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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I do agree that the quick blog post does not give much reason why tenure should go away, but it is the truth. It is a joke that you can’t fire a teacher when you please. Most people in this country can be told not to come in tomorrow and they can’t do nothing about it. But on the converse those same employees are free to go find another job if they please.
To say that students are not consumers is just donwright crazy. They are the biggest consumer of the product the teacher is offering. If the student is not the consumer who is?
This is clearly an ideological hit-piece by a neo-classical economist who has nothing to worry about if tenure were dropped anywhere given his wealth. As an upper-level PhD student who has seen the face of higher education today: itinerant adjuncts paid almost nothing, non-tenured faculty dismissed because of unpopular opinions or cost-measures, and the inability of non-tenured professors to oppose the administration effectively – this argument falls very flat. This is akin to saying “end unions” because they distort the labor market with their wage demands. Well, yes, if you think good wages, benefits, and a secure job are a “distortion.” Some of us prefer to think about quality of life, not wonkish, ideological precepts based on neo-classical models that intelligent economists like Piero Sraffa have shown do not apply outside textbooks.
Chronicle of Higher Ed’s piece on tenure, a more balanced assessment: http://chronicle.com/article/Tenure-RIP/66114/
It appears he feels teachers aren’t held to a standard to perform as other professionals are.. This is the problem being experienced in mediocre Florida schools.. The entire system needs to meet requirements & held to standards, as opposed to floating through on cruise control with little threats of job security.. Gotta improve the public school systems..
Hey, don’t abolish tenure at universities! I am a PhD student working my ass off for a ridiculous salary….Why the heck should I do this if there are no tenured jobs luring as distant reward somewhere in the future?
At the primary and secondary level how would you prevent teachers for being hired and fired for political reasons. If a teacher tries to adopt a tough curriculum or set high standards what would prevent organized groups of parents from demanding that those standards be lowered to that their children receive higher marks?
While in some schools parents couldn’t care less, in others they are completely out of control assuming that they know better than the teacher and that their kids are special or not being treated “fairly”. If public schools are turned into some sort of American style consumer driven enterprise expect to see the sorts of worthless educational programmes that currently permeates the world of online/part-time professional studies where everyone gets a B because anything lower will jeopardize employer reimbursement.
Sometimes being an effective teacher means being a hard nose. If a teacher’s job is dependent on keeping their customers happy don’t expect much actual education to take place.
At the college level in addition to the arguments that apply to primary and secondary educations, the lack of tenure will essentially force all research to in some ways be market driven. The whole POINT of tenure is that certain professors should be allowed the freedom to study what they please and without pressure to distort the findings. Non-market sensitive research is critical to driving technological progress as it is the only that those unknown unknowns are ever discovered. While the Google’s of the world are smart enough to mandate “unstructured research” time, do we really trust all of our state and private schools of higher learning to do the same?
The reason tenure exists is because it is the only proven way to broadly protect academic freedom and high standards. Narrowly tailored protections will not work because there will always be ways to get around them. Even if a professor is protected against being explicitly fired for a study on the effects of abortion on crime, it would be easy, for example, to take some non-representative sample of performance as evidence that a professor is not performing up to snuff and should be let go. Everybody knows that in politicized jobs once one loses political favor they are effectively done, even if they cannot be arbitrarily fired. At some point they’ll violate some policy and it’s out the door they go.
I have to agree with Sarah (#1), there was no argument presented. But I have to ask, what is the reasoning for the benefits of tenure anyway? Now that I think about it, what is a University to gain by taking away the incentives of proffessors? (That being said, I can generally tell when I have a professor who is tenured, they seem to be head and shoulders above the rest.)
yikes…. don’t piss off the NEA. they’ll find you on google tracker and come write comments on your blog..
I echo JM’s comments (#4) – despite numerous protests and meetings with the principal by angry parents, and demonstrably poor performance, a teacher newly hired 3 years ago keeps getting rehired, and will soon gain tenure.
I have seen a much higher percentage of poor administrators than teachers, to the point that I suspect that incompetent people become administrators.
Although as administrators, they can no longer directly harm students, these incompetents protect other incompetents and push idiotic policies that make it harder for the competent teachers.