In Defense of Tenure

Let's get a few things straight. Tenure protects bad teachers. That is a problem that must be fixed. Also just so we are clear I myself do not have tenure yet. Now that we have that out of the way . . .

Tenure isn't as bad as everyone thinks. Absolutely there are plenty of teachers in the system that only have their job thanks to tenure. They are lazy and ineffective and schools are powerless to be able to fire them. I have no solution to this.

But there is a flip side, tenure also protects good teachers. Let me explain. Those of us who teach know that education is an ever evolving field. Every year there is the new "thing" that is going to change education. Differentiated instruction, multiple intelligences, problem based learning, guided discovery, etc. Some of these work, some of them don't. Some of these ideas are good in some situations others not so much. The problem happens because some administrator goes to a workshop and learns one of these new methods, thinks it is the educational penicillin so to speak, and tries to get all their teachers to use it all the time. This is where tenure becomes good. Those of us who are in the classroom realize that you cannot do something like problem based learning everyday. It doesn't work. Some days you have to have the back-to-basics-I-talk-you-take-notes-then-do-some-practice-problems type of lesson. The enlightened administrators don't like this. Lessons like that are ineffective according to them. Therefore if you do an "evil lecture" you must be a bad teacher.

Essentially tenure protects good educators from falling victim to the always changing fad world of education. Confidence in our jobs allows us to do what we know from experience to be effective without having to cower to the newest educational trend. (Not that this does not give us an excuse to not try new things, but the key word is try not accept as perfect without an evidence)

Now the automatic argument is that in a "real" job there is no tenure why should teachers be any different? Well take an editor for example. An editor essentially proofreads for a living. He has no tenure, nor will he ever. But his job is not ever changing. The grammar rules of today that he is in charge of using properly are not changing. His boss will never say to him, "how about instead of using grammar we have the reader 'discover' where the grammar should go. Get rid of all those pesky commas and periods." The rules of the editor's job aren't changing so he doesn't need tenure. As long as he continues to properly apply the rules of grammar he has job security (assuming the finances of the company remain stable and such). Expectations are clear and consisten from day one. We teachers are not so lucky, our "grammar" rules are ever changing at the whim of our administrators.

It leaves us with a not so rhetorical question, which is worse, tenure protecting good teachers or tenure protecting bad teachers? and how do we fix the system?