It was Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who said "If you tell a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough, people will eventually come to believe it."
Suddenly tenure has become the root of all evil in American public education. In a time of shifting educational priorities, dramatic fiscal cuts, and massive teacher layoffs, somehow this practice has become the focal point for all that is wrong with education today.
The case goes something like this:
a) Tenure protects bad teachers, making it impossible to get rid of any poor teacher
b) Tenure therefore eliminates good teachers who happen to be lower on the seniority list
Sounds like a pretty good case...except for the fact that it is based on only partial truths.
Tenure in secondary schools across this country is far from permanent job security. The fact is that tenure is a two part process that starts with a school corporation having a period of years to determine whether or not to make a new staff member "permanent." This period of time can vary, though it typically seems to be two or three years in length. During the "semi-permanent" phase of your employment, the school can simply choose not to offer you a contract for the next year for just about any reason.
At the end of the last "semi-permanent" year, the school corporation either lets the teacher go, or chooses to retain the teacher and have their classification changed to "permanent." It is at this point that the teacher is said to have tenure.
It is important to understand that the teacher is not guaranteed a job for life at this point. A permanent teacher could still be subject to reduction in force (RIF) due to down-sizing. Also, a permanent teacher can still be let go from their position - but now the school must show due cause for the release. This means the burden falls on the administration of the school to do a consistent and thorough job of evaluating and documenting teacher performance. If evidence can be shown that a teacher has been notified of deficiencies in their work, and those deficiencies are not satisfactorily addressed in a reasonable period of time, the tenured teacher can be fired.
The very purpose of tenure as a benefit to teachers was to ensure that school corporations could not simply let a teacher go for just any reason. A two or three year period of employment, including regular evaluation and observation, should give administration a sufficient picture of the teacher's abilities to enable them to make a decision on whether or not to want the teacher to be a permanent part of the school's staff. Tenure then ensures that a change in administration at any level does not lead to a personality conflict of some kind that might lead an administrator to make a hasty decision to terminate.
The tenure system and a seniority system are not necessarily linked systems. Once tenure is granted, all such tenured teachers are effectively equal. When new teachers are RIF'ed due to staff reductions, there is nothing inherently wrong about first terminating teachers who have not yet completed their probationary or evaluation period before terminating permanent staff. At the same time, there is no particular reason for sticking to a seniority list once reductions move into the permanent staff list. This is perhaps an area where local teacher's associations could find some flexibility in RIF procedures.
The problems faced by public education today are vast and complex. There is no one single issue that is a potential cure-all for the shortcomings we face. An honest appraisal of current education would include acknowledging that societal changes, particularly in terms of family structure and socio-economic pressures, contribute much to the challenges in educating today's youth.
It is long past time that all sides in the education arena stop fixating on hot-button issues designed to appeal to inflammatory rhetoric but with little potential to produce positive results in the lives of students.
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