Tenure can be defined as: guaranteed permanent employment, especially as a teacher
or professor, after a probationary period. This probationary
period typically lasts up to three years, after the three years of teaching a
teacher can receive tenure. Once given tenure the process to fire a teacher becomes
long and costly. So what this means is that you basically have to only teach
for three years to then have a job for life, with the exception of committing a
serious crime.
People say this is a necessary component of the
educational system due to the fact that it protects good teachers from getting their
jobs cut first if they have high income and the school or district is
experiencing budget cuts. The problem is the system we have now is protecting a
lot of bad teachers. The system should be based more on the quality of a
teacher rather than the measly three years they spend learning how to be a good
teacher. I have had many teachers that have been at a school for twenty plus
years that are not god teachers, but stay there because they completed three
years of teaching. Three years is not enough time to say that a teacher is good
enough to be a teacher for life.
The system is set up to cut the least experienced
teachers first no matter what, but what if they are one of the good teachers
that just haven’t received tenure yet? Teachers get job security based on length
of employment. A new teacher that is an exceptional teacher and is well liked will
be let go first while a mediocre teacher who has been there 20 plus years will
not be cut solely on the length of their employment.
What if we had students go through this process, telling
them that they can graduate as long as they have been going to school for a
certain amount of years. There would be no grading or evaluation of the
students just on their length as a student. Our education system would fall
apart, including our society. The process of tenure needs to be evaluated and
needs to be based on productivity and excellence not just years of teaching. To
better our children’s education and have trust in our teachers, tenure needs to
be based on quality not quantity.
I can see both sides on the tenure argument you have laid out here.
ReplyDeleteOn one hand, I feel like it is a great idea to protect teachers who have been at it for a while because frankly they deserve it. Teaching is not easy and they should be rewarded for putting in years of hard work. As you mentioned in your article, it would be easy for a school system to cut a teacher with an extremely high salary as opposed to cutting multiple teachers who make less money.
However, tenure can keep shitty teachers employed. I've been exposed to this multiple times during my academic career. A teacher who does not have the required skills to be teaching a course remains employed simply because they squeaked out a few years of work without being fired. That part of tenure does not seem fair to me.
I do feel like it is a system that could be redefined. Some teachers are excellent teachers, but some are bad teachers. The newer teachers who are coming in are inexperienced but may have brilliant ideas. I think the system needs to be totally redone to protect teachers and to base it on their work, not on years experienced or their students standardized tests.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you were able to learn from a few divine beings in the past twenty years. Is this blog post talking about college tenure, or Massachusetts public school tenure?
ReplyDeleteM.G.L. c71, §42 states that teacher may be dismissed for
"inefficiency, incompetency, incapacity, conduct unbecoming a teacher, insubordination or failure on the part of the teacher to satisfy teacher performance standards". Not quite the high bar of a "committing a serious crime" that you claim.
Also, we do have a system where under-performing children are graduated after sitting in a classroom long enough. And our education system and society are falling apart as a result.
I'm so happy that this topic was finally discussed. Tenure is something that I think is beneficial to the professors who deserve it, but for some its just a ticket to lay back and enjoy the ride.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though there should be some sort of evaluation period within a tenure contract. Perhaps if you dove into why getting a professor out of a tenure contract is costly would help students like myself, better understand why these professors often get away with poorly educating students.
I agree with you that the tenure system as it currently is is very flawed, however I think there is no easy fix here. If we were to analyze teachers abilities before administering tenure there could be a problem. We cannot base a teachers tenure purely off of student test scores or off of how much they are liked by students. I agree with you that we should find a way to refine the tenure system, but we should take care in how we do it.
ReplyDelete