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.
I think we've all been there... had some teacher for some class in some grade that made the students wonder "how on earth are you allowed to keep teaching?".
There are many many very good teachers. There are also some very bad teachers who stop caring about the kids.
Tenure currently enables teachers to "coast" and lose enthusiasm to teach and change lives.
Teachers who lose enthusiasm don't lose it because one day they wake up and think, "Man, I'm tenured now; fk all y'all I got mine." They lose it because of the vicious, dysfunctional attitudes taken toward teachers. That attitude being the one in which "we" expect teachers to be babysitters, guardians, mentors, and a variety of other things while at the same time facing a relentless assault on their competence, integrity, and wallets (lower pay, less support for classroom materials, etc.).
I put "we" in quotes because, clearly, I don't consider myself part of that group. Teachers, tenured or not, are as much victims as the students in this mess. They're all victims of--and this isn't going to be a popular opinion here, I bet--the very real, very destructive, anti-intellectual, anti-government, and anti-education strains of conservative politics that have increased sway in matters of the governance of education. This isn't a Democrat vs. Republican thing, either; as far as I'm concerned party affiliation is irrelevant (or, if you like, "both sides do it"). It is ideology that matters here. The destructive ideology I just described is the one most responsible for the problems we see in public schools, and that ideology is deeply entrenched in one party and becoming increasingly more entrenched in the other, to the point where the lines blur.
Yes, "we" treat our teachers pretty poorly. And they often succumb to the assault on them. But, it doesn't really matter if they lose enthusiasm over night or over a 10 year period. If they have lost their enthusiasm and are no longer performing their job to the satisfaction of their employer, there should not be a long complicated process to dismiss them.
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.
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.
> "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.
>
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.
> 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?
Don't know, it's just one particular example. It may not happen in this case, but it can in others.
In a parallel comment, someone mentioned Communism/Socialism, and I myself mentioned Nazism in another one. If one teacher wants to teach Capitalism or Democracy, one Communism, one Nazism and one Absolute Monarchy as the one-true-system (let's say they're all History teachers), which one are you going to fire and why?
A friend of mines HS biology teacher taught creationism going so far as to physically remove any mention of evolution from the textbook. It's far more common than you might think.
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.
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.
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.
> "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".
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.
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?
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.
>> 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?
> 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.
Oh? What is this great solution you have? The courts? That takes years, at which point the teacher is unemployed and may years later receive compensation. Good luck expecting that to go well.
> 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?
My PE teacher also taught the sex ed class. My English teacher taught a book that was later banned in the School District for a number of years before being unbanned again.
Also? Only 6 of the 12 years is divided up like that.
> 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?
Why do you create arguments that are irrelevant?
The teachers that are terrible can be gotten rid of. If you think it is too hard, then streamline the process so they can be fired in X time period. There is a huge range between "can dismiss for any reason" and "can dismiss for performance".
> Oh? What is this great solution you have? The courts? That takes years, at which point the teacher is unemployed and may years later receive compensation. Good luck expecting that to go well.
Nah, it's an institutional problem; you'd solve it with slightly different rules about how schools are run. For instance, you could give principals more autonomy over hiring/firing teachers but make it harder to fire THEM, thereby reducing the ability of nitwit politicians to exert pressure to fire particular people. You could make more of the relevant intermediary jobs (like state superintendent) nonpartisan, and make being nonpartisan an explicit part of the job. You could add more transparency to hiring/firing decisions and leave it to the voters to punish politicians who do that sort of thing - if regular elections aren't enough disincentive, then add a petition-based recall process.
Or you could recognize that political sea changes at the local level don't happen often enough for this to be a significant problem, so we shouldn't worry about it until and unless it actually happens. Don't institute cures that are worse than the disease. (The fact that some district in Texas has this problem doesn't mean you need tenure everywhere in the country.)
Though the real solution is more student autonomy. Let parents decide which schools to send their kids to rather than arbitrarily assigning them to a specific one and the whole issue basically goes away. If parents don't like what's being taught to their kids, make it easy for them to go elsewhere or teach the kids at home and they don't NEED to get rid of bad teachers. (When people don't like what's served at a restaurant, they don't typically lobby to fire the cook, they just eat somewhere else! Because they CAN.)
Fundamentally, the purpose of a school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers. If you want to convince people tenure is a good idea, you need to make the case from that perspective - why it helps the students. Otherwise it just sounds like special pleading.
> Nah, it's an institutional problem; you'd solve it with slightly different rules about how schools are run. For instance, you could give principals more autonomy over hiring/firing teachers but make it harder to fire THEM, thereby reducing the ability of nitwit politicians to exert pressure to fire particular people. You could make more of the relevant intermediary jobs (like state superintendent) nonpartisan, and make being nonpartisan an explicit part of the job. You could add more transparency to hiring/firing decisions and leave it to the voters to punish politicians who do that sort of thing - if regular elections aren't enough disincentive, then add a petition-based recall process.
The voters vote these people in intentionally. They campaign on it.
> Or you could recognize that political sea changes at the local level don't happen often enough for this to be a significant problem, so we shouldn't worry about it until and unless it actually happens. Don't institute cures that are worse than the disease. (The fact that some district in Texas has this problem doesn't mean you need tenure everywhere in the country.)
I suggest you employ Google. Its a frequent problem in the South, not just Texas.
> Though the real solution is more student autonomy. Let parents decide which schools to send their kids to rather than arbitrarily assigning them to a specific one and the whole issue basically goes away. If parents don't like what's being taught to their kids, make it easy for them to go elsewhere or teach the kids at home and they don't NEED to get rid of bad teachers. (When people don't like what's served at a restaurant, they don't typically lobby to fire the cook, they just eat somewhere else! Because they CAN.)
Fundamentally, the purpose of a school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers. If you want to convince people tenure is a good idea, you need to make the case from that perspective - why it helps the students. Otherwise it just sounds like special pleading.
And when people like you are willing to pay the full cost, including an externalities beyond just the price of tuition on everyone involved, sure.
Strangely, people seem to pretend that they don't exist and/or balk at the full price tag.
It is alot like the USPS. Even UPS and Fedex don't want its unprofitable routes in rural areas because they can't be made profitable. The problem is, when you rip away the profitable portion of the process, it ends up costing the taxpayer just as much when the bill comes due.
If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
> The voters vote these people in intentionally. They campaign on it.
Great, then let them! What's the matter, don't you believe in democracy? :-)
> And when people like you are willing to pay the full cost, including an externalities beyond just the price of tuition on everyone involved, sure.
What externalities? Private schools don't have tenure and cost on average about half as much per student as public schools do.
> It is alot like the USPS. Even UPS and Fedex don't want its unprofitable routes in rural areas because they can't be made profitable. The problem is, when you rip away the profitable portion of the process, it ends up costing the taxpayer just as much when the bill comes due.
UPS and Fedex aren't legally allowed to charge less than the post office does to deliver mail nor are they allowed to carry non-urgent mail or packages. The fact that they focus on high-priced delivery options is NOT because they're cherrypicking, it's because that's the only niche they've been able to wrest legal access to. (And they were able to do that because the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
Get rid of the laws prohibiting competition with the post office, let the post office go broke if need be, and the private carriers would make money in rural areas too. Mail delivery would likely cost half as much if the private sector did it.
Incidentally, it has long been the case that in some rural areas the Post Office would deliver mail to the nearest "mail stop" (which could be miles away from a home) while UPS and FedEx would drive right up to the door.
>If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
Why would you expect there not to be good schools in bad neighborhoods? Absent the political incentive to centralize and bureaucratize you'd have lots of tiny schools all over the place meeting local needs rather than huge monolithic schools that folks have to be bussed over to.
That is a popular story, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Do you have a source?
I suspect you're thinking of the sort of elite academy type schools that have tough entrance exams - but those are a very tiny fraction of private schools. There also exist private schools that that take anyone who applies and even private schools that specialize in special-needs students.
Also: in several parts of the US (including all of Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Utah as well as various municipal districts), special-needs students actually have their own separate voucher system which parents can use to attend private schools because the public schools aren't good at educating those kids.
> Great, then let them! What's the matter, don't you believe in democracy? :-)
It elects people who believe delusional things that are not grounded in reality sometimes, doubly so at the local level. I believe in checks and balances. There are no real checks and balances at the local level except in a timespan measured in years which isn't 'acceptable'.
> What externalities? Private schools don't have tenure and cost on average about half as much per student as public schools do.
Providing transportation with adult supervision for single parents who need to work and don't have a car to drop the kid off with. Providing food for those that can't afford to at lunch. Etc.
Things like that are part of the $13k figure. So, unless you are planning to drop all of that?
> Why would you expect there not to be good schools in bad neighborhoods? Absent the political incentive to centralize and bureaucratize you'd have lots of tiny schools all over the place meeting local needs rather than huge monolithic schools that folks have to be bussed over to.
1) Economies of Scale
2) People in wealthier areas can pay more and schools are partially funded through property tax...drum roll please...this means schools in richer neighborhoods have more money.
> (And they were able to do that because the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
LOL.
http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/05/13/pos...
"Rising online shopping has sparked a jump in package revenue, while a gradually rebounding economy has stabilized mail revenue. That’s why the USPS forecasts a $1.1 billion operating profit this year. Quite simply, the package business is booming for the Postal Service."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fix-for-a-profita...
"In 2006, lawmakers mandated that the Postal Service do something that no other public or private entity is required to do — pre-fund future retiree health benefits. That $5.6 billion annual chargeaccounts for 100 percent of the red ink."
That is simply was never true and has never been true. I'm not going to even bother reading the rest of your rant.
> Providing transportation with adult supervision for single parents who need to work and don't have a car to drop the kid off with.
Is this really necessary? Surely a substantial fraction of kids could walk, bike, and/or take a public transit bus to the nearest school like I did. Or if driving has to be involved (why?) they could organize/join an informal neighborhood carpool.
Anyway yeah, I'd probably drop most of that. Or pay for it out of a very small fraction of the money saved.
> People in wealthier areas can pay more and schools are partially funded through property tax...drum roll please...this means schools in richer neighborhoods have more money.
That would have been a fine argument to make in, say, 1970. Nowadays, not so much. Though it might depend on what state you're talking about. Today there is in most states quite a lot of redistribution of state funds to make up for local variation. And many of the worst schools and school districts spend the most money - they just spend it badly.
>> the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
> LOL. [random links]
Your two articles are completely irrelevant to whether package delivery and urgent message delivery were profitable for the post office in the 1970s, which was when Federal Express (now FedEx) got started. (The "urgent letters" exemption to the postal monopoly was made official in 1979.)
As for time-sensitive delivery today, FedEx is so much better at it than the Post Office that by 2000 the Post Office entirely gave up on providing that service themselves; they now subcontract to FedEx and UPS to carry most of the post office-branded urgent mail and packages.
(They don't do this just because they were terrible at delivering stuff quickly and reliably, but also due to a boneheaded post-9/11 rule change about carrying packages on commercial flights that broke their previous business model.)
(the post office also now subcontracts a lot of local rural delivery, fwiw.)
> Is this really necessary? Surely a substantial fraction of kids could walk, bike, and/or take a public transit bus to the nearest school like I did. Or if driving has to be involved (why?) they could organize/join an informal neighborhood carpool.
Did you do this when you were 5 and the nearest good school is 5+ miles away? No?
> Anyway yeah, I'd probably drop most of that. Or pay for it out of a very small fraction of the money saved.
At which point you aren't talking about school choice, but cutting the safety net for poor children.
Kay, well I'm dropping this since you seem to think "separate but equal" on a class basis is acceptable. We won't agree on anything.
Look, you can't say "Oh, private schools are cheaper because we can throw the poor kids under the bus by cutting their safety net". That isn't an acceptable solution.
The poor kids are the ones getting shafted by the status quo! They get "assigned" to schools that are terrible and don't even have the option to go somewhere better, even if it's just as convenient to get the kids there. School choice is a safety net for poor children.
Having more but smaller schools with more choice means shorter commutes and a better school experience for everyone, but most of all for the poor. (The rich can afford to either move to a better public school district or pay twice, once for a public school option they're not using and a second time for a private school option they are, so they're fine either way.)
So from my perspective you're the one throwing the poor kids under the bus. You're saying the poor kids assigned to terrible, unsafe schools should just suck it up and tolerate it (and hope that maybe the political system fixes it sometime far in the distant future) rather than just pick (or create!) a better option right now.
I agree that we're probably not going to agree. But to tie up one last loose end:
> Did you do this [travel alone] when you were 5 and the nearest good school is 5+ miles away? No?
When I was 5 I walked to a public grade school that was less than a mile away - one of 2 or 3 in the area that met that criteria. In middle school (grades 7-8) my morning bike commute was 4.5 miles - though another option was to walk or bike 1.5 miles a different direction and take a public bus the rest of the way.
> If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
I'm not sure if your didn't understand that bit or what the issue is. I'm fine with vouchers as long as they actually cover what is currently provided.
And you are assuming they all live in major cities [hint: 20% of the population is rural/small town america].
Look, your plan requires:
1) Preventing poor kids from eating lunch [because they have no money]
2) Preventing poor kids from having sufficient transportation to get to school in all areas of this country, not just major cities.
2b) You want kids to walk unescorted in terrible, unsafe [your words, not mine] neighborhoods to make it to "better schools".
In reality, my objection is the fact you won't pay for the above which you conveniently and consistently ignore. Instead, you claim you are trying to "help them" while simultaneously starving them and increasing the economic burden on their family to get all students to a good school.
The reality is you cannot magically cut spending and rely on the free market to fix things. If you want services to remain roughly the same, you have to spend roughly the same amount of money regardless of if it is the government spending it in the form of public education or vouchers.
Personally, I think vouchers that provide the same level of service as currently exists in an apples-to-apples way is perfectly fine. The problem is, people like you pretend these services are somehow a complete waste of money servicing an imaginary need. They aren't an imaginary need.
I know poor people who live in a rural area that literally have to cross a lake that is more than a mile across to get to a school that teaches K-12 because it is the only school in the area for about 50 miles in any direction. You pretend such people are imaginary and do not exist to come to your "solution".
In theory, university tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think it does confer that as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term".
Tenure for non-research faculty might make sense if it protects the right to teach unpopular ideas.
It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.
> tenure is supposed to protect the freedom to research unpopular topics, not the freedom to be unproductive, however, I think [tenure] does confer [low productivity] as a side benefit at least as you say "in the shortest term".
Perverse incentives are intense in the research community and they're getting worse as the supply/demand imbalance in the academic labor market continues to grow. My experience is that non-tenured professors tend to dramatically overproduce flashy media-bait ("scientific debt," if you will). Tenure is the only mechanism we have to balance that out, which means it's becoming more and more important every day.
> It never made sense in the public schools, of course, and has always just been a way to transfer money from taxpayers' wallets to the Democrat party's coffers via a helpfully corrupt public sector union.
I find teachers far less objectionable as money-funnling mechanisms than the defense and dirty-energy industries.
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.
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!
The courts? Have a judge pick the textbook? I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong.
School choice is the solution. Let parents hold the schools accountable, because they're the only ones (apparently) who put the kids' education ahead of political pet causes.
You don't have to sell me on the idea, brother, I've been supporting vouchers since I heard of them. I think you're overly optimistic that there are "lawmakers" on our side, though. Even those from the ostensibly free-market party, when they get into power, rarely support programs that would reduce their own sphere of influence. It's hard to get re-elected by saying "Look what I didn't do for you."
The average private school costs quite a lot less than the average public school. You could spend about half as much per student and still get safer kids and happier parents.
So what "external costs" are you thinking of? Going to a private school does involve travel, but so does going to your assigned public school. Depending on how the district lines are drawn and how centralized the district is, the trip might even be shorter.
>I'm uncertain why you expect anyone to send people to Catholic schools "because cheaper"?
Cheaper, better, and/or safer, yes. Sometimes it's the best available option.
> Not everyone is Catholic.
Sure, but not everyone who attends Catholic schools is Catholic. Lots of Jews, atheists, and agnostics attend Catholic schools. How difficult that is to do depends on the school. In general, yes, the schools will be teaching some stuff your family doesn't believe...but that'd be true for public schools too, no matter what your beliefs are. Heck, having the irrationality in the curriculum be so blatant might produce more healthy skepticism in the kids than when the irrationality takes the more subtle forms it does in public schools!
I'm an atheist, FWIW. Perhaps I did a bad job of correcting you when you kept jumping to conclusions above, but whatever my motivations are doesn't change the fact that the average private school costs less than the average public one. :-)
Your average Democrat who wants to sabotage school vouchers will vote for vouchers of 2 or 3 thousand dollars. Meanwhile spending fifteen grand per student on the public school system. Great way to "prove" that vouchers "don't work".
The true idea of a voucher system is that the parent gets to decide where ALL of their child's share of that spending will go.
However, you seem to gloss over the fact that not all people in this country have a car and their children may be too young for the bus system. Etc.
It isn't "better" if people are too poor to take advantage of the option. So there are additional costs that get frequently overlooked beyond just the cost of school/tuition.
The amount of money has to be enough that even the poorest student has 2-3 options or it becomes pointless.
I don't see why, from an economics perspective. Sure, the person who lives real close to one school and very distant from the other schools may not have other options so good that they overcome the cost difference of travel, however, the people who live halfway between the two schools will still have that choice. This still ensures that there is competitive pressure on the schools. The thing about competition is that it tends to improves the quality/cost ratio of all offerings, even those that don't "win" the competition.
In capitalism, those that don't "win" the competition go bankrupt and die.
I can easily see scenarios [say inner city LA county] where the only options are "bad schools" and siphoning funds away from them while leaving the poorest that are stuck in Compton or the like, isn't going to work.
It has to provide for the poorest to get an education as good as those in richer areas.
So... when will they be taking Pepsi off the shelf? Closing down all the Burger Kings?
LA has dozens if not hundreds of schools. If there are two lousy schools near Compton and parents can choose which ones get the funds earmarked for their child, even those lousy schools will get better fast. They don't have to become the best schools in the country for the parents and children to experience a benefit.
It's not just the union as charter schools are (in general) just as mixed of a bag as public schools. There was a Stanford study back in 2009 that spanned 16 states and showed around 20 percent of charters outperformed and 35 percent of charters underperformed their peer public schools. Actually this reminds me they were supposed to have another round of outcomes last year or so. I'll have to go and see again how things have changed. (Offhand, it wouldn't surprise me if it's relatively close overall).
> "I think the courts are a better solution for that problem."
So who sues? The students who are under-served by a public education system that doesn't teach evolution? Let's suppose they find a jury of their peers that agrees, what does the court decision look like?
A mandate for the hiring or retention of at least one teacher who will teach evolution? (Likely with redundancies. People retire, change jobs, get sick, etc.)
And to ensure the ruling is respected one would imagine the district would have to go to further lengths to prove cause, if they ever want to remove that teacher, right?
So all we'll have done is move the tenure track to the court docket, but only for those students/concerns that can shoulder the legal costs to pursue their rights, inevitably providing poorer service to poorer students and those seeking protections for minority concerns (which are disproportionately less likely to win a court case).
Isn't it just as, if not more, likely that a teacher would i.e. refuse to teach evolution (or even just be generally incompetent) and irremovable because of tenure? How does that improve anything?
Ah, but that is a violation of the curriculum and clear cause for removal.
Tenure isn't some magical invulnerability to being fired. It simply slows the process to a crawl and forces the collection of a mountain of evidence to fire someone for cause.
If someone intentionally, and repeatedly, violates the curriculum you can fire a tenured teacher.
You can't acquire that mountain of evidence in the 12 months between getting a ban on evolution passed and having it repealed in federal court.
Joe is right, you did contradict yourself. You originally said that tenure allows teachers to violate stupid school board decisions and to teach evolution anyway. Here, you said that tenure does not allow teachers to not teach evolution if the school board mandates it.
Which is it? Can the school board fire teachers for not following the curriculum? If so, then school boards can stop teachers from teaching evolution. If not, then teachers can choose to teach Creationism. Either way, tenure doesn't matter.
I think you've never experienced unofficial pressure in the workplace before when you need to put food on the table. ;)
Tenure is much, much more effective than trying to make a law like that work reliably. Every time some new topic came up that was politically charged, you'd need to amend it. What happens when the people you consider to be the "wrong people" are in charge? They get their way.
If it's unofficial, then there's not much to be worried about. Do your job and you'll be fine.
I honestly don't think tenure is more effective than actual legal enforcement, namely because tenure isn't really effective for that purpose at all, especially when we're considering that the older teachers - the ones who benefit from tenure - are the ones who are probably in support of such pressure, which is more likely directed at the younger teachers, relatively fresh from college, who want their students to learn about the proper science they learned about in school but are afraid to do so when their paychecks are on the line.
That's not even in the possible range of solutions. Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education.
It's not going to be made illegal, and such laws will not and would not be enforced in the areas in which this is a problem to begin with, i.e., Republican areas.
> Remember that lawmakers and law enforcers in red states are actively hostile towards teaching science, never mind teaching anything at all about the body, such as sex education.
Then do it at the federal level. Fuck the troglodytes in the red states.
The freedom to teach unpopular ideas also includes the freedom to teach that water has feelings and you can change its molecular structure by yelling at it, or that vaccines cause autism, or that global warming is all a bunch of bullshit made up by the liberal media. Pick your poison.
No, I'm agreeing that a science teacher who taught kids that water has feelings would be fired immediately without tenure protections -- and deserves to be fired immediately! But tenure protections would not just protect an evolution teacher in Mississippi, it would also protect Gwyneth Paltrow's right to teach kids batshit crazy things about molecular chemistry based on new age pseudoscience. It cuts both ways.
You make a point in a later comment "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."
So tenure protects teachers long enough for such a trial to occur. I understand that. But wouldn't a wrongful termination suit do the same? After a couple of these, the State would pass guidelines on hiring and firing so that they don't get sued.
Here in Tennessee the legislature's been fighting hard against tenure for years. At my kid's school an alarming number of teachers are leaving after this year, reportedly due to bad evaluations (not public information, unfortunately) with the gung-ho principal and no recourse. The ones leaving are generally well thought of by the parents. It seems that "team player" is weighted a lot higher than teaching ability here.
I don't know that tenure is really the answer, but currently public school teachers are much more at the whim of administrators than college instructors are. It feels like they're trying to drive the teachers away so they can declare the whole public education thing a failure and kill it.
Tenure prevents teachers from getting dismissed for teaching ideas that may not acceptable with the majority opinion. With creationism being pushed in schools, it seems we moving backwards from the progressive made after the scopes trial.
At least at the K-12 level, teachers don't have a right to teach their students whatever they feel is appropriate. There are state and national standards -- backed by assessments -- that mandate what teachers should be teaching and measure whether those teachers are doing a good job.
Teachers are employees like any other employee. At my job I don't get to work on whatever I want whenever I disagree with the majority opinion about how my time should be spent, and most companies would be terrible if employees had "tenure" where they could work on whatever they wanted -- including "working on this sandwich before an afternoon nap." (And if that sounds like a straw man, Google around for videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5VkcwKwP0)
Thats the point i am trying to make. When Kansas removed evolution out of curriculum, teachers still taught it because they couldn't get fired. Thats what tenure protects, that our education system is not affected by majority opinion and changes political climate. Now that Kansas has removed tenure, the next time the education board bans evolution which seems to happen every 5 years, teachers will have to comply or get fired.
And the point I'm trying to make is that curriculum choices at the K-12 level are a democratic decision, not a matter of personal conscience by educators. You don't get paid by the government to teach whatever you like, you get paid to teach what the government pays you to teach, and you're evaluated based on how well students know the material the government asks you to teach them.
Removing evolution from the curriculum is a political problem that voters need to solve. It's not something you can fix through teacher autonomy. The real issue is getting politicians and administrators to ask teachers to teach the right things, and it's their fault -- not teachers -- when the curriculum is bad.
I think it's the school administration's job to protect teachers from casual termination... not a contract that makes it impossible to get rid of the worst teachers.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you're mixing up my points. The Constitutional concern doesn't lie with tenure itself; enforcement of the Constitution would replace this rather far-fetched excuse for maintaining tenure as some holy trait. The legal system already exists to help teachers in cases where they're punished for teaching science instead of religion in government-funded institutions, since doing so already runs afoul of the establishment clause; a tenure system doesn't really add much, and (in my own observations at least) only seems to benefit veteran teachers at the expense of students and newer teachers.
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.
"nobody wants to join" -> I think you mean few want to continue in. There is plenty of fodder heading into the ranks only to have their dreams crushed by the reality of teaching in today's educational system. The numbers of those going into teaching has been on the rise for years (I believe elementary and secondary teacher population has risen about 7 percent since 2002...don't remember if that was DoE statistics or what...i'll try to find it)
California teachers earned $67K on avearge in Calif in 2011. Note that this is for 9 months of work. Except in the major cities, teachers often out-earn the income of the parents of all their students. And they benefit from a system in which they can never be fired for their performance and which gives them comparatively good retirement benefits.
Focusing strictly on California, it has the lowest scholastic scores of all states. Despite many efforts to improve schools, fewer than 10 teachers have been fired during the last two years for poor performance. That's out of a population of 275,000 teachers. Schools simply view it as impossible to fire for cause[1].
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.
Just remember that 15.X number is average. I know my wife's school had to call the union in twice last year as certain classes were exceeding 39 students in the classroom. I'd love to see more of statistics broken out demographically (in particular dense urban areas would be interesting).
>nearly half of all new teachers last less than five years
My guess is because teaching is seen as a fall back job for liberal arts majors who have no teaching experience, and once they get hired, it turns out they hate teaching.
Or, at least in CA, teachers leave because they grow up and need a real job; one that might pay them enough to afford to live in the communities they work in. If you'd like to live in the valley and teach, you better marry well. You can see some of the salaries here [1]; $71k for Belmont means give up any dream of owning a home.
If you have 2 salaries of 71k, you've got 142 which should allow you to buy a home priced at around 600k, more if you've saved for a bit. So that dream is still alive.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For a variety of reasons, really stupid metrics in tech have mostly not had staying power, which reduces how much of a problem people consider them to be. Plenty of companies have attempted to institute some kind of LoC or normalized-LoC or other such system to measure programmer productivity, and they are mostly ridiculed as laughingstocks of the profession. Whereas the dumb, unvalidated metrics seem to be actually making inroads in education.
To some extent tech benefits from there being giant piles of money everywhere, which limits how much leverage stupid employers have over their employees (where legal, they try to use noncompetes to counteract that effect).
An interesting feature of this decision, though, is that it interprets the "right to education" in the state Constitution as creating an enforceable, quite broad right, rather than merely a general principle: any government policy that stands in the way of students receiving an effective education is (according to this holding) unconstitutional. If that stands as precedent, students may have another way to combat poorly designed metrics: such metrics might also be unconstitutional. (One problem, of course, is that there's no clear limiting factor for this principle; it essentially empowers judges to make policy decisions about what stands in the way of good education.)
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.
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.
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.
So how do you prevent that while also not making it impossible to fire people who insist on teaching young-earth creationism or abstinence-only sex ed or whatever else wrong/harmful you can think of?
Honestly, it is a pretty bad solution. However, it was sufficiently shielded from politics that bypassing that shield was difficult for decades.
Pretty much any alternative is purely governed by populous whims because it is no longer the "norm" but "some unique thing we do".
Now, if you can get a constitutional amendment passed that solves the things tenure is truly needed for [such as abuse of position to engage in de factor or outright bans of topics like evolution]...sure. I can see a better solution there.
However, I don't see a better solution happening :/
And I'm not sure how the problem you describe is limited to public schools? If my manager doesn't like me (for whatever reason), he can find a way to have me removed from my job. Nitpick every minor problem, make-work assignments, untenable deadlines, etc.
Why is it incumbent on your friends and family to demonstrate that school administrators would be more likely to be capricious or unfair, and not on you to demonstrate why it's a good idea to subject teachers to any increased level of capricious or unfair management?
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.
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?
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....
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/
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.
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.
They only have those benefits because they collectively bargained for them. And yes, if the courts start gutting negotiated benefits, that does hurt unions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.