End teacher tenure
The American education system needs fixing in a lot of ways. It’s a complicated issue, but one relatively simple reform that I think would result in significant improvements is the elimination of teacher tenure.
I’m not convinced that tenure is ever the best idea, but at least for professors, I can see some positive utility. In colleges and universities, professors are teaching and discussing new ideas at the forefront of research and understanding. These may be controversial and objectionable to some, but because they’re where the current advances are being made, they have to be discussed in the classroom. In order to protect the ability of professors to challenge conventional wisdom and to expose students to new ideas, it might be necessary to guarantee them a job with virtually no strings attached (i.e., give them tenure).
In elementary, middle, and high schools, however, teachers are working from curricula, the details of which they usually have little control over. Teachers are not in a position to be able to assert sweeping challenges to the conventional wisdom, and even if they were I’d argue that that’s not a good thing for them to be doing. Primary and secondary education is a time for students to be learning the basics, the well-established and essential background. (Of course, there is some grey area here about what counts as “objectionable” and “controversial,” given the recent disputes about teaching evolution. I’d say that’s more related to a separate issue of who determines curricula; I currently lean towards preferring a nationally standardized one, but that’s an issue for another post.)
So, why have teacher tenure? I really can’t think of any good reason. And with stories such as this one out of New York City, it’s clear that there are major downsides. When the city closes failing schools, they’re required to keep paying the salaries of the tenured teachers who worked there, even though they’re no longer working. Other schools looking to hire teachers are wary of hiring out of that pool, since the stigma of having taught at a failing school hangs over their heads. Hiring brand new teachers and continuing to pay the old ones puts severe strain on their already-strained budget, so the city instituted a hiring freeze, telling principals they could only hire teachers out of the pool. The principals would rather leave the positions vacant. There’s no winning scenario for these principals, these schools—these students. Either they get bad (or at least unconvincingly good) teachers, or they get no teachers at all.
A better solution, but one which I’m sure would require arduous renegotiation with the teachers’ union, would be to allow the district to terminate the contracts of teachers who had remained in the pool for some certain amount of time. If they can’t convince any other school to take them on, even when there are many vacant positions, it doesn’t make sense for the district to continue supporting them. They’re not teaching!
It would also make more sense for schools in general to be able to get rid of teachers who weren’t teaching, even if they were performing their lack of teaching in a classroom, under the pretext of educating. I’m talking about bad teachers. Yes, they exist. And for all the hubbub every politician loves to make about improving the quality of American education, it’s surprising that this simple measure hasn’t yet been instituted.
As I see it, the bottom line is that teachers are getting substantially more job security than everyone else, in exchange for no real benefit to society. Sure, that job security is pleasant for them, but why do teachers in particular deserve such unique protection? If your company decides to close the branch office where you work, unless you’re fortunate enough to get transferred elsewhere, you get laid off. That’s sad, but people live through it. And if you’re bad at your job, your boss can fire you. Tenure makes teachers immune from these outcomes, and it merely serves to protect bad teachers and thwart the efforts of teachers who are more qualified and competent. It ought to be eliminated.
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Easy! First, get everyone to realize that “academic freedom” doesn’t apply to primary and secondary schools. Then, get the teacher’s unions to give up their most prized possession. That’s a morning’s work, at least. But yes, it would certainly improve schools, and in short order.
The teacher’s unions may not have considered that one side-effect of eliminating tenure would be to elevate popular respect for the profession of teaching. If the reason for this is a mystery to them, they need to get out more.
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