Get Rid of Tenure

From another thread:

This brings up one of the biggest problems with our education system. Tenure. It protects incompetent teachers and offers society no real benefits, especially when we're talking about elementary or high school teachers. It costs over two hundred thousand dollars and takes years to fire an incompetent tenured teacher.

http://www.thehiddencostsoftenure.com/
Meanwhile, our children are being given a substandard education. Does anyone else in the world have a job THEY CAN NOT BE FIRED FROM?

To really drive the point home, here's a case of an assistant principle who knocked up a seventh grade student and could not be fired despite blood tests which proved the child was his to a 99 percent certainty!

 

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Teachers should be valued by their merit as teachers, not by how long they've been sucking at their jobs. Get rid of it.

 

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Teaching is a thankless job

 

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It imagine it is. I've had some really great but sorely underappreciated teachers, and I've had some really shitty teachers who were way out of their element teaching honors classes. I'm sure all of them heard nothing but complaints from students and parents.

 

They can. Unionization and whatnot.

 

Illinois sure has a lot of problems. Do you have any evidence from other states?

 

This problem is nationwide. I quoted the articles from Illinois because they had a good website with lots of good articles. Here's some info from a site in Arizona:

Not to mention California. The governor tried to get the "probationary" period before tenure kicks in extended to five years from two. The teacher's union spent two hundred million to defeat it, and defeat it they did. They'll be no crappy teachers fired in California, unless their incompetence or abusiveness is revealed within two years.

Not only can they get tenure, it's mandatory for public school teachers after a couple years. It's not like college where only certain professors get tenure. In public school [elementary, junior high, high school] they all get tenure.

 

The appearant solution would be to abolish it in public school districts. But teacher's unions are quite strong, and I imagine teachers would be loathe to give up job security like that.

 

Darn people, "pensions", relative job stability keeps people in teaching. Remove that, and you'll get even less competent folks willing to teach. People are not that $tupid, you know.

Wonna learn what is tenureless teaching about? Visity your friendly nearby university. Speak with representative of the all growing caste of the untenured lecturers on janitorial salaries. You just might learn something.

 

$tupid, huh? That's real ©lever.

US Universities are doing far better than their secondary counterparts.

 

US university's abstract "doing better" means little to some $18k/year, no benefits temporary lecturer with ZERO chances to move up the ladder into the tenured/permanent field. De facto, American universities separate themselves into several, nearly unmixing, castes of teachers. Students are not completely dumb not to see what teaching career might buy them. With any luck, none of them will be "damaged" by some frustrated lecturer.

 

I might not know all of the implications, but the way I see it, I am completely against the tenure system. I have had way too many professors who just don't care about their jobs. When they know that they have ultimate job security, there is no incentive to do better, and too few consequences when they do worse.

Just last term one of my tenured professors always showed up late to class, was never prepared for his lecture, frequently rambled on about things completely unrelated, talked down to his students in a very disparaging manner, and talked trash about his students behind their backs.

This isn't an isolated event. It happens in every school. I've only ever seen the bad side of the tenure system. Maybe it can be reworked into a functional system. Until then, I say it has to go.

 

Ultimate job insecurity + low pay will bring the best and brightest into teaching, that's for sure.

You see, job (and income) of your professors depends very little on the teaching of you precious. Getting research grants and publishing some worthless crap is way more important. What you percieved as "not caring" could have been "having one's head full with way more important stuff for survival than your feelings". University tenure, contrary to the popular myth, is not 100% guarantee of the stream of cash into the tenured pockets. Neither it's 100% guarantee of the job title itself.

 

Dixon,
I always know what your position on an issue will be, the opposite of mine.

There are plenty of people who would and do teach without tenure. Private schools operate without tenure and the students generally do much better than public school students.

 

say what you will about professors but they have real jobs aside from trying to cram basic knowledge into the heads of insufferable maggots. what is the point of teaching people who aren't willing to learn?

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This is very true. Teaching is often seen as a necessary evil. It's mostly obligatory, but at the same time the real reputation of the person in question is based on how well he is publishing scientific work. Without good publications good scientists have no future.

This american system of being judged merely on the impact factor of your publications has now spread through the world. Professors are not really hired anymore based on their educational merits alone. Often the scientific work is more important. This is measured by how many publications this particular fellow has in high impact journals. And not in the past of course. There needs to be a constant stream.

If you are lucky someone like that likes teaching and is good at it. But what are the chances? Not 100%. Not 75%.

It is a miracle that good people actually stay at the University. There is much more money in corperate life. There are no bitching students there, less paperwork etc.

If you would visit a groupleader or professor in his office you will mostly see him shoving paperwork and applying for grants. That is what the system demands. Someone whose trackrecord shows he was a good scientists has to focus in the second part of his career that he is a good bureacrat. That is what the system is like.

 

Only in America.

You keep forgetting that.

 

Too bad that supply of the upper middle class folks able to shed few dozens Ks/yr. on a private school is limited. To teach without tenure for $70k/yr. is slightly different than do the same for $30/yr. Tenure, in the last case, is an equivalent of additional income. Certain level of stability is attracting not only dead wood but also reasonably competent folks who, to put it simply, are not competitive by nature, cannot sell themselves well, etc. Tenure is not perfect, but given the amount of $ society is willing to shed on education, it's reasonable trade off.

In universities/community colleges, untenured lecturers are doing much worse than $30/year. Some of them are retired and don't need much. The rest, excuse my language, is fucked. Fighting to get a teaching contract (need to be renewed each year/semester) to make $20K max/year skew teacher's priorities from teaching to survival, mix there anger/frustration and you'll get an idea about quality.

 

Perhaps a deal could be negotiated, increase salaries for teachers in exchange for throwing tenure in the dustbin of history!