Fake Bill Gates Says Your Boss Doesn’t Have Tenure (part 2)

Tenure

FakeGates suggests that tenure is a weakening influence.  Teachers have it, but your boss doesn’t which is why he’s a tough S.O.B.  So what is this tenure?  It’s another word for job security, and, apparently, it makes you soft.  In America, job security is for pansies and teachers unions (and workers in most other first world countries.)  Academic tenure holds that an educator who has demonstrated value to their school receives the right not to be removed from their job for unjust or arbitrary cause.  But if strong, independent, free market Americans don’t need tenure, why would any highly qualified teachers need it?

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It turns out that tenure does more than protect teachers; it protects the education process. It secures the voice of educators who, because of their proximity to children and subject matter,  are especially suited to protect those interests. Tenure provides teachers with the unfettered ability to advocate for children even when those interests impact the bottom line.  It gives them agency in important discussions of content and curriculum and protects against the pressures of special interests. A teacher must be tenured in order to feel safe to engage in such conversations, whether it’s advocating for a child at a CSE, arguing for explicit study of mechanics in the English classroom or questioning the probable impact upon class size and programming by Pearson’s  $1 billion dollar PARCC test.

A tenured teacher is the best guarantee for independent thinking that a society has.  A  tenured teacher is less likely to inflate grades or pander to secure the good will of powerful people.  He or she is less likely to bend to pressures to indoctrinate or sell a particular point of view, or add and remove curriculum without just cause.  Tenure protects teachers from being forced to teach children things that are morally or factually incorrect or to submit without comment when their students are introduced to misleading or biased content.  Removing tenure, removes the agency of the workers closest to your child and to what is actually being taught.  It’s loss will inevitably silence conscience and debate. Tenure is an essential check and balance against the misuse of education by special interests and the powerful.   No thoughtful, informed person who has the public good at heart would support it’s loss.

There are those who argue that tenure exists only to protect teacher self interest.  Tenure does protect teacher self interest, but there are legitimate reasons why protecting self interest also protects high quality hires.  In the real world, where most of us live, people don’t just lose jobs because they are unqualified.  They lose jobs for economic reasons.  They lose jobs because of agism, cronyism, and nepotism. They lose jobs because of politics or favoritism or as incidental casualties of the inevitable and periodic shifts in leadership.  Any working person already knows this, and every working person should have protection against those kinds of job losses.

Teaching is a particularly risky choice without these protection.  Teaching is important work, but it is a cul de sac.  Teaching prepares its practitioners for nothing else.  It’s skills are not directly transferable so that, after the first few years, teaching is a sacrifice of other avenues and possibilities.  At it’s core, teaching is an agreement to grow in place rather than to grow toward something else.  Most teachers would agree that this sacrifice is well rewarded by the opportunity over a career to guide young lives and work with ideas.  It’s an extraordinary thing to be a creative force in the intellectual, aesthetic and physical development of the next generation.  However, because working in the classroom limits growth potential in other fields, teachers need assurances that having chosen to teach will not be a disadvantage down the line.  Tenure is a practical incentive for attracting highly qualified people to stay in the field.  If teaching becomes an at will profession,  half a career of dedication could land you on the street having to go back to the very beginning.  Smart, potential teachers without trust funds will want to reconsider whether to enter the field at all.  Under those circumstances, teaching is simply not a rational choice for highly qualified people.

Read part 3: Lifetime Job Insecurity

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