teacher tenures

Teacher Tenures: Good or Bad For Education

Teachers have one of the most important jobs in existence. Teaching can be at times a complicated and grueling job. With ever-growing class sizes and constant budget cuts, it makes a person wonder why anyone would become a teacher. They teach because they would like to make a difference in the world, and a good teacher can change a child's life. Which is a more then enough reason to fix the problems in the education system. “There are International data comparing K-12 student achievement across many nations clearly showing that U.S. schools are failing”, according to Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank based at Stanford University in California. The tenure structure has been a mammoth detriment to the United States education system, the teachers, and most importantly the children of this great nation. Tenure was created to provide teachers with protection. It’s a policy that restricts the ability to fire teachers, requiring a "just cause" rationale for firing. Though, all it really does is give teachers the sense of slacking off on his or her lectures and dwindling the education process the child is receiving.
A dozen years after Congress passed a landmark education reform law, the American public education system remains troubled, with more than half of the states not expected to meet the proficiency standards in reading and math set out in the No Child Left Behind law. In addition to establishing Race to the Top in 2009, an incentive-based approach that offers competitive grants to states to boost educational achievement. The Obama administration has introduced a $75 billion, 10-year Preschool for All initiative. The goal is to expand high-quality public preschool, full-day kindergarten and Head Start programs to help close achievement gaps between low-income and minority students and their wealthier peers. But the measure faces probable delays in Congress.
Meanwhile, at the state level, 45 states and the District of Columbia have voluntarily adopted rigorous new “Common Core” standards in reading, writing and math to better prepare students for the global economy, but a backlash against the movement is developing in some states. At the same time, the “school choice” movement continues to expand, with 12 states and the District of Columbia providing tax-supported vouchers for students to use for private school tuition. And, during the 2009-10 school year, 1.6 million students, up from 300,000 a decade earlier, attended public “charter” schools, which have more autonomy and flexibility than their school district counterparts.
Secondly, is establishing why the test scores as a whole has not been up to normal standards. According to Kenneth Jost an author of the Supreme Court Yearbook and The Supreme Court from A to Z. “In Ohio, the backlash against testing focused on a rule that would have required fourth-graders to pass a reading proficiency test before promotion. About 58 percent of fourth-graders passed the test in spring 2000. Had the rule been in effect, 42 percent of the state's 128,000 fourth graders, 53,000 children would have been held back”. That’s simply unacceptable, and all fingers are pointed directly at the teachers of the 53,000 failing fourth graders in the state of Ohio. It became clear by 2013 that all of the nation’s students would not meet the 2014 deadline for proficiency in reading and math required under the NCLB law. Even though there’s a realization that not all educators are bad and worthless teachers, if the tenure policy was to be removed from discussion, the education system would be far off better then what it has sarcoma to now. This epidemic of failing children has paralyzed and stunned a lot of students from the inner cities and lower income communities. Its been shown that students who qualify for free or reduced price lunches tend to score lower in mathematics than those whose family income is high enough to make them ineligible for subsidized lunches. The correlation suggest poverty contributes to lower achievement. Or, does it suggest the teachers working in the schools, that are located in the lower income areas, are giving a lower and underachieved education? Is it because the teachers don’t believe in their students that they will pass anyways? Is it because educators feel like the salary is too low for what is demanded of them? Or is it simply because most teachers have a tenure clause that basically says they get paid whether the children learn the material or not? Newly elected Republican governors and legislators in states including Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Idaho, New Jersey and Florida propose bills to lower costs and improve education by ending tenure, limiting teachers' union collective bargaining rights, instituting merit pay and firing teachers based on student-achievement assessments. Dismissing tenure would not only be wonderful and a big help for the children, its also a positive for the achieving teachers as well. The educators with repetitive low-test scores and poor attendance can be weaved out and replaced with teachers that can get the job done. Teachers with repetitive high-test scores and with satisfying attendance can receive educational bonuses. Once upon a time, a town was having a serious health problem. Approximately 30 percent of its children were coming down with typhoid and other diseases because of contaminated drinking water. The town council allocated millions to medical care for the victims, yet some of them died or were permanently disabled. One day, an engineer proposed to the town council that they install a water treatment plant, which would prevent virtually all cases of the disease. “Ridiculous!” fumed the mayor. “We can't afford it!”
The engineer pointed out that they were already paying millions for treatment of a preventable disease.
“But if we bought a water treatment plant,” the mayor responded, “how could we afford to treat the children who already have the disease?”
“Besides,” added a councilman, “most of our children don't get the disease. The money we spend now is targeted to exactly the children who need it!” After a brief debate, the town council rejected the engineer's suggestion.
The town council's decision in this parable is, of course, a foolish one. From a purely economic point of view, the costs of providing medical services to large numbers of children over a long time were greater than the cost of the water treatment plant. More important, children were being permanently damaged by a preventable disease.
In education, The U.S. has policies that are all too much like those of the foolish town council. A substantial number of children fail to learn to read adequately in the early grades. Many are retained, assigned to special education, or maintained for many years in remedial programs. The financial costs of providing long-term remedial services after a student has already failed are staggering, but even more tragic are the consequences for individual children who fail so early.
Despite some improvements and a growing acceptance of the idea that prevention and early intervention are preferable to remediation, programs (and funding) for at-risk students overwhelmingly emphasize remediation. The unspoken assumption behind such policies is that substantial numbers of students—due to low IQs, impoverished family backgrounds, or other factors—are unlikely to be able to keep up with their classmates and will therefore need long-term support services to keep them from falling further behind.
If early school failure were, in fact, unavoidable, we might have a rationale for continuing with the policies we have now. But a growing body of evidence refutes the proposition that school failure is inevitable for any but the most retarded children. Further, the programs and practices that, either alone or in combination, have the strongest evidence of effectiveness for preventing school failure for virtually all students are currently available and replicable. None of them is exotic or radical.