Education, Part 3: Tenure

When people denigrate the American system of education—which, to some extent, they should—fingers are invariably pointed at the same supposed causes: the teachers have guaranteed tenure for life which protects incompetents; teachers are not accountable for student achievement; teachers are overpaid; teachers received free medical benefits; teachers only work a half-year and get huge pensions.

I will discuss each of these complaints in turn, but I will also discuss administrators, boards of education, parents, and the students themselves, all of which are equally important as causes of the current state of education.

I have already discussed merit pay, which is a much more complicated issue than most non-educators realize. Now I wish to discuss another equally-thorny issue which the anti-education media would have us believe is a simple black-and-white issue: tenure.

I should begin by a brief explanation of what tenure actually is. Put simply, it means a teacher cannot be dismissed without just cause. It is not intended to guarantee a lifetime job, nor to protect incompetent teachers. It only protects teachers against dismissal based on whim or non-professional reasons.

Non-educators might not appreciate the need for such protection, but there were valid reasons why tenure was instituted in the first place. Prior to its inception, Boards of Education routinely fired teachers in order to open positions for relatives and friends. This was a Board of Education “perk” which was used routinely throughout education. And when a budget crisis arose, it was simplest to balance the a budget by firing experienced teachers earning the higher salaries, leaving education in the hands of newcomers and inexperienced teachers, whose mentors and role models were then gone.

In spite of the tenure laws, I have seen incompetent teachers removed from their positions, and rightfully so. The procedures to remove a tenured teacher are not prohibitive, merely requiring administrators to evaluate those teachers and show evidence of a lack of improvement or a continued failure to follow valid laws and policies.

But I have also seen some incompetent teachers retain their position for years for a simple reason: the failure of administrators (including district administrators, building administrators, and supervisors) to carry out the necessary procedures, either through incompetence or laziness on their own part. Administrators are often judged by how well they maintain the status quo without “rocking the boat” too much. Removing teachers whom they hired and gave tenure makes them look bad, so it is easier to hide their heads in the sand and pretend everything is going hunky-dory, rather than do the professional thing by removing teachers who do not belong in the classroom. After all, isn't their own career more important that what goes on in the classroom?

Which means that the problem with tenure is not that incompetent teachers are protected, but that incompetent administrators do not do their job properly by removing them.

So what effect would removing tenure completely do? Sure it would make it easier for administrators to remove incompetent teachers, but it would also return education to the wild days when Board of Education members fired competent teachers to create positions for their families and friends, and it would help them balance budgets by lowering the quality of their district’s teachers drastically.

I was one of the highest-paid teachers in my district before I retired, but I also had the highest Advanced Placement scores in the entire county. Since our bully governor cut most statewide educational support, Boards of Education were scrambling to cut expenses, and firing the highest-paid teachers like me would have saved them about $45,000 per teacher. Get rid of 10 such teachers and there is a savings of nearly $500,000. And they could have done so without the protection of tenure.

Is this a worthwhile trade-off? Since the media (and the governor of New Jersey) have gone to great lengths to point to tenure as one of the leading evils in education, most non-educators would probably agree that it is. But if tenure was removed, after a subsequent decade of declining educational standards, I think the popular attitude would change drastically, by which time it would be much too late to save our schools.