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There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence that doing
by yequalsx 14y ago
There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence that doing this would fix the system or make it better?
Academic freedom, tenure, and seniority (to a lesser extent) have a lot of positives. Getting rid of these should only be done if the reasons are compelling and valid. What is required is not a collection of anecdotes of how tenure protects bad teachers - there are equally many anecdotes showing that tenure protects students and educational integrity - but rather statistics, facts, and well reasoned arguments.
There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions. Will the physics department stop talking about the Big Bang? Does the geology department stop talking about processes taking millions of years to work? Does the history department only talk about the good parts of Manifest Destiny?
Instead of tenure maybe 5 year, renewable contracts would work. I don't know. I do think it is in society's best interest if teachers treat society as the client and not the students as the client. Doing the latter leads to dilution of standards. Doing the former without fear of being fired, at least in me, leads to grading on knowledge and not fluff.
- aroberge 14y agoTenure and Academic freedom are applicable to University professors, not to teachers.
- drharris 14y agoWhy? Source, or are you just making stuff up?
- johnrgrace 14y agoIn the United States, public school teachers do get tenure in most locations which protects them for being fired except for a limited set of reasons or teacher supply being greater than demand.
- saraid216 14y agoActually, pre-university education also includes things that require academic freedom and the protection tenure affords for that.
- archon 14y ago> There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions. It's a very slippery slope, denying some people input into "important educational decisions", or any decisions, based on one person's criteria of ignorance.
- yequalsx 14y agoI have strong opinions on whether or not the U.S. should go to war with country A. My opinion counts as far as voting goes. I have opinions on tactics involved in fighting a battle. My opinion counts for very little because I am wholly ignorant about fighting wars. My opinion in this should count for very little. Sometimes it's best to leave implementation to the experts. Sometimes not. One should be careful about when/where such intrusion takes place.
- jessaustin 14y agoI have strong opinions about dining and auto repair (I'm neither a particularly noteworthy chef nor mechanic). Others have strong opinions about health care, hair-styling, home remodeling, child care, legal representation, or any of hundreds of other widely available services. Somehow we have a system in place that allows expert service providers to consider all of our opinions so as to provide satisfying service. It would be great if something similar existed for education.
- brigade 14y agoI truly do not see it helping, especially as a first step. The vast majority of those bad and mediocre teachers that everyone wants fired? They're still around primarily because the school administration is comfortable with them. They don't complain, they don't cause problems, they don't garner parental complaints, they simply implement whatever new schemes administration comes up with to try to increase standardized test scores, etc. Removing tenure isn't going to make administrators magically start firing bad teachers that they like, even if standardized test results were a good measure of such. And your comment about parents with strong but ignorant opinions is spot on - one of the best teachers in my high school was fired directly as a result of parental complaints.