The use of tenure confuses me. Here are my three questions:
[ul]
[li]Why do competent teachers need tenure?[/li][li]Why should incompetent teachers benefit from tenure?[/li][li]If tenure is a good idea, how come it isn’t more widespread?[/li][/ul]
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To protect us from the whims and vagarities of administrators and school boards, who bend over for any parent with a phone and an attitude.
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To give them a chance to correct this “incompetence.” (See #1.)
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In Education it is very wide-spread. To try to apply the idea to other professions is likeasking “Why is there no mustard in professional hockey?”
If the teacher is good, why is tenure needed to force administrators to stand up for them?
But to remove the incentive to.
Nonsense. Doctors don’t get tenure to force hospitals to stand up for them. Neither do police officers.
Or, in other words,
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To remove all power from administrators and school boards to discipline or remove incompetent staff,
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To allow incompetence to continue indefinitely without consequence (See #1),
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Many other public and private sector industries have abusive, protectionist labor unions who are more interested in padding their own membership than cultivating skilled workers who do their jobs.
At least in theory, an incompetent teacher should not get tenure in the first place. The benefit of tenure is to protect a competent teacher/research from being fired, not for incompetence, but for expressing unpopular opinions. That’s why it’s particurlay associated with universities and academic freedom.
Because one of the functions we serve is to speak the truth. Not what most people deem to be true, not what’s popular, not what the majority can compromise on, but what’s true. Sometimes we don’t even agree on what’s true, so we need to hire people to explore conflicting views on what’s the truth, without the slightest fear that a sincere effort to seek out the truth could have harsh repercussions on their careers.
As it is, even with tenure, there are enough timid careerist academics seeking approval from their bosses or from the public to go around, but without it we may as well surrender academe to the state school board in Kansas and just teach whatever the local yahoos want us to teach.
Right. The idea behind tenure is to protect academics who hold unpopular views. Doctors and police officers don’t get tenure because, first, doctors and police officers aren’t in a profession where they make their views known for a living, and second, there’s not a history of doctors or police officers getting fired for holding views that those in power disagree with or find offensive.
Here’s something else to consider: For college professors teaching is only one part of what they do. Another big part is research. Some research is completely non-controversial, but a lot of it IS, even if the controversy exists only within that professor’s particular field. Tenure provides the protection for professors to pursue unpopular or controversial lines of inquiry without fear of punishment.
This thread is probably better suited to GD, but here goes…
While one of the main purposes of higher education is to teach, it certainly isn’t the only one; another is the pursuit of knowledge, and the open debate of ideas. It’s here that tenure becomes much more important. Suppose, for example, that Monsanto is one of the main donors to the Biology Department of Podunk State College, having donated oodles of liquid cash, built new facilities, etc. Now suppose that Prof. Smith finds evidence that people who consume tomatoes from Monsanto’s new genetically modified tomato plants are at a high risk for cancer. If Prof. Smith can be fired at will, what’s to stop Monsanto from exerting pressure in order to keep Prof. Smith’s results from being released?
The point here is that in the pursuit of academic knowledge, “being incompetent” and “saying things I don’t agree with” are way too easy to confuse. Only if there’s a system that requires clear, well-defined reasons for dismissal and minimal administrative interference (i.e. some kind of tenure system) does true academic freedom become possible.
OTOH, Harvard itself does not grant tenure in the traditional sense of the word. They could in theory but they don’t. Their tenured faculty all get siphoned away from other schools and already have tenure. Harvard does not give tenure to its junior faculty as a matter of tradition. Make of that what you will.
- Another reason would be to prevent the higher paid teachers (those who have earned raises above the starting salary) from being fired and replaced by new hires.
- They shouldn’t, IMO, assuming your definition of incompetance is reasonable. But the low starting salaries and poor working conditions in some areas might make it tough to get replacements. So those incompetent types might be held over because they can’t get someone to replace them, not because of tenure.
Also, to maintain member loyalty, a Union will fight for all employees, up to a point. (Sexual harassment they won’t defend, but incompetance they might.) This makes it tough to fire folks in protected positions for incompetence. The employer has to have extensive documentation to get past that hurdle.
- Employers usually want to have the flexibilty to make decisions based on the needs of the organisation, not the individual employee. (They may adopt it anyway to attract more applicants.)
It gives faculty academic and intellectual freedom. But to answer your specific questions:
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Competent teachers could be summarily dismissed following a change in administration and adminstrators change with the seasons. Politics rules in the University setting no matter how low you lay. My own personal organization has had five deans in the past three years all with dramatically different ideas and agendas. You don’t want all your faculty to toady up to the fleeting whims of the current seagull* CEO. Enough of them suck up of their own free will anyway. The faculty are the ones there year in/year out. You don’t want them changing their research/teaching methodologies based on the politics of the day.
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Incompetent teachers are the bane of the competent. It’s basically the lessor of two evils, protect the good and the bad are also protected. There are bad apples in every organization, Congress, police departments, post office, Enron, etc.
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Unofficial tenure used to be the norm in US business. You worked for a company for life unless you committed some kind of crime. Incompetence was rewarded not by firing you but by promoting you; remember the Peter Principle? And how about Unions? Union workers still have essentially tenured positions.
Just my WAG as a tenured prof.
*flys in, shits all over everyone, then flys out.
PS I’m only an engineer and this is only a message board so don’t diss my spelling. Thx in advance.
And I now see that all of my points were made by others as I was distracted by a phone call.
Carry on.
But all this says is that Harvard tends not to promote junior faculty (i.e., faculty members without tenure) from within. Being the “flagship” American university, Harvard has enough clout and appeal to be able to recruit its senior (tenured) faculty (almost) exclusively from the ranks of people who are already senior faculty members elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean that Harvard in any way opposes the tenure system; AFAIK, they award tenure to all their senior faculty members, just as almost all other universities do. By the way, tenure is not formally transferable from one university to another: just because a professor “already has tenure” at one institution doesn’t automatically mean that s/he will have tenure if hired at another institution.
It does usually work out that way, simply because most academics will refuse to leave a tenured job for a non-tenured one. But the grant of tenure is still officially at the discretion of the hiring institution. Harvard is perfectly free to offer non-tenured jobs to other universities’ senior faculty members if it wants to, and those professors are perfectly free to accept such jobs and become non-tenured Harvard faculty if they want to. But it doesn’t, and they don’t.
It’s not all about teaching. Why should I get paid to research as well as teach when my field shows no sign of turning into a sellable application? Tenure says that I’ve proven my worth even if the university can’t turn a profit on the fruits of my (mental) labor.
Exactly. The same is true here at Yale, at least in the math department. Andrew Casson, Yair Minsky, Mikhail Kapranov, and Bruce Kleiner (to name only those senior faculty who have joined since I’ve been around) all have as much tenure as Igor Frenkel, who was the last to be first granted tenure here.
So all of these reasons seem perfectly sound in regards to university professors. But why do they give tenure to public school teachers? From what (I think) I understand of the profession, teachers (high school and below) are given the topics they have to teach along with the exact method they must use and all the materials and handouts and tests. I don’t see much room for research or politics or unpopular ideas there.
My fourth grade teacher had an anger problem and abused kids at several schools. Instead of firing her, they just passed her around all the schools in the district, presumably because she had tenure. So maybe I’m a little biased.
But my understanding of teachers is remarkably cloudy. I’m not even sure if they get tenure but I know some people think so, therefore let’s say I’m asking for them.
The premise of tenure is to protect the powerless from the whims of the powerful.
It’s that simple. Same reason that unions require contracts with reviews before terminations.
Former teacher, former local school board member here.
The intent is to protect teachers from politics, among other things. Local school board membership and control can oscillate between opposing viewpoints. If there were no controls, there is the potential that if I were part of a majority on the school board, I could threaten to fire a teacher who gave my kids (or my friends’ kids) poor grades, or whom I just didn’t like, or who was known to favor my political opponents.
When a new teacher is hired, it takes 3 years (again, here in NJ) before he or she is granted tenure in that district. Any time within that 3 years the local school board (presumably on the recommendation of the principal, department head or other supervisor) can simply not rehire the teacher for the next school year. Of course, they can’t break the law by firing all the women or all the black teachers, but short of blatant discrimination, teachers have no guarantee of employment for the following year for the first 3.
After that, you can fire a teacher for cause. Cause can include things like being committed of a crime, corporal punishment or other abuse of students. In the example you gave, if that were in NJ, the school board could have chosen to make an issue of it and take the necessary steps to fire the teacher, regardless of tenure.
If a teacher’s supervisor simply feels that the teacher is not doing a good enough job, there is a procedure in place through which the alleged shortcomings are documented, the teacher is told in writing of the exact deficiencies and the means by which they must be addressed and given sufficient time and resources to do so. It takes a long time, most likely a few years, to develop a case for termination. The teachers’ union will provide support and backing for any teacher against whom such measures are being taken.
During the 9 years I was on my school board, we succesfully fired one teacher. He was widely believed to be an alcoholic. The students referred to him as “The Lush.” He was terminated after 2 or more years of reviews and documentation for the specific shortcoming of failure to prepare lesson plans. (We could not fire him just for being drunk unless we had valid scientific proof of that, and you cannot force a person to submit to a blood alcohol test just because you want to.)
We had another teacher about whom we often got complaints from parents about alleged physical abuse. This was a gym teacher who liked to push kids around, push them into the wall or locker, that sort of thing. For a long time we heard complaints but no one would actually put it in writing, or stand up and testify in public, Of course, we were not about to take action based solely on undocumented rumor or innuendo. Finally, he slammed the wrong kid into the locker and the kid’s mother said, “Damn straight, I’ll testify. Ain’t nobody gonna slam my kid around 'cept me!” The union told the guy there was really no defense they could offer, although they would go through the motions; this sort of thing is grounds for dismissal and loss of tenure. The teacher was, however, within a few years of retirement. He offered to take early retirement if we agreed not to go forward with the dismissal action. The alternative was to pursue it, take the year or two needed to go through all the various steps and hearings, and at the end of that time he would retire anyway. And we would have had to keep paying his salary during the appeal process. Our lawyer advised us that although he would really, really like to prosecute and make an example of this jerk, it would be very costly and would actually prolong the amount of time he would be involved with students. We let him retire.
A few years after I left the school board, the high school gym/driver’s ed /health teacher was arrested, in the home he shared with his girl friend, for possession with intent to distribute of some hard-core drugs. He also was fired and, I believe, lost tenure.
It’s also permitted in NJ to not rehire teachers if it’s just a matter of “Reduction in Force.” For example, if you decide to no longer offer Latin as a foreign language, you don’t have to rehire the Latin teacher. Or if you just decide you need fewer elementary school teachers, you can let go those with the least seniority.
So, there you are. If you’re a teacher in NJ, you must demonstrate during the first 3 years that you are a good teacher; after that you have a job as long as you want it unless your position is eliminated or you do something really stupid. Do some tenured teachers “coast?” Absolutely. It’s far from the majority though. Most teachers I have had to do with really wanted to make a difference to the students.
IMHO in many cases tenure is more important in the public schools than in the Universities. Imagine a Biology teacher in a school district that suddenly becomes fundie (think Kansas). And, yes the curriculum is restricted but all teachers have their own take on the “Meaning of…” How can you teach History, Literature, Political Science or even Biology if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder in fear of parental, administrative and political intervention?
A big part of teaching, again IMHO, is to open students to views and ideas other than what they have been exposed to before. Education is not just facts and memorization. Education must include critical thinking. And if you haven’t seen any room in the public school for politics or unpopular ideas you haven’t been reading the headlines or GD.