TENURE OR NOT

Tenure or Not

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Tenure or Not

Introduction

Tenure can be define as life duration in a job and refers particularly to a contractual right of academic to terminate a person without a cause as tenure ends.

The issue of tenure is the increasingly job protection controversial particularly public school teachers has to face after servicing 1 to 7 years on a job. For instance, 2.3 million teachers have tenure in 2008. Tenure supporters asserted that tenure provide safeguard to teacher from being fired for any reason, and avoids termination of experienced teachers to recruit new teachers. However, tenure opponents affirmed that this protection of job makes the termination difficult of those teachers who are not performing well; secure the job of incompetent teachers and under current laws of job discrimination tenure are no longer required.

Discussion

Background of Tenure

The core issue of tenure is the job termination of teacher for unrelated work reasons. Teachers could lose their job if principle wants to hire his friends or even if political dynamics change. During 19th century, calls for teacher's protection coincided with the labor struggle and suffrage movement of women. In 1885, National Education Association published a report in favor of public school teachers to have tenure to safeguard against discriminations or favoritism. Massachusetts is the first state who has passed tenure law for pre-college teachers in 1886 (Kennedy & Cochran-Smith, 2010). During 1909, for the first inclusive tenure law for K-12 was passed in New Jersey, and supporters stated that tenure facilitates in pulling qualified teachers.

Teachers began to organize politically after Great depression as they need government funding and protections for their jobs. The clauses of tenure is negotiated by the teachers unions with the individual and state school districts, and about 7 percent K-12 public school teachers received job protections in 1940 and this percentage had increased to 80 percent till 1950s.

During 1983, release of a report “A Nation at Risk” articulated that the uneven rising tide in the educational foundations threatens the future as a Nation and of people. This report demanded the renewal of tenure reforms, strengthening standardized tests use, and increasing educational standards. However, in 1985, it was evident that on average only three tenured teachers were fired per year and after these changes only 39 tenured teachers were fired in 18 years (De George, 1997).

By the year 2000, Roy Barnes who was the Governor of Georgia eliminated tenure law for new teachers, and argued that tenure makes it difficult to fire bad teachers resulted in waste of time and resources. The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger raised the teacher tenure issue in 2005 to the electors in a special election, and proposed that teachers' tenure should be extended from 2 to 5 years. However, this proposition fall short as it only received 45 percent votes. In 2009, US President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan take into account the issue of teacher tenure and argued that they have a plan ...