Teacher Tenure: The Perk That Protects Itself

Commentary: if there was no teacher tenure, then there'd be no argument for teacher tenure.

by Collin Hitt

University of Chicago’s Tim Knowles has an excellent commentary in today’s WSJ, on the tautological justification of teacher tenure: the unions argue teachers need tenure to protect them from specious principals, but tenure more than anything requires principals to use asinine methods to accomplish the necessary removal of bad teachers.

Here’s the highlights:

In interviews with 40 principals, 37 admitted to using some type of harassing supervision—cajoling, pressuring or threatening—to get teachers to leave in order to circumvent the byzantine removal process mandated by the union contract…

This fuels labor’s argument that management is capricious, strengthening their case for increased employment protection…

Schools where principals set high standards and involve teachers in decision making are seven times more likely to make substantial improvements in math than schools weak on such measures. But cooperative relationships are difficult to maintain when principals must use underhanded methods to remove ineffective teachers, and when bad teachers undermine staff morale.