves attended school, they feel qualified to weigh in on how educators should teach, while they would never tell a surgeon or an auto mechanic what to do. Richard Casagrande, a lawyer for the New York State United Teachers, made a profound point when he said during recent litigation that tenure laws are “not a gift to teachers. These laws empower teachers to teach well.”

 

To begin with, teachers need tenure to stand up to outsiders who would instruct them on how to teach politically sensitive topics. A science teacher in a fundamentalist community who wants to teach evolution, not pseudoscientific creationism or intelligent design, needs tenure protection. So does a sex-ed teacher who doesn’t want to be fired for giving students practical information about how to avoid getting HIV. So does an English teacher who wants to assign a controversial and thought-provoking novel.

 

These concerns are hardly theoretical. In 2005, the Kansas Board of Education adopted science standards that challenged mainstream evolutionary theory and was cheered by proponents of intelligent design.44 (The standard was later repealed.) In 2010, conservatives on the Texas Board of Education proposed renaming the slave trade the “Atlantic triangular trade,” an effort that was later dropped. And in 2012, the Utah legislature passed (and the governor vetoed) a bill to ban instruction on homosexuality and contraception.

 

Arm yourself with a thoughtful discussion of the history and politics of tenure for teachers. This is a good place to start.

 

 

– See more at: http://www.aft.org/ae/summer2015/kahlenberg#sthash.aaKYcjIJ.dpuf