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The case for teacher tenure (before it vanishes altogether)
The war on education
Robert Zaller
Pennsylvania's stealth governor, Tom Corbett, has unveiled an education-bashing budget (a 50% cut in funding for Temple University, etc.) that aligns him firmly with his yahoo colleagues from Chris Christie in New Jersey to Scott Walker in Wisconsin. The plan here appears to be the old Republican nostrum of "starve the beast"— in this case public education. When Temple costs as much as Penn or Drexel to attend, it will become in effect a private university, in which case the government can wash its hands of any public commitment to higher education.
The shoe that hasn't yet dropped, but no doubt soon will, is an attack on primary and secondary teacher unions on the grounds that their contracts protect deadheads who can't be bothered teaching our kids to read and write. The solution is elimination of teacher tenure. Governor Walker in Wisconsin wants to do away with collective bargaining for public employees. But the assault on tenure goes beyond bread and butter issues; it strikes at the heart of the learning process.
The view from campus
I teach at the college level. Tenure here has withered through attrition. Forty years ago, two-thirds of regular faculty members were tenured; the proportion is now down to a quarter.
Academia as I entered it simply no longer exists. Teachers in private universities, like me, were denied collective bargaining rights 30 years ago by the Supreme Court on the grounds that our faculty senates participated in something called "shared governance." That so-called Yeshiva Decision was actually the kiss of death for shared governance — for without the threat of unionization, administrators simply ignored faculty senates, or turned them into window-dressing for faculty careerists bucking for jobs in the administrative hierarchy.
Meanwhile, unions in public universities, which often existed confusingly beside senates (as at Temple), began a long retreat before the pressure of legislatures and the increasing corporatization of higher education in general.
The death of tenure at the college level has been a protracted agony, and so it has attracted relatively little attention. The threat to abolish it in primary and secondary school systems, however, has focused the threat it involves.
Protection from Glenn Beck
Tenure entails job security, but job security is ultimately justified because it protects academic freedom. Contrary to popular belief, this is more important on the primary and secondary level than at the university.
No one challenges what I say in my college classes except, one hopes, my students. But public school teachers are subjected to all kinds of extramural scrutiny and pressure: by parents, by politicians, by public commentators (if I can so dignify the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh), and just about any idiot with a foaming mouth and a functioning computer.
To be sure, in a free country, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and no subject seems to provoke more opinion than education. For precisely that reason, however, teachers need the buffer of tenure.
The Scopes Trial lives!
The most vocal if not articulate opinions about education tend to come from those who know least themselves, and would like to keep it that way for everyone else. That is why, 150 years after The Origin of Species and 86 years after the Scopes Trial, evolutionary biology still isn't taught in many parts of the country, and global warming is similarly taboo. This programmed ignorance affects not only the heads of our kids but also the future of the planet.
Tenure is hardly a perfect protection against idiocy. But without it, there is precious little protection at all.
I don't suggest that the values and content of education shouldn't be vigorously debated. Socrates made that point a long time ago. But neither can education be the plaything of every prevailing political wind and every onerous prejudice. Socrates made that point too.
The war on teachers' unions is above all an attack on tenure. It's a fiction that tenure is an absolute right that protects the lazy and incompetent. But tenure is an essential protection of public literacy, and the democracy that depends on it.
The shoe that hasn't yet dropped, but no doubt soon will, is an attack on primary and secondary teacher unions on the grounds that their contracts protect deadheads who can't be bothered teaching our kids to read and write. The solution is elimination of teacher tenure. Governor Walker in Wisconsin wants to do away with collective bargaining for public employees. But the assault on tenure goes beyond bread and butter issues; it strikes at the heart of the learning process.
The view from campus
I teach at the college level. Tenure here has withered through attrition. Forty years ago, two-thirds of regular faculty members were tenured; the proportion is now down to a quarter.
Academia as I entered it simply no longer exists. Teachers in private universities, like me, were denied collective bargaining rights 30 years ago by the Supreme Court on the grounds that our faculty senates participated in something called "shared governance." That so-called Yeshiva Decision was actually the kiss of death for shared governance — for without the threat of unionization, administrators simply ignored faculty senates, or turned them into window-dressing for faculty careerists bucking for jobs in the administrative hierarchy.
Meanwhile, unions in public universities, which often existed confusingly beside senates (as at Temple), began a long retreat before the pressure of legislatures and the increasing corporatization of higher education in general.
The death of tenure at the college level has been a protracted agony, and so it has attracted relatively little attention. The threat to abolish it in primary and secondary school systems, however, has focused the threat it involves.
Protection from Glenn Beck
Tenure entails job security, but job security is ultimately justified because it protects academic freedom. Contrary to popular belief, this is more important on the primary and secondary level than at the university.
No one challenges what I say in my college classes except, one hopes, my students. But public school teachers are subjected to all kinds of extramural scrutiny and pressure: by parents, by politicians, by public commentators (if I can so dignify the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh), and just about any idiot with a foaming mouth and a functioning computer.
To be sure, in a free country, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and no subject seems to provoke more opinion than education. For precisely that reason, however, teachers need the buffer of tenure.
The Scopes Trial lives!
The most vocal if not articulate opinions about education tend to come from those who know least themselves, and would like to keep it that way for everyone else. That is why, 150 years after The Origin of Species and 86 years after the Scopes Trial, evolutionary biology still isn't taught in many parts of the country, and global warming is similarly taboo. This programmed ignorance affects not only the heads of our kids but also the future of the planet.
Tenure is hardly a perfect protection against idiocy. But without it, there is precious little protection at all.
I don't suggest that the values and content of education shouldn't be vigorously debated. Socrates made that point a long time ago. But neither can education be the plaything of every prevailing political wind and every onerous prejudice. Socrates made that point too.
The war on teachers' unions is above all an attack on tenure. It's a fiction that tenure is an absolute right that protects the lazy and incompetent. But tenure is an essential protection of public literacy, and the democracy that depends on it.
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