The first and most obvious negative of tenure is that it protects the occasional teacher who really should not be teaching. Because of tenure protections, it is much more difficult for school divisions to get rid of ineffective teachers. Research has shown that ineffective teachers hurt students’ academic performance. Thus tenure hurts some students’ performance.
I do want to point out that the number of truly ineffective teachers is not nearly as large as most people think. I can only speak from my personal experiences working at two elementary schools in one of the better school divisions in the state so I may be underestimating the number of teachers who really should not be teaching. Out of a total of about 60 teachers that I work with I would say that only two or three really should not be teaching. That is five percent of the workforce.
That matches up with the same assertions that Rick Hess makes in his blog post ""Many" Teaching Who Shouldn't Be". I did the math and his numbers equal about five percent of the teaching workforce as well.
To me the issue is really one of flexibility. Schools should be able to adapt their workforce as necessary to meet the demands of their students. Tenure gets in the way of that flexibility.
What do you think? Thanks for reading.
I think one of the other arguments I commonly hear is that tenure allows older teachers who have gotten lazy with their curriculum to continue to teach, while newer teachers who are interested in incorporating new and exciting stuff are still at risk. The tenured teachers may not be bad, per se... but they may not be good teachers either. They're just sort of there.
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