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
History indeed, and the American history wars are alive and well again, as today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece demonstrates.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bye-bye-american-history-1433978690
One of the most pernicious and troubling rheephorm spins is to paint due process for teachers as “jobs for life.”
There are no shades of grey [whether more than 50 or less] here: it is an outright lie propagated by those supporting the “soft bigotry of low expectations” of public school staffs, students, parents and their associated communities.
Due process is absolutely necessary if teachers are to be advocates for their students.
And the idea—closely connected to forced ranking—that organizations big and small can (as a rule) “fire their way to excellence” is a sure-fire way to go to rack and ruin.
Read the following VANITY FAIR article—
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
Then ponder the connection between pummeling your way to success and stack ranking. Finish by thinking of what is happening to public education in the light of what happened to Microsoft—and how what happened to Microsoft is being applied to public educators and students and parents.
‘Nuff said.
😎
Since when have teachers been hired to be “advocates for their students”? Here I thought they were hired to provide students with an education in the manner prescribed by those that employed them? Was I wrong?
Seems to me that if teachers want to do things THEIR way, then they should set-up and finance their OWN schools…and quit trying to impose themselves on what is the province of others more qualified in those areas than themselves.
Ken
There are few more qualified than the teacher herself. You really need to try teaching Language Arts for administrators who specialized in Physical Education.
Some of the current prescribed manners have absolutely no basis in research, educationally or cognitively.
Good administrators hire teachers who know the myriad of manners to reach the myriad of student differences.
My 6th grade math teacher noticed how much I squinted to see the board in class. She told me I needed glasses, sent me to the school nurse, and sent a note home to my parents. Prior to this I’d complained to my parents that I couldn’t see well in school, but they were very busy working and being too stressed out to pay it much attention. When the note came home from school, they found an affordable eye doctor and I got glasses. Thanks to the advocacy of Ms. Morgan in 6th grade I got what I needed in order to succeed in school. I pay it forward to my own students as I advocate for them in the myriad of needs that they have in order to do well in school. I am not sure where you draw the line between “educating” and being an educator who gets to know the whole child, her family and community, and uses this knowledge to advocate for what she needs in order to learn. The stories contained on teacher blogs are full of all the ways we advocate for and educate our students. Teaching is a very human endeavor. Read our stories. Talk to us. Come into our classrooms. Meet our students and their families. And help us in our work as mandated reporters, as advocates, as teachers, as humans with important relationships with the younger generations.
West Coast Teacher;
In another post on this thread, you pretty much demonstrated to me that YOU aren’t qualified in that area…nor, if truth be told, to be in front of students in a classroom PERIOD.
Or do we seek today to setup dishonest, ignorant jerks to “educate” our children todya? Want to tell them – as you told me – about the “Perry Township Schools”, do ya’? [smile]
Personally, I would expect a teacher to be (1) basically truthful, and (2) be knowledgeable enough to be able to backup (via minimal research – such as using a simple “Google” search – if necessary) what he says when he shoots off his mouth. You showed to me that you’re lacking in both areas.
In short, please spare me your determinations as to who is “qualified”. You aren’t “qualified” to make them.
“Tenure Your Resignation”
The foremost case for tenure
Is Gates and Duncan crowd
By fear of lost provender
The teachers would be cowed
First of all, tenure for teachers is not all that different from job security for an auto worker. After a certain period of time, during which a person performs the job well, longer for some jobs, shorter for others, he or she is vested, tenured. In other words, you can’t be arbitrarily fired—say for questioning stupid decisions of a manager or being involved with a union, as I once was before I had tenure. Not to say you can’t be fired—you’re not a Supreme Court justice, however capricious they might be. But you can’t be fired without cause or without due process. Show me a person opposed to due process and firing only for cause, and I’ll show you a totalitarian wretch.
When I visited China back in 1974, I remember someone in our group asking at a school how they dealt with bad teachers: “do you just fire them”? The answer was that that would be socially irresponsible. If a person is not doing the job well, it would be negligent to push them out and into another job they might not do well. So you work with them to improve their performance, or to prepare them for an alternative. I have no idea whether that idea maintains traction in today’s China, but the principle remains an excellent one.
Especially in a society like that of the USA in which teaching is one of the few paths to upward mobility, or even steady employment, for significant numbers of people of color, as it once was to earlier generations of Irish and Jewish educators. I have to wonder how it is that the civil rights leaders who have promoted the firing of teachers on the basis of corrupt exams don’t seem to have looked sufficiently into how many of the teachers being pushed out into oblivion are themselves members of minority groups.
“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. ”
I actually didn’t know the Obama Administration sought to weaken tenure for teachers.
The Democrat’s proposal on standardized testing is not good. It’s just funding tied to a set of requirements for public schools to analyze standardized testing schemes, and it uses existing funding they took from somewhere else.
The cure is worse than the disease. If it passes I hope public schools don’t get duped into accepting the (meager) funding and the (extensive) requirements. Pass on it. You’ll actually come out ahead especially if it takes time (= money) away from something with some value.
https://www.opencongress.org/bill/hr5807-113/text
This is how Lack of Tenure works: Two of my excellent middle school teachers were fired by the Superintendent of Perry Township Schools in Indiana because they had not supported this man’s campaign for the position.
The “job-for-life” notion is really owned by poor administration, and/or poor judicial rulings, and smart lawyers who recognize both and can get cases thrown out.
Screeching that one cannot fire bad teachers is another case of blaming the wrong person. Who is to blame if the teacher is inadequate, the person who refuses to do the work to evaluate, reeducate, or fire him/her, the school board who agrees to give tenure too soon, or the public which creates a short supply of teachers wherein it is necessary to hire a “warm body?”
[This may be coming to a school near you shortly.]
I have seen poor teachers fired. In one case, the A. P. had to work at it, but she was up to the job.
I have also seen Principals and Assistant Principals who seemed to have either no skill or no cojones in dealing with poor teachers. That is not a teacher’s fault and no reason for getting rid of tenure.
What two teachers were those? It would be nice to review the news accounts of their dismissals (and if they were in Perry Township – a suburb of Indpls – and circumstances were as you say, then there WOULD be news accounts!).
Ken
This was in 1950’s and I am not sure the paper even reported it. The teachers sued and won a settlement.
And Perry township is two hours from Indianapolis. Hardly a suburb.
West Coast Teacher;
Perry Township Schools are *NOT* “two hours from Indianapolis”, but in the same COUNTY as Indianapolis which, if you knew anything about the city and it’s Unigov structure, would realize has boundaries that CORRESPOND exactly with the county boundaries. In short, it’s not “two hours from Indianapolis”. In fact, it’s not even two MINUTES from Indianapolis. Perry Township is literally PART of Indianapolis. And even in the 1950’s, such an incident would have made it all over the Indianapolis Star…and the Star’s archives are searchable online
So, is the rest of your story as honest as the crappola you just tried to spread here? I.e. – you LIED about the location; can we safely assume that the rest of your tale is just as “credible”?
Tenure has afforded me the ability to fight tooth and nail to get resources from my district to provide for our English language learner population this past year. I have been able to put myself out there politically, be the squeaky wheel and advocate for students that the district would rather ignore. Newer non-tenured teachers face overwhelming teaching circumstances, but feel powerless to voice their concerns because they fear for their jobs. My tenure allows me to advocate on behalf of children, and protects me with due process if I am ever fired or demoted due to being a whistle blower in the face of detrimental and inequitable school policies.
Tenure goes beyond due process. Academic freedom which also involves protecting the rights of children is at stake.
As maestramalinche stated, “My tenure allows me to advocate on behalf of children, and protects me with due process if I am ever fired or demoted due to being a whistle blower in the face of detrimental and inequitable school policies.”
There is a reason why Accreditation Boards require 50 % full time faculty. Many require 5 full-time faculty with doctorates for a Program. If there were only adjuncts in the department, who is going to insure that the standards for a program, which the State approved, will be maintained.
Once the governors refuse to properly support higher ed to the point where there is only sufficient money for adjuncts, our quality of education will plummet and lose the respect other countries. When will our governors try and envision the reprecussions of some of their asinine directives?
One of my daughters has students from eight different countries including Saudi Arabia, Libya, Russia, and China in one of her classes. I attended the graduation at another university. Graduates from the area of science came from around the world. That will soon
end if our degrees loose their efficacy.
We should stop throwing away money on harmful, unsound tests and charter schools; give public schools and higher ed the needed money to hire full time faculty. The greed of the corporate world is destroying our public education.