9 ms·

California Teacher Tenure Laws Ruled Unconstitutional

72 points by _pius 12y ago

jack-r-abbit 12y ago
> But lawyers for the states and teachers’ unions said that overturning such laws would erode necessary protections that stop school administrators from making unfair personnel decisions. > Administrators seeking to dismiss a teacher they deem incompetent must follow a complicated procedure that typically drags on for months, if not years. Wait... why should they get more job protection than the vast majority of all other workers? I don't think they need any special treatment beyond what every other person with a job has.
- forkandwait 12y ago
  I agree with the court in dropping tenure laws, but arguments in favor of have cited protecting freedom of teachers' conscience and preventing politically motivated hiring. I personally think tenure had its day, but its day is long past....
  - squidfood 12y ago
    Don't let the word "tenure" fool you too much, in this case it's just union seniority rules under a different name.
- 33W 12y ago
  > Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)
- alistairSH 12y ago
  I've had this discussion with friends and family who teach. None of them can make a convincing (to me) argument that a school administrator is any more likely to be capricious or unfair than managers in the private sector. Then, the friends move onto the whole "how do you evaluate a teacher?" to which I respond "how do you evaluate a programmer?" Sure, there are metrics for both, but none are foolproof. At some point, managers have to go with their guts.
  - gress 12y ago
    You evaluate a programmer on the coding problems they solve that contribute to the business. There is nothing so clear for teachers other than their class performance on standardized tests, but standardized tests measure only a very limited part of what a good teacher should be able to offer.
    - josephschmoe 12y ago
      This is how you get lots of low-hanging fruit pickers, rather than programmers who would rather solve hard problems for more significant, but less visible, business needs. Examples: Refactoring is effective in the long-term but doesn't look as good in the short term. Exploratory work often takes time but doesn't show any specific productivity. Teaching and helping others is incredibly value, but increases their productivity rather than your own. Evaluating programmers by their business output leads to low-quality code run by a team that doesn't talk to each other and loves self-aggrandizing. Also when something big finally does slip through the cracks, everything will fall apart. And if you want to find outliers with it, good luck - they'll make mountains out of their molehill of work. Honestly, it's not very easy to get good metrics for programmers - for the same reason it's not very easy to increase programmer productivity on a project. It's not easily divisible work and involves a lot of teamwork. I've heard 360 reviews work pretty well though.
      - gress 12y ago
        What you're saying here seems to be taking about poor evaluators, rather than anything to do with the method of evaluation. How does self-aggrandizement, for example, result from evaluating how people have solved problems?
        josephschmoe 12y ago
        Two reasons: 1. Evaluating people by "solved problems" encourages them to solve problems rather than do other kinds of work - which is often more important. 2. You can't evaluate people by their real performance - only their perceived performance. You're splitting them up individually to do so as well. As you are a human being, your perception is biased and your information is incomplete - there are many, many people who would take advantage of that to make their work seem more important/better. Hence, self-aggrandizing. If you want people to do their best, give them the power to do self-evaluation and ask them to find ways to improve their work/their team's work. If you want to fire people, your absolute worst employees - the bad ones who somehow survive layoffs, are the ones who are going to abuse your perceptions and metrics the most. The only way to get around this is to gather metrics in ways that can't be self-reported or influenced by the individual being evaluated, even indirectly, except by being competent at their job.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Because sometimes incompetence is offered as an excuse for political dismissal, and education is a highly politicized field int he US. Think of controversies over the teaching of evolution or sex education, for example. Those edge cases are important, but there are very few of them relative to the number of cases where self-interest and rent-seeking by teacher's unions is the main factor. This is an important decision and one that I welcome.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    It's been a while since high school for me, but when I was there parents could opt-out their kids from sex ed and they'd get study hall instead. There wasn't a lot of controversy. Is that different now?
- opendais 12y ago
  Why shouldn't they have the right to collectively bargain like every other worker and Union in this country? And more importantly, in the past, teachers were removed for political reasons or for teaching unpopular topics. http://teachertenure.procon.org/ http://teachertenure.procon.org/
  - saosebastiao 12y ago
    Collective bargaining isn't the problem. It is the strike that is the problem. When GM workers go on strike, I can still buy a car from 20 other car companies, as well as ride a bus, bike, skateboard, or walk. When public union workers go on strike, they have a much larger position of power because they have monopoly control over a societal good. When teachers go on strike, the children who rely on public education are the ones that suffer...not the teacher's employers.
    - Domenic_S 12y ago
      And when BART workers went on strike it was a (brief) nightmare.
    - Torgo 12y ago
      This is (one of the reasons) why it should not be legal for government workers to go on strike.
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  Teachers union advocates will tell you that it's a way of convincing people to become teachers, as the job has far more stability. Reality shows that it just discourages new teachers, as nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years[1]. Teaching has become an outdated, slow-moving profession that nobody wants to join because of the entrenched interests and bloated bureaucracies. 1: http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-standards.pdf http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-st...
  - justizin 12y ago
    yes, but getting rid of all protection for older, more experienced teachers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. i have often struggled with this issue. i have had some great teachers, i have had some terrible teachers, but if you got rid of all the existing teachers and started anew, who the hell would possibly be a positive influence on the new teachers?
  - gerbal 12y ago
    Or no one wants to teach because of low pay compared to equivalent professions, huge classes, and deteriorating working conditions.
    - phdp 12y ago
      What is your definition of a huge classroom? The number of public school teachers has increased by a larger percentage than the number of public school students over the past 10 years, resulting in declines in the pupil/teacher ratio. In fall 2002, the number of public school pupils per teacher was 15.9, compared with a projected number of 15.2 public school pupils per teacher in fall 2012. [1] Of course I understand that some districts are different than others, and that this probably includes teachers that teach music, gym, and other classes, but still, there are more teachers per student now than there has been over the past few decades, meaning that even if classrooms are the same size as before, teachers must be getting more free time during the day to catch up on grading/admin work. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28
- roc 12y ago
  The traditional justification is that teachers need to feel free to discuss ideas that social trends or local political whim may disagree with. They may even need to take a Devil's Advocate during a lesson and argue a pretty unpopular position that they don't personally agree and which would sound awfully impolitic out of context. E.g. To protect them from being fired for reading from a given book. Or teaching evolution. Or teaching sex education. Or covering a topic like communism or socialism in any way other than demonization.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    By that same logic, though, teachers are then protected from being fired for reading from the Bible, or teaching creationism, or teaching abstinence-only birth control, or covering a topic like vaccination or astrophysics in any way other than demonization. Tenure isn't the appropriate approach here. Enforcing Constitutional law - like separation of church and state - is far more useful to actually achieve the desired results. If teachers are being fired for teaching actual fact, then they need to be bringing that to the legal system and turn it into a Supreme Court case. This whole "it protects secular teachers" argument is a silly justification for the negative impact California's tenure-fetish has had on students and younger teachers.
    - roc 12y ago
      There's no constitutional concern here. Tenure would provide no protection for a teacher who was using their position to preach. Any talk of creationism or reading from a holy text would have to be part of a lesson that didn't run afoul of the establishment clause. Neither does tenure necessarily provide protection for a teacher who refused to teach the curriculum to such an extent that they failed their students. Tenure is about protecting teachers from being fired for controversial positions, not protecting them from having to teach the material they agreed to teach. I can't speak to the particulars of California's tenure or contract in general. Maybe their contract really could protect a physics teacher who taught epicycles instead of heliocentricity despite failing class after failing class. But I would doubt it.
      - 12y ago
- pwthornton 12y ago
  Tenure was designed for higher education and is out of place in K-12. Tenure's purpose is to protect and encourage academic freedom. Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. Since K-12 teachers do not conduct research and follow fairly strict curricula, tenure is merely a union tactic to guarantee employment.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    > Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. That sounds legit, but the best example I can think of is stem cell research. Can you help me out? I'm not an academic so I don't really know that world.
- ironchef 12y ago
  Probably based off of some of the origins of tenure. WAY back when they used to fire teachers (for example) when they got pregnant. Nowadays it's protection against (for example) teaching evolution in biology class (which isn't popular in some districts) or "Catcher in the Rye", etc. That all being said there's a reasonable list of pros and cons here: http://teachertenure.procon.org/ http://teachertenure.procon.org/ EDIT: I should qualify I meant when tenure was coming into K-12. It was originally based off of the professors and the boards of trustees in the universities.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  You take away their tenure, you take away their job protection, you are also taking away their need for a union. A union that can cost an hour, two, or more hours of pay per month. That is a lot of money, a lot of money to buy politicians or hysteria. to start the hysteria train I will trot out... tenure protects the children, protects us from creationist, protects us from bigots, from racists, from all sorts of bad people. Best thing to ever happen to the teaching profession and it damn well needs to happen at the college level to reign in those costs.
  - smackfu 12y ago
    They only have those benefits because they collectively bargained for them. And yes, if the courts start gutting negotiated benefits, that does hurt unions.
steven777400 12y ago
Tenure makes a lot of sense for research university positions. Research can take a long time to be fruitful, and many avenues of research won't pan out at all. Tenure helps enable researchers to focus on various problems instead of being stuck to what will have the most payout in the shortest term. It's never been quite clear to me why tenure makes sense for instructor positions, either at the college or pre-college level. I say this as someone who was a tenured instructor at a community college for a number of years.
- plg 12y ago
  I guess one answer is the following: that "academic freedom" (which is one of the motivations for tenure, i.e. it protects one's academic freedom) applies not only to research but to teaching activities as well... but again, you're right, in that perhaps this makes sense in a university environment (in which curriculums can easily vary in many ways, and still be valid) but not so much in elementary schools, primary schools, high schools, etc, in which a curriculum is more restricted in its scope, and pre-defined using standards, etc.
- opendais 12y ago
  It is because of bullshit like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-banned-US-schools.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-ban... "The word "evolution" will be removed from school books in the deep south of the United States under a new proposal." How much do you want to bet violating such a ban would lead to immediate dismissal without tenure protections? This is a school administrator that tried to get such a ban passed. EDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion, I've italicized the word immediate since people seem to think it was irrelevant.
  - dlss 12y ago
    I think the courts are a better solution for that problem. Having a couple "crazy science teachers" with tenure shouldn't even count as a solution IMO - especially if that causes people to be more careful about who they give tenure to... EDIT: I said "better solution" not "perfect solution". I would love if you speculate about what a perfect solution is though!
itbeho 12y ago
Under state law here, teachers are eligible for tenure after 18 months... 18 months!?! Something is seriously out of whack with employment in education here in California..
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  If my memory of tenure is correct, "eligible" is not the same as "gets". Limited number of tenure slots available, the same way you may not be promoted in the private sector because there aren't enough slots in the next grade.
- darksim905 12y ago
  Agreed. Glad I didn't get an education there.
VikingCoder 12y ago
I wonder when the Supreme Court will rule that life tenure for the Supreme Court justices deprives citizens of their right to justice under the Constitution of the United States of America. Substantial evidence can be presented that make it clear that the life term of Justices disproportionately affects young, poor, minority, and / or technologically-minded citizens. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.
- datapolitical 12y ago
  One of the beautiful pieces of the Constitution is that it's allowed to contradict itself. The more specific statement wins out (for example, a section banning gay marriage would beat out a section that said that all people were guaranteed equal rights)
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    And the most beautiful part of the Constitution is the checks and balances. For instance, the Executive branch is supposed to enforce laws from the most generic to the most specific, as you've indicated. However the Supreme Court Justices are supposed to use their brains, and realize that a law banning gay marriage, written into the Constitution or not, is inherently unconstitutional because the Equal Protection Clause takes precedent.
ColinDabritz 12y ago
Teacher Tenure is important for similar reasons as lifetime appointments for judges, especially on the academic research side. It certainly has some trade offs, but it protects our freedoms of expression, speech, and thought in a very fundamental way. Teachers and researchers need to be free from some influences to be able to teach and research unpopular subjects and views. Consider communist teachings during the "red scare" as a relatively recent example. "Faculty Tenure in Academe: The Evolution, Benefits and Implications of an Important Tradition" http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/lh62/CameronJoSA_.pdf http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/lh62/Cameron...
eruditely 12y ago
In California, teachers do a lot of under-handed lw brainwashing of their kids, at least at the high school I went to in the south bay in NorCal. We would always get told pro union agenda's and I to me as a kid(I am just 21 now), all that meant to me was "My nice teachers are getting hurt by X, X is evil!" or at least it seemed to me. I was never aware that some of it was sometimes underhanded union distortion. Note I have not implied pro/against for any issue. Just when I was made aware of this agenda which I thought was decentralized agony, it shocked me.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I grew up in NorCal, too; that was the opposite impression I got. Most of the teachers I had were relatively young, and hadn't been teaching for a very long time; my conversations with them - especially in high school - frequently included mentions of how often they'd be pink-slipped because the teachers' union - dominated by veteran, tenured teachers - would elect for pay raises instead of hiring more teachers. This meant growing class sizes, and the veteran teachers knew it. We were certainly taught about the environment, how biodiversity is a good thing, etc., but I was hard-pressed to find a teacher that actually agreed with the teachers' union, and unions in general were typically portrayed in a neutral light at best.
  - eruditely 12y ago
    I guess my perception is somewhat malformed due to memories, but your experiences line up with mine. I guess the f(x)(explanation) for the x I gave was incorrect. I do remember a lot of my teachers being pink slipped, but I also do remember all the strikes, all the specific agenda pushing. It was covert in the sense that young kids do not have such sharp anti-manipulation senses formed.
parker94 12y ago
If you've ever watched the documentary "Waiting for Superman" you'll see exactly why tenure shouldn't be allowed in public schools.
jongraehl 12y ago
If teaching in California public schools is messed up, what U.S. state is good for teachers?
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  Former Mississippi high school science teacher here. New Hampshire seems great -- affluent state with high quality of life, relatively high teacher pay, educated population, lots of small and culturally-homogenous communities. (Multicultural education in poor areas is a noble and worthy challenge, but it's ridiculously stressful and often demoralizing. I think teaching a chemistry class in a 99% African-American public high school in Mississippi does more good for society, but the chemistry teacher in an affluent district in New Hampshire is probably less stressed about student achievement and job security.) If thick New England accents and bone-biting winters aren't your bag, Colorado has similar advantages (affluence, high quality of life, educated population) but a more diverse population, more notoriety for education innovation, and more opportunities to serve traditionally underserved communities. PS - I took this question's "good for teachers" to mean "enjoying your profession" and not "do as little work as possible for as much money as possible." If you meant the latter, the answer is "The Bronx".

72 points by _pius 12y ago

> But lawyers for the states and teachers’ unions said that overturning such laws would erode necessary protections that stop school administrators from making unfair personnel decisions. > Administrators seeking to dismiss a teacher they deem incompetent must follow a complicated procedure that typically drags on for months, if not years. Wait... why should they get more job protection than the vast majority of all other workers? I don't think they need any special treatment beyond what every other person with a job has.

forkandwait 12y ago
I agree with the court in dropping tenure laws, but arguments in favor of have cited protecting freedom of teachers' conscience and preventing politically motivated hiring. I personally think tenure had its day, but its day is long past....
- squidfood 12y ago
  Don't let the word "tenure" fool you too much, in this case it's just union seniority rules under a different name.
33W 12y ago
> Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenure_(academic)
alistairSH 12y ago
I've had this discussion with friends and family who teach. None of them can make a convincing (to me) argument that a school administrator is any more likely to be capricious or unfair than managers in the private sector. Then, the friends move onto the whole "how do you evaluate a teacher?" to which I respond "how do you evaluate a programmer?" Sure, there are metrics for both, but none are foolproof. At some point, managers have to go with their guts.
- gress 12y ago
  You evaluate a programmer on the coding problems they solve that contribute to the business. There is nothing so clear for teachers other than their class performance on standardized tests, but standardized tests measure only a very limited part of what a good teacher should be able to offer.
  - josephschmoe 12y ago
    This is how you get lots of low-hanging fruit pickers, rather than programmers who would rather solve hard problems for more significant, but less visible, business needs. Examples: Refactoring is effective in the long-term but doesn't look as good in the short term. Exploratory work often takes time but doesn't show any specific productivity. Teaching and helping others is incredibly value, but increases their productivity rather than your own. Evaluating programmers by their business output leads to low-quality code run by a team that doesn't talk to each other and loves self-aggrandizing. Also when something big finally does slip through the cracks, everything will fall apart. And if you want to find outliers with it, good luck - they'll make mountains out of their molehill of work. Honestly, it's not very easy to get good metrics for programmers - for the same reason it's not very easy to increase programmer productivity on a project. It's not easily divisible work and involves a lot of teamwork. I've heard 360 reviews work pretty well though.
    - gress 12y ago
      What you're saying here seems to be taking about poor evaluators, rather than anything to do with the method of evaluation. How does self-aggrandizement, for example, result from evaluating how people have solved problems?
      - josephschmoe 12y ago
        Two reasons: 1. Evaluating people by "solved problems" encourages them to solve problems rather than do other kinds of work - which is often more important. 2. You can't evaluate people by their real performance - only their perceived performance. You're splitting them up individually to do so as well. As you are a human being, your perception is biased and your information is incomplete - there are many, many people who would take advantage of that to make their work seem more important/better. Hence, self-aggrandizing. If you want people to do their best, give them the power to do self-evaluation and ask them to find ways to improve their work/their team's work. If you want to fire people, your absolute worst employees - the bad ones who somehow survive layoffs, are the ones who are going to abuse your perceptions and metrics the most. The only way to get around this is to gather metrics in ways that can't be self-reported or influenced by the individual being evaluated, even indirectly, except by being competent at their job.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Because sometimes incompetence is offered as an excuse for political dismissal, and education is a highly politicized field int he US. Think of controversies over the teaching of evolution or sex education, for example. Those edge cases are important, but there are very few of them relative to the number of cases where self-interest and rent-seeking by teacher's unions is the main factor. This is an important decision and one that I welcome.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  It's been a while since high school for me, but when I was there parents could opt-out their kids from sex ed and they'd get study hall instead. There wasn't a lot of controversy. Is that different now?
opendais 12y ago
Why shouldn't they have the right to collectively bargain like every other worker and Union in this country? And more importantly, in the past, teachers were removed for political reasons or for teaching unpopular topics. http://teachertenure.procon.org/ http://teachertenure.procon.org/
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  Collective bargaining isn't the problem. It is the strike that is the problem. When GM workers go on strike, I can still buy a car from 20 other car companies, as well as ride a bus, bike, skateboard, or walk. When public union workers go on strike, they have a much larger position of power because they have monopoly control over a societal good. When teachers go on strike, the children who rely on public education are the ones that suffer...not the teacher's employers.
  - Domenic_S 12y ago
    And when BART workers went on strike it was a (brief) nightmare.
  - Torgo 12y ago
    This is (one of the reasons) why it should not be legal for government workers to go on strike.
GauntletWizard 12y ago
Teachers union advocates will tell you that it's a way of convincing people to become teachers, as the job has far more stability. Reality shows that it just discourages new teachers, as nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years[1]. Teaching has become an outdated, slow-moving profession that nobody wants to join because of the entrenched interests and bloated bureaucracies. 1: http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-standards.pdf http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/supply-demand-st...
- justizin 12y ago
  yes, but getting rid of all protection for older, more experienced teachers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. i have often struggled with this issue. i have had some great teachers, i have had some terrible teachers, but if you got rid of all the existing teachers and started anew, who the hell would possibly be a positive influence on the new teachers?
- gerbal 12y ago
  Or no one wants to teach because of low pay compared to equivalent professions, huge classes, and deteriorating working conditions.
  - phdp 12y ago
    What is your definition of a huge classroom? The number of public school teachers has increased by a larger percentage than the number of public school students over the past 10 years, resulting in declines in the pupil/teacher ratio. In fall 2002, the number of public school pupils per teacher was 15.9, compared with a projected number of 15.2 public school pupils per teacher in fall 2012. [1] Of course I understand that some districts are different than others, and that this probably includes teachers that teach music, gym, and other classes, but still, there are more teachers per student now than there has been over the past few decades, meaning that even if classrooms are the same size as before, teachers must be getting more free time during the day to catch up on grading/admin work. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28
roc 12y ago
The traditional justification is that teachers need to feel free to discuss ideas that social trends or local political whim may disagree with. They may even need to take a Devil's Advocate during a lesson and argue a pretty unpopular position that they don't personally agree and which would sound awfully impolitic out of context. E.g. To protect them from being fired for reading from a given book. Or teaching evolution. Or teaching sex education. Or covering a topic like communism or socialism in any way other than demonization.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  By that same logic, though, teachers are then protected from being fired for reading from the Bible, or teaching creationism, or teaching abstinence-only birth control, or covering a topic like vaccination or astrophysics in any way other than demonization. Tenure isn't the appropriate approach here. Enforcing Constitutional law - like separation of church and state - is far more useful to actually achieve the desired results. If teachers are being fired for teaching actual fact, then they need to be bringing that to the legal system and turn it into a Supreme Court case. This whole "it protects secular teachers" argument is a silly justification for the negative impact California's tenure-fetish has had on students and younger teachers.
  - roc 12y ago
    There's no constitutional concern here. Tenure would provide no protection for a teacher who was using their position to preach. Any talk of creationism or reading from a holy text would have to be part of a lesson that didn't run afoul of the establishment clause. Neither does tenure necessarily provide protection for a teacher who refused to teach the curriculum to such an extent that they failed their students. Tenure is about protecting teachers from being fired for controversial positions, not protecting them from having to teach the material they agreed to teach. I can't speak to the particulars of California's tenure or contract in general. Maybe their contract really could protect a physics teacher who taught epicycles instead of heliocentricity despite failing class after failing class. But I would doubt it.
    - 12y ago
pwthornton 12y ago
Tenure was designed for higher education and is out of place in K-12. Tenure's purpose is to protect and encourage academic freedom. Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. Since K-12 teachers do not conduct research and follow fairly strict curricula, tenure is merely a union tactic to guarantee employment.
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  > Unpopular research often becomes groundbreaking research. That sounds legit, but the best example I can think of is stem cell research. Can you help me out? I'm not an academic so I don't really know that world.
ironchef 12y ago
Probably based off of some of the origins of tenure. WAY back when they used to fire teachers (for example) when they got pregnant. Nowadays it's protection against (for example) teaching evolution in biology class (which isn't popular in some districts) or "Catcher in the Rye", etc. That all being said there's a reasonable list of pros and cons here: http://teachertenure.procon.org/ http://teachertenure.procon.org/ EDIT: I should qualify I meant when tenure was coming into K-12. It was originally based off of the professors and the boards of trustees in the universities.
Shivetya 12y ago
You take away their tenure, you take away their job protection, you are also taking away their need for a union. A union that can cost an hour, two, or more hours of pay per month. That is a lot of money, a lot of money to buy politicians or hysteria. to start the hysteria train I will trot out... tenure protects the children, protects us from creationist, protects us from bigots, from racists, from all sorts of bad people. Best thing to ever happen to the teaching profession and it damn well needs to happen at the college level to reign in those costs.
- smackfu 12y ago
  They only have those benefits because they collectively bargained for them. And yes, if the courts start gutting negotiated benefits, that does hurt unions.

steven777400 12y ago

Tenure makes a lot of sense for research university positions. Research can take a long time to be fruitful, and many avenues of research won't pan out at all. Tenure helps enable researchers to focus on various problems instead of being stuck to what will have the most payout in the shortest term. It's never been quite clear to me why tenure makes sense for instructor positions, either at the college or pre-college level. I say this as someone who was a tenured instructor at a community college for a number of years.

plg 12y ago
I guess one answer is the following: that "academic freedom" (which is one of the motivations for tenure, i.e. it protects one's academic freedom) applies not only to research but to teaching activities as well... but again, you're right, in that perhaps this makes sense in a university environment (in which curriculums can easily vary in many ways, and still be valid) but not so much in elementary schools, primary schools, high schools, etc, in which a curriculum is more restricted in its scope, and pre-defined using standards, etc.
opendais 12y ago
It is because of bullshit like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-banned-US-schools.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-207079/Evolution-ban... "The word "evolution" will be removed from school books in the deep south of the United States under a new proposal." How much do you want to bet violating such a ban would lead to immediate dismissal without tenure protections? This is a school administrator that tried to get such a ban passed. EDIT: Since there seems to be some confusion, I've italicized the word immediate since people seem to think it was irrelevant.
- dlss 12y ago
  I think the courts are a better solution for that problem. Having a couple "crazy science teachers" with tenure shouldn't even count as a solution IMO - especially if that causes people to be more careful about who they give tenure to... EDIT: I said "better solution" not "perfect solution". I would love if you speculate about what a perfect solution is though!

itbeho 12y ago

Under state law here, teachers are eligible for tenure after 18 months... 18 months!?! Something is seriously out of whack with employment in education here in California..

sliverstorm 12y ago
If my memory of tenure is correct, "eligible" is not the same as "gets". Limited number of tenure slots available, the same way you may not be promoted in the private sector because there aren't enough slots in the next grade.
darksim905 12y ago
Agreed. Glad I didn't get an education there.

VikingCoder 12y ago

I wonder when the Supreme Court will rule that life tenure for the Supreme Court justices deprives citizens of their right to justice under the Constitution of the United States of America. Substantial evidence can be presented that make it clear that the life term of Justices disproportionately affects young, poor, minority, and / or technologically-minded citizens. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.

datapolitical 12y ago
One of the beautiful pieces of the Constitution is that it's allowed to contradict itself. The more specific statement wins out (for example, a section banning gay marriage would beat out a section that said that all people were guaranteed equal rights)
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  And the most beautiful part of the Constitution is the checks and balances. For instance, the Executive branch is supposed to enforce laws from the most generic to the most specific, as you've indicated. However the Supreme Court Justices are supposed to use their brains, and realize that a law banning gay marriage, written into the Constitution or not, is inherently unconstitutional because the Equal Protection Clause takes precedent.

ColinDabritz 12y ago

Teacher Tenure is important for similar reasons as lifetime appointments for judges, especially on the academic research side. It certainly has some trade offs, but it protects our freedoms of expression, speech, and thought in a very fundamental way. Teachers and researchers need to be free from some influences to be able to teach and research unpopular subjects and views. Consider communist teachings during the "red scare" as a relatively recent example. "Faculty Tenure in Academe: The Evolution, Benefits and Implications of an Important Tradition" http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/lh62/CameronJoSA_.pdf http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/lh62/Cameron...

eruditely 12y ago

In California, teachers do a lot of under-handed lw brainwashing of their kids, at least at the high school I went to in the south bay in NorCal. We would always get told pro union agenda's and I to me as a kid(I am just 21 now), all that meant to me was "My nice teachers are getting hurt by X, X is evil!" or at least it seemed to me. I was never aware that some of it was sometimes underhanded union distortion. Note I have not implied pro/against for any issue. Just when I was made aware of this agenda which I thought was decentralized agony, it shocked me.

yellowapple 12y ago
I grew up in NorCal, too; that was the opposite impression I got. Most of the teachers I had were relatively young, and hadn't been teaching for a very long time; my conversations with them - especially in high school - frequently included mentions of how often they'd be pink-slipped because the teachers' union - dominated by veteran, tenured teachers - would elect for pay raises instead of hiring more teachers. This meant growing class sizes, and the veteran teachers knew it. We were certainly taught about the environment, how biodiversity is a good thing, etc., but I was hard-pressed to find a teacher that actually agreed with the teachers' union, and unions in general were typically portrayed in a neutral light at best.
- eruditely 12y ago
  I guess my perception is somewhat malformed due to memories, but your experiences line up with mine. I guess the f(x)(explanation) for the x I gave was incorrect. I do remember a lot of my teachers being pink slipped, but I also do remember all the strikes, all the specific agenda pushing. It was covert in the sense that young kids do not have such sharp anti-manipulation senses formed.

parker94 12y ago

If you've ever watched the documentary "Waiting for Superman" you'll see exactly why tenure shouldn't be allowed in public schools.

jongraehl 12y ago

If teaching in California public schools is messed up, what U.S. state is good for teachers?

eastbayjake 12y ago
Former Mississippi high school science teacher here. New Hampshire seems great -- affluent state with high quality of life, relatively high teacher pay, educated population, lots of small and culturally-homogenous communities. (Multicultural education in poor areas is a noble and worthy challenge, but it's ridiculously stressful and often demoralizing. I think teaching a chemistry class in a 99% African-American public high school in Mississippi does more good for society, but the chemistry teacher in an affluent district in New Hampshire is probably less stressed about student achievement and job security.) If thick New England accents and bone-biting winters aren't your bag, Colorado has similar advantages (affluence, high quality of life, educated population) but a more diverse population, more notoriety for education innovation, and more opportunities to serve traditionally underserved communities. PS - I took this question's "good for teachers" to mean "enjoying your profession" and not "do as little work as possible for as much money as possible." If you meant the latter, the answer is "The Bronx".