Posted By:
CoreyRS.hanusJoe,
I agree that there are many excellent tenured teachers in public education, teachers whose main motivation is not to pick up a pay check but to make a difference in children's lives. But the flip side is that there are also a number of teachers who teach with a fraction of the enthusiasm they originally had. Teachers are human like all of us and take away the need to continually prove your worth and you become complacent. Not all react this way, I agree, but too many do. What's broken then is the system, not the participants in it. I would think that those motivated teachers who teach because they care about their students are exactly those who would care least about and be least threatened by a change in the tenure system. What would be so terrible if tenure is granted for only, say, ten years, after which a teacher has to earn it again to stay on for another ten years? Yes people will say that tenure may be subsequently denied not because of poor job performance but in order to bring in younger less expensive teachers. And I'm not saying there is not merit to those concerns and that perhaps safeguards will need to be put in to guard against that. But the alternative would be a continuation of the current system, which I vigorously opine brings more abuse and has more pitfalls than something along the lines of what I described.