Teacher Tenure: Yes or No

As a longtime teacher in LAUSD, I had tenure and belonged to the union.  I saw up close and personal the pros and cons of teacher tenure.  George Will, conservative writer for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent guest on the Sunday morning talk shows, recently wrote about tenure.  It brought up some issues I had not thought about in years.

There are many positive reasons for teachers to have tenure.  It protects teachers from being fired for personal, political, or other non- work related reasons.  Often there is a conflict between teacher and administrator, and without tenure, principals could easily fire teachers with different points of view.  Tenure also prohibits school districts from firing experienced, more expensive teachers, to hire less experienced and less expensive teachers.  Tenure helps guarantee innovation in teaching.  Without the protection of tenure, teachers may feel pressured to use the same lesson plans and teach directly to tests.  Tenure allows teachers to advocate on behalf of students and disagree openly with school and district administrators.

On the other side, there are many negatives to granting tenure.  It creates complacency and removes incentives for teachers to put in more than the minimum effort.  Tenure makes it difficult to remove underperforming teachers because the process is wrought with legal wrangling and extremely expensive.  Tenure does not grant academic freedom.  There is so much emphasis on standardized testing.

I taught elementary school in North Hollywood.  We had a fourth grade teacher who was found passed out, drunk, on several occasions during the school day.  She had been a teacher for more than 20 years.  Steps were taken to remove her from the classroom.  This took over one year, due to protection by the union and their lawyers.  Finally, there were able to remove her from the classroom and stuck her in the library, where she could be monitored by other adults.  As far as I know, she continued to receive her salary and was still there when I left teaching.

In New York, they have "rubber rooms."  These are rooms where approximately 600 tenured teachers accused of incompetence and wrongdoing, received their full salaries to sit in a sparse room and do nothing.  The school district could not dismiss them due to tenure.  It takes over $250,000 to remove a tenured teacher.

I had a friend in Los Angeles who had been teaching for over 35 years.  She hated it, but needed the money so continued to teach.  She sat at her desk each day and did little in the way of teaching.  She did not prepare lessons, grade papers, or teach much of anything.  This is a crime to do to a young boy or girl.  Children unlucky enough to be placed in her class have a wasted year of school.  Tenure keeps incompetent teachers in the classroom, with no way of getting rid of them.  Let's keep our best teachers in the classroom, and remove those that do not measure up.  In private industry, incompetent employees would be let go.  Why not the same in teaching?