4 ms·

Does making teachers easier to fire draw better candidates into the profession?

• danielweber 12y ago
  Maybe. I'm sure the idea is that "I might be fired, better not get that job" is easy to imagine, as is people running away from the industry at high speed if they could be fired. Somehow most other professionals deal with the ability to be fired just fine. But there are other forces at work that make less job lock good for workers. First is coworkers. Education is a team activity, where your coworkers screw-up means more work for you. I've worked at places where management refused to fire people who needed fired, because of friendships or pain aversion. It was not fun fixing all their problems. Fortunately I quit and watched them circle the drain. The biggest is the ease of entry and exit. If the only job available is one of a selected number where you have to wait for the current person holding it to retire, you have a situation like postdocs trying to get tenure track positions in American academia. On the other hand, if there is a flow of teachers moving around in job market -- including people new to teaching, and people stopping teaching to do something else -- there's plenty of room to find openings. It also makes it easy to move around: if your boss sucks, or your spouse wants to move elsewhere else in the country, you can find openings.