Friday, October 11, 2013
Teachers and Tenure
In class, we have been discussing teachers who are known to be bad, but are still in the classrooms. Why? In most jobs, if your performance is poor, you get fired. However, that is not the case with teachers. Bad teachers are protected by tenure. Which is just job security for poor teachers. I have found an article that talks about how tenure is keeping bad teachers in front of students. http://www.teachersunionexposed.com/protecting.cfm. Just like in waiting for superman this article discusses the statistics of how many teachers get fired. According to the article, of 132,000 teachers only 32 were fired between 2006 and 2011. This article even discusses how teachers also agree that the "bad apples stay." If the schools are being judged on how well the students are preforming, maybe they need to look at their own faculty for the problem. Eliminating poor teachers in the system and giving the jobs to better and more deserving ones, schools test score, in my opinion, would increase. We need to reevaluate the system of tenure and give it to the most deserving and best teachers. Or another option would to evaluate the firing process and make it a bit more easier to be able to fire a poor teacher.
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I totally agree that teachers who take advantage of tenure should be fired. I do think, however, that there is a fine line between firing bad teachers and firing teachers who can't get their students to produce high test scores.
ReplyDeleteLike we have talked about a lot before, it seems unfair to fire a teacher or pay them less if their students aren't getting high test scores. A teacher can still be good even if the kids can't do well on tests- it might just be that the tests are not designed well for certain students. But I think it would be hard to distinguish a "bad" teacher who can't get the students to pass the tests because of the actual test and a "bad" teacher who doesn't try to even teach anymore (because they have tenure).
I understand that kids need to past these tests but sometimes it is just not possible for a teacher to get them there if they are so behind. So I think when firing teachers there should be consideration for how much effort the teacher puts in and if the kids are actually learning (even if they can't show it on a test).