Quantity: Protect Teachers

Teaching has progressively become a contentious form of job security. It only takes between one and seven years for public school teachers in most states to receive tenure, and Time estimated that as of 2008, 2.3 million teachers have received this luxury. While school’s claim that tenure is granted based off the quality of performance, performance is often what is sacrificed once tenure starts to set it. This policy provides comfort for teachers and leaves their students to suffer.

It breeds complacency, as teachers know the unlikelihood of losing their job and eliminates the incentives to perform at a higher level than the minimum standard and improve their teaching. For those teachers who do underperform, tenure impedes their removal – a school would have to go through an onerous and costly process of legal wrangling in order to actually fire them.

Often this laziness among teachers is overlooked by students, because it just means their school days are filled with movies and busy work – for the students who want to learn, these teachers are hindering them. They are easily bored by the mindless tasks the teachers equally put no effort into compiling. Most subjects – history, English, math – have worksheets, study guides, quizzes, essay prompts, and tests online, so all teachers have to do it is press print. Though most tenured teachers have grown accustomed to this, they proceed to get mad at the equal apathetic efforts presented to them by their students. Poor academic habits are being formed by the students tenure teachers continually neglect.

Tenure also perpetuates the “last-hired, first-fired” policy, meaning that seniority has become the principal component in discharge decisions – not teacher performance and caliber. It is no surprise that underperforming teachers are complicit in substandard student performance. In a report conducted by The New Teacher Project entitled, “The Widget Effect,” the authors report that “. . . 81% of administrators and 58% of teachers say there is a tenured teacher in their school who is performing poorly . . . But district records confirm the scarcity of formal dismissals; at least half of the districts studied have not dismissed a single non-probationary teacher for poor performance in the past five years.” The fear of losing your job should not be instilled for only severe cases, educators should lose their job if they are not doing it properly.

Alternatives could also be offered or changes to the tenure program could be introduced to improve the system. Yearly reports could be given by trusted students to make sure they are receiving a just education. Teachers, if on tenure, could also be evaluated every couple of years to make sure they are still maintaining the quality of their work, which is something various school districts across the country have implemented, or tenure could not be offered altogether. At the end of the day, good educators don’t need a safeguard like tenure – they should be kept and promoted on the basis of their excellent work, not how long they’ve done the job for.