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Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply th

by roc 12y ago

Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply threaten/actually fire teachers until the entire staff was agreeable to their desired curriculum.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
The obvious solution there is to not provide administrators with tenure either.
- roc 12y ago
  The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority. You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that. So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.
  - Variance 12y ago
    On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
    - opendais 12y ago
      Yes. And then they eventually would get fired for it. This isn't about protecting a progressive viewpoint against a conservative one. It is about protecting teachers from being forced to service Political Viewpoint X or lose their job immediately.
      - Variance 12y ago
        So teachers will also eventually get fired for teaching Evolution in a Creationist school district. Tenure doesn't seem to actually do anything other than add red tape and drag out the process. Voters, via school boards, get their say either way. Teachers just get fired in two years rather than a month. Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired? And if you're arguing that tenure isn't about protecting radical ideas, but instead about job security regardless of political ideas, why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
        opendais 12y ago
        Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired... > Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired? Last time I checked 'all businesses' did not change ownership on the basis of opinion and did not require the person to speak publicly about sensitive subjects. > why should teachers have more job security than anyone else? Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected.
        glenra 12y ago
        >> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else? > Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected. How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many levels a bizarre result to expect, and in the rare case where you might expect it seems like it'd be a positive thing more often than not. Or even if it wasn't, there are SO many simpler ways to prevent that outcome than giving EVERY teacher tenure. Do you expect a republican or democratic political candidate to make firing all the English teachers or PE teachers or music teachers of the other party their first priority when elected to the (nonpartisan) office of Superintendent or to the City Council? Surely not! Does French or Math instruction come in Democrat or Republican flavors? Of course not! You're only really worried about science and history, right? Can you justify offering tenure to ALL teachers on that basis? On the flip side, what if some teachers are objectively really terrible, a candidate runs on a platform of "I will clean up the schools by getting rid of these bad teachers!", and the candidate gets elected on that platform because the voters agree with it. Why shouldn't those teachers be gotten rid of?
    - roc 12y ago
      > "On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily?" Teaching creationism (as opposed to not teaching evolution) is a funny edge case that runs, pretty quickly, into the establishment clause. So it's perhaps not the best example. But, sure, tenure protects teachers who refuse to teach evolution just as it protects those who would teach it. And I see that as a feature as well. It's not there to further any particular ideology. That's rather the point. And the problem with a federal curriculum as ultimate judge is that such a curriculum is ultimately a political creation. If today's legislature were voting on the NCLB act, the Santorum amendment would very likely have become law. And then we'd have biology teachers forced (via the courts if necessary) to "teach the controversy".
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
rrss1122 12y ago
Something tells me that would qualify as wrongful termination.
- roc 12y ago
  Wrongful termination only applies if the employment contract, or some statute of employment law, was violated. The law has little-to-nothing to say about this topic, which is why educators fought for these protections in the first place. And we're talking specifically about what can happen if existing protections are taken out of the employment contract. In which hypothetical case, suing for "wrongful termination" would seem, to me, to be reduced to fishing for judicial activism.
ahomescu1 12y ago
Sounds like there's some balance to be struck here. I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old, or other crap like that (and I'd agree with you). Preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher seems like an over-reaction.
- roc 12y ago
  > "I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old" The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened? What we actually see, is that people who dedicate themselves to a scientific subject (almost overwhelmingly) accept the current best conclusions of that study and teach it accordingly. And even where those scientific understandings run into non-scientific beliefs, people tend to adapt their thoughts to complement one another. (e.g. "gaps which they fill up with God") Abject politicization only really comes from the outsiders, who decide they don't like some part of our scientifically formulated understanding of the natural world and attempt to legislate it away. So you rarely, if ever, see the problem as a teacher refusing to teach the subject they dedicated their lives to, or choosing to do an active disservice to the students that they pledged to serve. And equating "tenure" with "preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher" is pretty ridiculous and politicized framing. It's more difficult to fire a teacher than a contract plumber, sure. But I don't think it's ever been shown to be more difficult to fire a teacher than a union plumber. Which makes the gripe about "inability to fire incompetence" just a reframing of the old attack on unions and union contracts -- with little or nothing to do with tenure itself.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened? Here's a creationist chemistry teacher, talking to Dawkins. http://touch.dailymotion.com/video/xdlfm8_creationist-teacher-nick-cowan_news http://touch.dailymotion.com/video/xdlfm8_creationist-teache...

by roc 12y ago

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

The obvious solution there is to not provide administrators with tenure either.

roc 12y ago
The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority. You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that. So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.
- Variance 12y ago
  On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Yes. And then they eventually would get fired for it. This isn't about protecting a progressive viewpoint against a conservative one. It is about protecting teachers from being forced to service Political Viewpoint X or lose their job immediately.
    - Variance 12y ago
      So teachers will also eventually get fired for teaching Evolution in a Creationist school district. Tenure doesn't seem to actually do anything other than add red tape and drag out the process. Voters, via school boards, get their say either way. Teachers just get fired in two years rather than a month. Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired? And if you're arguing that tenure isn't about protecting radical ideas, but instead about job security regardless of political ideas, why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
      - opendais 12y ago
        Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired... > Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired? Last time I checked 'all businesses' did not change ownership on the basis of opinion and did not require the person to speak publicly about sensitive subjects. > why should teachers have more job security than anyone else? Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected.
        glenra 12y ago
        >> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else? > Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected. How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many levels a bizarre result to expect, and in the rare case where you might expect it seems like it'd be a positive thing more often than not. Or even if it wasn't, there are SO many simpler ways to prevent that outcome than giving EVERY teacher tenure. Do you expect a republican or democratic political candidate to make firing all the English teachers or PE teachers or music teachers of the other party their first priority when elected to the (nonpartisan) office of Superintendent or to the City Council? Surely not! Does French or Math instruction come in Democrat or Republican flavors? Of course not! You're only really worried about science and history, right? Can you justify offering tenure to ALL teachers on that basis? On the flip side, what if some teachers are objectively really terrible, a candidate runs on a platform of "I will clean up the schools by getting rid of these bad teachers!", and the candidate gets elected on that platform because the voters agree with it. Why shouldn't those teachers be gotten rid of?
  - roc 12y ago
    > "On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily?" Teaching creationism (as opposed to not teaching evolution) is a funny edge case that runs, pretty quickly, into the establishment clause. So it's perhaps not the best example. But, sure, tenure protects teachers who refuse to teach evolution just as it protects those who would teach it. And I see that as a feature as well. It's not there to further any particular ideology. That's rather the point. And the problem with a federal curriculum as ultimate judge is that such a curriculum is ultimately a political creation. If today's legislature were voting on the NCLB act, the Santorum amendment would very likely have become law. And then we'd have biology teachers forced (via the courts if necessary) to "teach the controversy".
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

rrss1122 12y ago

Something tells me that would qualify as wrongful termination.

roc 12y ago
Wrongful termination only applies if the employment contract, or some statute of employment law, was violated. The law has little-to-nothing to say about this topic, which is why educators fought for these protections in the first place. And we're talking specifically about what can happen if existing protections are taken out of the employment contract. In which hypothetical case, suing for "wrongful termination" would seem, to me, to be reduced to fishing for judicial activism.

ahomescu1 12y ago

Sounds like there's some balance to be struck here. I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old, or other crap like that (and I'd agree with you). Preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher seems like an over-reaction.

roc 12y ago
> "I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old" The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened? What we actually see, is that people who dedicate themselves to a scientific subject (almost overwhelmingly) accept the current best conclusions of that study and teach it accordingly. And even where those scientific understandings run into non-scientific beliefs, people tend to adapt their thoughts to complement one another. (e.g. "gaps which they fill up with God") Abject politicization only really comes from the outsiders, who decide they don't like some part of our scientifically formulated understanding of the natural world and attempt to legislate it away. So you rarely, if ever, see the problem as a teacher refusing to teach the subject they dedicated their lives to, or choosing to do an active disservice to the students that they pledged to serve. And equating "tenure" with "preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher" is pretty ridiculous and politicized framing. It's more difficult to fire a teacher than a contract plumber, sure. But I don't think it's ever been shown to be more difficult to fire a teacher than a union plumber. Which makes the gripe about "inability to fire incompetence" just a reframing of the old attack on unions and union contracts -- with little or nothing to do with tenure itself.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened? Here's a creationist chemistry teacher, talking to Dawkins. http://touch.dailymotion.com/video/xdlfm8_creationist-teacher-nick-cowan_news http://touch.dailymotion.com/video/xdlfm8_creationist-teache...