My University of Chicago colleague Timothy Knowles recently wrote a nice piece for The Wall Street Journal calling for the end of tenure in primary and secondary education.
There can be little doubt that he is correct. Tenure massively distorts the incentives of teachers. Once enacted, it becomes virtually impossible to fire a teacher. For instance, a recent BBC report says that over the last four decades, only 18 teachers in the entire U.K. have been fired for incompetence.
I see only one problem with Knowles’s argument. When it comes to getting rid of tenure, why stop with primary and secondary education? Tenure at universities is equally counterproductive. Let’s do away with it there as well.
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These three paragraphs make no argument as to why tenure should be abolished. Why should I agree that tenure is “counterproductive” when no reasons behind this assertion are presented? What a waste of NYTimes online space.
Getting rid of tenure might be a good idea if we could (1) protect teachers from “fire-at-will” policies (that is, protect them from nasty department politics, angry parents, and clueless evaluation boards, (2) stop heavily weighing a teacher’s ability to teach on their student evaluations (students are not the consumers, they simply have the right to the chance to become educated), and (3) giving them more autonomy to practice teaching their subject-matter-expertise.
Your argument is underdeveloped, even for a blog post. How does “Tenure massively distort the incentives of teachers”? Why is tenure at universities equally counterproductive? I don’t see a lot of support here, just blind skepticism.
How about this: Instead of griping about the need to fire “bad” teachers, who likely aren’t as prevalent as you suppose, why don’t you think about something more productive– for example, why our society would rather blame teachers for student failure than give teachers the support they need to ensure that our children are well-educated. The illusion of a “teacher crisis” strikes me as both unfair and unwarranted. In a nation where state education budgets have been slashed across the board, the argument that teacher performance is the only factor with any bearing on student performance seems dubious at best.
it is ludicrous to say, ” it becomes virtually impossible to fire a teacher.”
Poorly functioning teachers are put into tenured positions and left in place by POORLY FUNCTIONING administrators.
period.
It may take “work” to demonstrate that a tenured teacher’s performance had declined, and that they should loose their tenur status, but it can be done.
I completely agree with #2 Michael B’s comment that students are not consumers, but people who are given an OPPORTUNITY to learn and explore, which they can accept or reject.
Read the link guys–
That’s what blog posts do– they link to other arguments and ideas.
Republicans hate our education system because it produces educated people, who are unlikely to vote for them.
Destroying tenure is another step in a long series of steps to undermine the public education system for the middle class.
The rich will always have the finest private schools money can buy.
Republicans don’t want educated middle class kids to compete with their kids for the fewer and fewer well-paid jobs that haven’t yet been outsourced in the future.
It’s really as simple as that.
Eliminating tenure removes an incentive for good teachers for the sake of weeding out the bad ones.
So is the assumption that MOST teachers are bad?
If so, the problem would seem to be not tenure but some combination of:
(a) the incentives that attract people to teaching in the first place (mostly people with little skill or interest go into the field);
(b) the decisions for hiring and promotion pre-tenure (incompetents get the opportunities);
(c) teacher training (even potentially competent people don’t emerge from college with the right skills);
(d) teacher evaluation (what’s being measured is not what’s wanted in learning or has benchmarks that cannot be met with available resources).
I’m about as liberal as they come, and I agree 100%: eliminate tenure. This crap about needing tenure to “protect” against politics and fire at will policies is just that: crap. First of all, all other jobs have those hazards, so why should teaching be any different? Second of all, wouldn’t parents pay attention to these hirings and firings to choose the best school?