[Martina]

from the current issue of NEA Today Magazine, which i get because i am currently a credentialed classroom teacher:

Tenure doesn’t guarantee anyone a job. It guarantees due process: Teachers are told why they are being terminated and given an opportunity to challenge that reason. During the two, three, four, or even more years that a teacher must work before earning tenure, that teacher can be fired for no reason at all. Eliminating tenure would be like a never-ending probationary period.

Tenure laws were created to keep school officials from axing teachers out of prejudice or anger, or just to make room for a politician’s relative. Those who want to get rid of tenure often say it was needed in the olden days, but times have changed. How so? Have we banished prejudice, anger, and politicians’ relatives? Do we really want to jeopardize teachers’ willingness to speak up regarding instructional, curricular, safety, or other issues that affect students and school staff?

If someone doesn’t have what it takes to teach, there’s plenty of time for a principal to tell that person to find a new career before tenure applies. Principals need the skills and the time to evaluate and work with teachers in those first years before tenure. Let’s end “drive-by” evaluations. But eliminating due process is not the way to attract and retain the best and brightest. Stronger professional development, better mentoring, and more useful teacher evaluation-all of which NEA locals are working to strengthen-are better ideas.

In human terms.
Jane Jackson (not her real name) is a special education teacher who received a harsh letter of reprimand charging her with insubordination and threatening “further action.” Why? She told the truth when a child advocate asked whether a student’s individual education plan was being carried out.

Jackson had tenure. She kept her job and her union got the reprimand erased. But what if she had not had due process? She might well have been fired for doing the right thing.

Educators without tenure have been terminated or non-renewed for reporting unsafe conditions to the superintendent, complaining about the mishandling of funds, criticizing the district’s dress code in public, filing a grievance, or being married to a union organizer.

Most administrators are fair-minded. Tenure is to protect you if you run into one who isn’t.